Negative T opic Lecture by Ian Ritchie

1. Negative Topic Lectureby Ian Ritchie Resolved: “Resolved: Significantly increasing public transportation funding is in the best interest of United States citizens.”

2. What is Public Transportation? • According to the Department of Transportation public transportation is “Transportation by bus, rail, or other conveyance, either publicly or privately owned, which provides to the public general or special service on a regular and continuing basis. Also known as "mass transportation", "mass transit" and "transit." “

3. What makes an increase significant • According to the CBO the US spent about 82 Million dollars on mass transit in fiscal 2007. • Significant: great or important to be worthy of attention; noteworthy. • Therefore an increase must be great enough to warrant attention because of its size.

4. What is best interest • The only legal use of the term best interest is related to child custody cases, therefore we have to look at the words separately. • Best: is obviously a superlative form of good. • Interest: according to Merriam Webster is advantage, benefit. • Therefore one must logically assume that best interest means that it is the absolute best use possible.

5. Basic reasons to oppose greater mass transit funding • It is underutilized, spending more will just waste more money. • We already have well developed systems where they will do the most good and there is a diminished marginal utility from creating more systems. • The money can be put to better use. • There are obviously others, get creative.

6. Wastes more money • As cities continue to become more dispersed, the cost of building and operating public transportation systems increases. For instance, only about 80 large urban agglomerations have a subway system, • dispersed residential patterns characteristic of automobile dependent cities makes public transportation systems less convenient to support urban mobility. In many cities additional investments in public transit did not result in significant additional ridership. Unplanned and uncoordinated land development has led to rapid expansion of the urban periphery. Residents, by selecting housing in outlying areas, restrict their potential access to public transportation • Urban transit is often perceived as the most efficient transportation mode for urban areas, notably large cities. However, surveys reveal a stagnation or a decline of public transit systems, especially in North America. The economic relevance of public transit is being questioned. Most urban transit developments had little, if any impacts to alleviate congestion in spite of mounting costs and heavy subsidies.

7. Diminished marginal utility • Public transit systems are not designed to service low density and scattered urban areas that are increasingly dominating the landscape. The greater the decentralization of urban activities, the more difficult and expensive it becomes to serve urban areas with public transit

8. Better uses • This is fairly self evident, get creative and the sky is the limit. • Just so long as you link to it creating a better net benefit for the use of the money you should win that argument.

9. Definition public transportation http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/planning/glossary/glossary_listing.cfm?TitleStart=P • Spending http://www.cbo.gov/publication/21902 • significant def: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&biw=1600&bih=799&noj=1&sclient=psy-ab&q=define%3Asignificant&oq=define%3Asignificant&gs_l=serp.3...10215.18627.0.18783.26.22.4.0.0.0.124.2111.13j9.22.0...0.0...1c.s4QCmgRXNnM • Wastes more money http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch6en/conc6en/ch6c4en.html • Less utility http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch6en/conc6en/ch6c4en.html