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September 03, 2005
Privatization and Failure of Buses in New Orleans
The image above is of local buses in New Orleans, unused as local people without cars were unable to leave the city. Conservatives such as those at FreeRepublic have repeatedly shown this picture as proof that it's local officials who are to blame for the New Orleans debacle.
Except that these buses were owned not by the city but by Laidlaw, a company emblematic of the dysfunctional public transit system that is the decades long product of conservative policies. Laidlaw is the parent company of Greyhound bus lines and is one of the main benefiaries of school bus privatization across the country, managing them for school systems across the country.
Conservatives have long promoted the privatization of government services: Laidlaw is exhibit A of this privatization across the country, transporting 2.3 million students daily. That Laidlaw failed to coordinate with relief efforts is hardly a surprise, since its history is one of corporate incompetence and indifference to the public interest.
This is a company that was bankrupt just two years ago and has a long history of complaints, by both customers, government officials and the workers at the firm. School systems regularly complain about the service from Laidlaw and other privatized bus companies. As AFSCME describes in this story , companies like Laidlaw have profited handsomely from privatization, yet local districts have little to show financially and workers have faced anti-union attacks by the company at every turn.
This failure of coordination by the private Laidlaw company and local emergency preparedness was foreshadowed just last fall, when in a civil defense drill in New England, Laidlaw buses failed to arrive during the mock evacuation because the drivers got lost:
Town and state officials are still studying what went wrong with the evacuation drill. It appears that New Hampshire Laidlaw buses from Swanzey, N.H., took the wrong route to Vermont and were ordered to turn around by a company official around 11 a.m.Maybe the company had a good reason for bagging the drill, but the fact that it could just ignore local officials shows the hazards in an emergency of having a private company in charge of critical transportation infrastructure.
Posted by Nathan at September 3, 2005 10:17 AM
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