Typical Political Objections To Hovercraft
Since hovercraft are obviously such great solutions to many pressing problems in urban development, why are they such a hard sell politically?
A lot of the reasons that hovercraft are not deployed in more areas are the very facts that make them such a great solution.
Conventional watercraft require a lot of the conventional methods that political entities bleed an area of wealth. Docks, piers and seaports, for instance, are firmly in the grasp of unions. Unions in the United States are a major political force to be reckoned with. Unions do a great job generally of protecting their interests and keeping their workers employed. Unions do not like watercraft that can move people and cargo outside the realm of their control. Thus, they spend a great deal of lobbying money to make sure that if something moves over water they get their cut.
Most roadways are built by large private companies and as previous entries have pointed out, there is a lot of money in paving. They too have a large lobby to make sure that their business continues to get paid.
These are actually valid interests, but they are taken to an extreme against hovercraft. For instance, hovercraft certainly will not replace the need for roads in the foreseeable future. Also with the ever growing environmental concern that is taking over political thinking, we certainly wont see major bridge networks being built through the areas that Waterline Metro is advocating using.
The same pretty well applies to the shipping unions objections to hovercraft. There just will not be any major channels dredged in these wetland areas and the periodic freezing of the waterways only adds to the improbability of using conventional watercraft in these areas.
Sadly, another one of the benefits to hovercraft that works against it in the political arena is that it is too efficient. American budget systems work on the premise that if an area of government gets more efficient and saves money and does not use their whole budget allowance, the next budget they get is cut. While on the surface this sounds good, in practice it leads to waste and deliberate inefficiency.
Hovercraft by nature will only get cheaper to operate as the craft are paid off. They do require maintenance, but they have no real infrastructure to spend budget dollars on like roads do.
Finally, politicians as a rule are not very brave sorts. They like to do things as they have always done because there is less risk in that.
The reality is that our previous ways of doing things are making our planet less and less comfortable to live on.
We need to stop doing things just because that is how we have always done them.
We need to stop blindly allowing lobby groups to buy and bully their way of doing things.
We need to do things that are the right thing to do, even if they mean changing how we think and act politically.
There is no good reason not to use hovercraft in the DC metro area.
April 28th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Water Line Metro, Inc. disavows itself from the opinions expressed in this commentary titled “Typical Political Objections to Hovercraft”. The management of Water Line Metro, Inc. has never identified any Union opposition to the operation of hovercraft in the U.S. - in fact, our vessels will depend upon qualified operators who are all members of the appropriate Maritime Union. To say that union opposition is an issue is an opinion with no basis in reality as far as this management team is aware.
There are parochial interests that will oppose any improvement in the Transportation Market Place that does not make money for those interests. This fact of life is part and parcel of our economic system. We get our word ’sabotage’ from the practice of 1700s-era French textile workers putting their wooden shoes (sabots) into the mechanism of the modern looms that took those workers jobs. And frequently references are made to the buggy-whip industry that went out of business when the automobile became popular.
Legitimate parochial interests are the essence of competition. The danger is the illegitimate use of governmental authority to foster one interest over another because the winning interest sends money to the government official who provides a deciding influence (i.e. “paying for results”). That should never be tolerated by any free society.