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The OC bus workers’ strike appears to be over:

The roughly 1,100 striking bus drivers were likely to accept the deal that gives a smaller proportion of wage hikes to veteran drivers than union officials had originally demanded, said Patrick Kelly, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 952.

It may have dawned on union bosses that every day the strike lasted, people found ways around the rigid, government-imposed bus grid. It will take some time to find out, but many people who car-pooled, biked, drove alone, or walked to work during the strike may have permanently reduced the number of bus riders. Maybe not. But last Friday the Register reported on …

thousands of bus riders who are now seeking alternate travel options, after the Orange County Transportation Authority reduced its service on July 7 in response to an employee strike.

During the strike, I had a good discussion on this blog over privatizing the system. I called for unleashing private jitneys. A reader then pointed out that insurance and other regulations wouldn’t make that possible.

Now some people, at least, discovered the past week their own private alternatives to using socialist buses.

In a previous post, on the O.C. bus strike, I lamented that O.C. doesn’t have jitneys — privately run, small buses.

Calwatch added a comment that explains a lot:

While jitneys are nice, the problem is not state regulations… it’s actually federal regulation, specifically the ADA [Americans With Disabilities Act] that Republican Senator Bob Dole championed and Republican President George H.W. Bush signed. And for good reason, since folks in wheelchairs can board a bus just like anyone else, or call a taxi company and request a wheelchair cab stop at their house. But the ADA also requires that all public facilities be accessible, which presents an unreasonable demand to jitney operators to have their drivers handle the physically disabled.

In addition, you have the wonderful world of liability insurance to come into play. Most jitneys look like crap and can’t afford all the liability insurance. California’s only legal jitney operator, in the wonderfully liberal bastion of San Francisco, paid $18,000 in liability insurance a year in 1997, and that on a then-19 year old GMC van. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/1997/07/28/MN52459.DTL Could they meet OCTAP’s demands of working air conditioning, seat belts, and rollable windows? Could they afford the liability insurance? Generally, insurance companies don’t like you carrying strangers, or goods for hire. That is the real killer of the free market, not alleged government regulation.

Thanks for the information, Calwatch. This is another example of how the past century’s government foolishness continues to weigh us down. When I was the Register during the ADA debate, I must have written about 20 editorials against that Soviet-modeled oppression of Americans.

All I can add is it’s another reason to break up the state, which is expected to have a population of 60 million by 2050.

Then Orange County would become a separate state and could eliminate some legal barriers to jitneys. Any better ideas out there?

In 1997, the Register sent me to a conference on local government given by some liberal academics up in Ventura. The first problem was that nightmare of every journalist: no free booze.

The second problem was the liberal academics. I didn’t need to suffer, dry, through a weekend of socialism.

Turned out it was really interesting. Hey, liberals, I have an open mind — sometimes.

The most interesting lecture was about how high costs for government transit workers’ wages and benefits mean they have to operate large buses, which means fewer riders on some routes.

It makes sense. There’s only so much money for bus transit. Wages are high because bus transit is a monopoly and the union exerts pressure. That leaves less money for buying buses. So the transit authority — in our local case, the Orange County Transportation Authority — buys large buses that often, as everyone notices, ride around with one or two passengers.

And the unions often go on strike, as we’re now seeing in O.C. in the third day of the bus drivers-strike.

If a free-market system were set up, as I called for yesterday, wages would be set at lower levels. That would give more people jobs as bus drivers, while leaving more money available for capital — that is, more buses. We would have more but smaller buses on more routes.

Roll up, roll up, for the Magical Strike Tour!

O.C. bus drivers went on strike Saturday, demanding a 13% pay raise over three years. That’s 4.33% per year.

Think you’ll get that much of a raise in your private-sector job as a drone who exists to pay taxes into the system of government queen bees?

The solution is to entirely privatize the O.C. bus service. Auction the resources. Allow competition.

Private jitneys would spring up, taking us where we want to go, not where the bureaucracy and unions say we should go.

When I first came to Orange County 20 years ago I took the bus system from Huntington Beach to the Register’s office in Santa Ana. It took 1 hour and 45 minutes on three buses. By car, it took just 30-40 minutes. The bus routes haven’t changed since then.

A private jitney system would see entrepreneurs starting new lines everywhere, including one with a single bus ride from Huntington Beach to Santa Ana. Such jitneys work in Argentina and the Philippines. Time to adopt them here.