Detroit Free Press Editorial Board

Of the many disappointing results in Tuesday's election, none is more tragically short-sighted than the failure of the regional transit millage in southeast Michigan.

Voters in Wayne, Washtenaw, Oakland and Macomb counties had an opportunity — our best chance in five decades — to modernize and rationalize the dysfunctional transit system that holds our region back, that keeps workers from jobs, that hampers economic development and that turns young residents away.

And we failed.

The RTA millage would have cost the owner of a home worth $78,856 about $95 per year. For a nominal sum, we could have bought a ticket to our regional future.

And we failed.

Why? Because voters in Oakland and Macomb counties shot it down, in Oakland by a smattering, in Macomb by a landslide.

The millage faced an uphill climb in both counties, thanks largely to the recalcitrance of Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson, whose wrong-headed opposition to regional thinking is a longstanding and shameful affront, and Macomb County Executive Mark Hackel, whose inane fence-sitting meant the millage lacked a vocal advocate in his notoriously fractious county.

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When the RTA board was ready to place the millage question on the ballot, Hackel and Patterson pitched an eleventh-hour tantrum that almost kept the question from voters entirely. Each executive lifted his embargo, but neither agreed to campaign for the millage.

Patterson suffers from a special kind of tunnel vision, one that sees Oakland County as an island of continuing growth and prosperity amid metro Detroit's muck. If it's good for Oakland, it's good, goes Patterson's line of thinking — and if it's good for any other part of the metro area, it must, by definition, be bad for Oakland.

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The notion that we sink or swim as a region seems entirely lost on the longtime exec, who handily won re-election Tuesday night to the county seat he's held since making his political name opposing school integration, and who has shown all too willing, in the decades since, to rile racial provocations to ensure his political agenda passes.

We endorsed Patterson's unsuccessful opponent, Vicki Barnett, for precisely these reasons: Patterson's shortsightedness may be good for Oakland's short term, but it is a losing long-term strategy. And it's a nice bit of hypocrisy that Patterson, who has said that this will be his final term, won't have to clean up the mess he's helping to make.

For Hackel, the decision not to support the millage was a nerveless bit of hair-splitting: He wouldn't block the millage question, but neither would he campaign for it publicly, a spineless bit of indecision that certainly helped sink the measure.

The RTA millage's backers weren't expecting to win Macomb, board chair Paul Hillegonds said Wednesday, but they weren't expecting to lose by such a wide margin that a loss there wouldn't be offset by wins in Wayne and Washtenaw counties. But a wave of voters lured to the polls by Republican presidential candidate, now president-elect, Donald Trump ensured both their man's win and the RTA's loss.

The RTA has a legal authority to distribute state and federal transit dollars to the Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transit, Hillegonds said, but aside from that? The authority's future — and our region's economic growth — are very much in question.

It's perpetuation of a massive, self-inflicted wound.

For the poor, that plays out in tremendous isolation and the inability to, say, get to a job that's not in the city where you live. And of course, that hurts Detroit most, where some 70% of the working population has to travel outside city limits and nearly 40% don't have access to a car.

For the elderly, it's much the same. If you've lost the ability to drive yourself around metro Detroit, how do you get to doctor's appointments, to see family, to recreation or entertainment, in the transit desert of metro Detroit? Often, the answer is simply that you don't.

And this is face-spiting policy for the rest of us too. Every other major metro area has at least a basic, functioning transit system, even around cities that have fewer natural assets and advantages than Detroit. The traffic that snarls our highways, the billions we spend trying to take care of and expand roads, the absurd inability to catch a train or a bus to the ballgame or a concert or a restaurant — it makes us a backwater. It holds us back from growth.

At the end of the day, we fear that voters in metro Detroit just don't believe they and their neighbors deserve better. After nearly 50 years of trying, they're more captive to anti-tax provincialism than they are dedicated to moving forward, together. It's not just sad; it's worthy of the ridicule and pity visitors often express when they land at Metro Airport and can't even find public transportation to any of the region's population centers.

RTA's next millage opportunity is in 2018, when both SMART and the Ann Arbor Area Transit Authority will have millage renewals on the ballot — and no one is optimistic that doubling up on transit millages will lead to success.

It's hard to see how the RTA moves forward. For a brief moment, we thought it could work — that fast and efficient bus-rapid transit could crisscross our counties, making sense of DDOT and SMART's abutting routes. That we could invest in transit, like every other successful U.S. city. That the people — not theoretical millennials, future development or fictive riders of choice, but the real people who depend on metro Detroit transit each and every day — could look to the future and find hope.

We failed.