BIKE: commuter rail in Mudville

[Patrick Goetz]

I'm certain that the list is extremely tired of this discussion.  An 
unemployed friend of mine just got hired to join a small army which is 
plastering commuter rail propaganda on cars and houses all over town for 
$10 per hour today.  This is the modus operandi of the people currently 
running our society:  cultivate an economy with lots of unemployed, 
desperate people and then put them to work spreading your propaganda to 
provide the appearance of an open and democratic process.  You can bet 
that they'd be distributing flyers on the absolute necessity of toll 
roads, too, if we were being given the option of voting on this, too; 
it's really the same big-money crowd.

With the millions of dollars being spent to promote commuter rail, it 
probably will pass, particularly since the public is being blatantly 
lied to and mislead by commuter rail supporters who appear to be roughly 
equivalent to the pollyanna-ish crossover Democrats who actually 
believed George Bush in 2000 when he espoused the concept of 
compassionate conservativism.  The results of commuter rail will almost 
certainly parallel the results we got there, and you can bet that Joe Q. 
Public will not be pleased when s/he finds out that s/he's been 
hoodwinked again.

In short, the combination of the toll road plan and the commuter rail 
plan sets an agenda of urban sprawl land use for this area which, if 
Roger is correct about the proximity of peak oil and I'm quite certain 
he is, will prove to be an unmitigated economic disaster for Austin.

Specific responses to David Dobbs below:

 > Patrick said:  Cap Metro didn't try too hard
 >
 > David Dobbs wrote:
> Jeb is right here. Capital Metro spent the better part of two years in 
> numerous meetings negotiating with the stakeholders in that area, The 
> State of Texas and the University of Texas, to identify a possible 
> alignment solution. Neither one of those entities was interested in 
> monorail.
> 

That's very odd, David.  When I *personally* met with UT officials to 
discuss the possibility of a monorail servicing campus, they thought it 
was an absolutely brilliant idea.  The director of the Center for 
Transportation Research, Randy Machemehl, who was at the meeting, was so 
enthused that he made his class watch a monorail propaganda video so 
over the top that not even I would approve of it.  I happen to know this 
because one of my friends is in his class this semester.  In short (and 
sorry to be so blunt, but we are facing a crisis -- see Roger for 
details), you're completely full of shit ... again.  I doubt very 
seriously that Cap Metro had even one discussion with "The State of 
Texas" and if they did, it would have been about the possibilty of 
implementing slow, dangerous, street-hogging, bicycle and pedestrian 
unfriendly street rail.  Cap Metro has never considered the possibility 
of implementing a Metro system, which of course is exactly what is 
needed and exactly what makes sense to people.  A streetcar poking along 
at 11-15mph and resulting in an average of one major accident every 4 
days while taking up most of the space on the already constrained 
streets around the UT/State Capitol area doesn't sound like a good idea 
to me, either.

> Patrick said: rumour has it Fred Gilliam is anti-rail
 >
 > David Dobbs responds:
> Fred Gilliam built the the Memphis Streetcar in 1993 designed from the 
> beginning to become light rail. That transition is in progress and the 
> orginal 2.5 mile line is now 6.5 mile with 4 more miles under federal 
> review.
> 

Fact: the proposal on the table is a do-nothing commuter rail line which 
will promote urban sprawl (the only TOD planned for this line is in far 
flung Leander), and a pseudo-BRT system so pathetic that even Cap Metro 
staff is embarrassed to talk about it and glosses over it as quickly as 
they can in their presentations.  If Fred Gilliam were interested in 
fixed guideway transit, he would be proposing something that could 
actually provide transportation alternatives.  Further, I strongly 
suspect that Fred is the one who issued the order FORBIDDING Cap Metro 
staff from educating themselves about monorail.  If this isn't bullshit 
times ten, I don't know what is.

 > Patrick said:  Lee Waker is an aggie
> 
 > David Dobbs responds:
> Mr. Walker is also a graduate of the Harvard Business School and a 
> professor of in the UT Graduate School of Business Management, and a 
> highly respected leader in the business, environmental, and neighborhood 
> communities.
>

In the same way that George Bush is consistently evil, it's actually 
comforting that the commuter rail bobbleheads are consistently full of 
shit.  If everything someone says is a lie or distortion, it's just as 
easy to know what's what as when they always tell the truth.  This blurb 
excerpted from (http://www.capmetro.org/news/news_lee_walker.asp):

"Walker comes to Capital Metro with a reputation for community service 
and keen financial insight. He graduated from Texas A&M University in 
1964 and from the Harvard Business School in 1976."

Um, last time I checked, Texas A&M graduates were aggies.


> Patrick said:
>     And no, the fact that hundreds of cities have successful urban core
>     rail systems doesn't bother them in the least.
> 
 > David Dobbs responds:
> Reality (NOT)
> And these "hundreds of cities" are using monorails for their "urban core 
> rail systems, right?"
> 

Do you see the word monorail anywhere in my statement?  I said exactly 
what I meant to say.  This has nothing to do with monorail and 
everything to do with providing an effective alternative to the private 
automobile, given the constraints imposed by our current transportation 
and land use patterns.  What works in other cities is some kind of 
Metro, whether that be elevated rail, subway, or monorail.

What is a Metro?  A Metro system is a mass transit system with the 
following properties:

   1. Fully grade-separated
   2. Fast and relatively frequent service across
      the entire metropolitan area
   3. High passenger capacity
   4. Stops at or near major and core urban destinations

If you don't agree that this is what is needed, then please proceed to 
identify yourself as someone who is just mindlessly mouthing words 
("light rail!"  "commuter rail!")  that they've overhead their similarly 
clueless friends blabbing about while the rest of us proceed to try and 
figure out if there's still some way of preventing the train wreck which 
is about to happen.

Failing even one these criteria, by the way, is a recipe for disaster. 
The proposed commuter rail system fails to meet three of them!  At best, 
it doggedly satisfies #3: high passenger capacity.  Elevated rail, 
subway, or monorail easily has 6-15 times the capacity, but then almost 
no one is going to be riding the commuter rail thing since it doesn't go 
anywhere or run very often, so capacity isn't much of an issue to worry 
anyway.