One Chance Is All You Get

In the latest brou-ha-ha on the lightrail_now yahoo group, some folks have re-expressed the sentiment that Lyndon Henry and I should bury the hatchet, and that I should work to improve this commuter rail line with a better streetcar distributor. It’s as if nothing I’ve written in the last two years has remotely penetrated these folks’ heads.
What Tri-Rail shows us is that if your starter line is bad enough, you will not get the chance to fix it. Tri-Rail destroyed the momentum for passenger rail in South Florida – for the first ten years after the service began, the (suburban voter) narrative was “see? rail transit doesn’t work”.
Now, for the last few years, it’s finally begun to shift to “of course it didn’t work; you ran it down the wrong corridor – nobody that has a choice wants to ride a train where they have to transfer to a slow, stuck-in-traffic shuttle-bus on every single trip. Why didn’t those idiots run it on the other rail line which happens to conveniently run through all the major downtowns in South Florida?”.
Maybe in five more years, Fort Lauderdale will be able to get a light rail line off the ground. They only lost 20 years worth of time, after all.
Only in states like California can you get away with an awful starter line that you then gradually improve with time (San José). In less liberal states like Florida, and especially in “red” states like Texas, the starter line must be impressive to voters, or it’s “one and done”.
More on this later this week, since both Lyndon and I are now ‘moderated’ (I don’t think the owner of the group understands the meaning of this word, since he seems to actually be saying we’re not going to be allowed to post at all).