The Crappy Is The Enemy Of The Good

Jeb Boyt throws back one of the most effective sound bites on commuter rail. I’m disappointed he didn’t have the guts to link to me; I will certainly allow you to read his own words directly and make up your own mind.
I responded in his comments with:

Again, I disagree. Rail systems which attempt to provide starter line service by requiring shuttle bus transfers are universally failures at pulling people out of their cars (unlike light rail lines in the last two decades).

And Guadalupe/Lamar was completely feasible – the 2000 election lost by such a small margin that any number of minor changes to the plan, or heck, even a more concrete plan (remember we voted without knowing the downtown routing!) could have put it over the top.
The spin that Guadalupe/Lamar is impossible comes straight from Fred Gilliam, who DOESN’T WANT RAIL AT ALL. Hint: He’s teamed up with Mike Krusee here to build commuter rail because it’s the cheapest way to show that it “doesn’t work”.
And it “won’t work” because it doesn’t run through neighborhoods where people actually want to use it, and the only people who COULD use it are precisely those who would be the LEAST willing to take shuttle buses every day.

The real problem here, folks, is that a starter line which is this horrible will be, as one of my colleagues on the Urban Transportation Commission put it, a “finisher line”. It will end rail transit in this area for decades. Please don’t fall for this baloney that the commuter rail line is good enough for a start, and that we can work on improving it later. As Jeb’s entry points out, Lamar/Guadalupe is not even under consideration as one of the possible “improvements” anyways, even if I end up wrong and suburbanites eagerly flock to daily shuttle-bus trips as part of their Leander-to-Austin commute.

m1ek

blahg

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