Some observations from today’s panel at the LBJ school:
I was the only one talking about the actual alignment of the route, the location of the stations, and unimportant stuff like that, for obvious reasons.
I did not enjoy my exchanges with Scott Polikov(from the pro-commuter rail contingent, a former Capital Metro board member). Jim Skaggs was his usual self, and Jim Walker was about the same as he was at the Austin Neighborhoods Council panel a few weeks ago.
David Foster (with whom I shared a panel last week at the UT planning school as well as the first panel at the Austin Neighborhoods Council) understands that I want rail and just have some experience which leads me to believe that we should be even more scared of a successful election + unsuccessful ridership than we should of an unsuccessful election (he disagrees, but he at least keeps it on that level). He and Jim Walker both admit that this plan is about as far from ideal as you can get while still calling it “rail”; they disagree with me about the idea that it precludes light-rail down the original corridor, but they do it honestly; David a little more than Jim. If I could summarize their position as charitably as possible, it would be “they know we need rail, and they think that this is the only way to get it”. I think David would honestly summarize my position, and I hope Jim would as well.
Scott, not so much.
One of Scott’s points was that it was unfair to compare this starter line to Tri-Rail as I’ve done, because this line “enters downtown” and is only “4 blocks from Congress Avenue”. He scored a point on me here since this ended up as a “gotcha” comeback to my quote that Tri-Rail’s first route was a stupid idea because “Unlike most commuter rail systems, it doesn’t serve even one downtown area.”
This ended up being my biggest missed opportunity today. I failed to point out that in their own literature the pro-RAIL PAC talks about shuttle buses downtown, and not only that, has a picture of a shuttle bus with the sign “DOWNTOWN” on it, at the supposed downtown rail station. If they expect that downtown workers will think that a station at the Convention Center is close enough to walk to their office, why do they need a shuttle-bus at all? Why talk up the “quick and easy transfer”?
Take a look at their literature – the picture on the front cover is a rendition of the Convention Center stop (“downtown”), illustrating the “quick and easy transfers” to shuttle buses. Note the second bus back (on the right) is labelled DOWNTOWN.
This is still burnin’ my biscuits even tonight. I’m sure David thinks I’m crazy for being more scared of B than A when everybody else is more scared of A than B, but he presents his position honestly without misrepresentation. Scott, not so much.
