My cow orker threatened to do nasty things, partially to himself, if I didn’t crackplog before he left on his trip. I’m in the middle of yet another attempt to stop Lyndon Henry from rewriting history on the lightrail_now yahoo group; and went looking for Tri-Rail news and found this letter which explains why Tri-Rail is still, for sale 20 years later, a complete and utter failure at attracting ‘choice commuters’ in South Florida.
Read carefully. Does any of this sound familiar?
Take the Delray Beach Tri-Rail station, for instance. It’s located way west of downtown, languishing between Linton Boulevard and Atlantic Avenue. Now, where can one walk from that location? The whole point of public transit is to create an alternative to driving. Yet, the thriving popular downtown area of Delray Beach is far removed from the poorly planned station location. Thus, you still have a downtown clogged with cars, because the Tri-Rail station is beyond walking distance.
Remember this discussion?
Then, there’s this gem:
I have ridden on Metrorail, on the other hand, and it is a joy compared to the mess that Tri-Rail is. Metrorail actually goes places, near neighborhoods, and other places people actually go, and it doesn’t share its tracks with 8,000 mile-long freight trains. That’s why it works.
Tri-Rail is viewed as a failure in South Florida because nearly nobody who has the choice between driving and taking it will leave their car at home. We’re headed down the same path here in Austin, because people like Lyndon Henry didn’t stand up and fight for Austin’s interests against those of Mike Krusee.
For shame.
Those who continue to nicely but naively ask us to ‘work together to fix it’ don’t get it: there ISN’T ANY WAY TO FIX THIS DEBACLE. More stations won’t help. Nice streetcar circulators won’t help. You can’t recover from deciding to run your trains on existing tracks instead of where the people are who might like to ride and where the places are they definitely want to go.
We’re turning dirt on a rail line which will ‘prove’ to most on-the-fence Austinites that ‘passenger rail doesn’t work’ – the same thing that happened in South Florida with Tri-Rail. Only now, 20 years after the thing was planned, have many people started to change their tune from “rail doesn’t work” to “maybe we screwed up in how we built it”. Can Austin wait that long?
Continuing to misrepresent this thing as urban ‘light’ rail only makes it worse – at some point a decade from now, we’re going to have to pick up the pieces from this disaster and try to sell rail again to the public. And part of that is clearly identifying what went wrong, and who led us down the wrong path. I ain’t gonna stop anytime soon.
