Hey guys? Here’s what a grass-roots pro-transit organization ought to look like: the CTC in Houston, which actually does more than just saying “please do exactly what Capital Metro and CAMPO want, as fast as possible”. IE, they analyze route proposals and try to figure out which ones are likely to work and which ones are not. They also don’t buy into the nonsense that stuck-in-traffic city buses will ever work for choice commuters and that circulators are somehow exempt from choice commuters’ distaste for transfers.
Yes, like yours truly, they actually hold the radical position that while rail transit is great in general, it IS possible to build rail transit that choice commuters won’t ride so you’d better think carefully about where you decide to run it rather than just assuming that rail anywhere works as well as rail in the perfect place.
I highly recommend following some of those CTC stories to their forums in which it becomes even more clear what APT ought to be doing for Austin – instead of asking us all to support exactly what Round Rock legislator Mike Krusee wants Capital Metro to do with their tax money (92% from Austin, 0% from Round Rock), we ought to be asking ourselves whether what they want to do will actually work, and not from the anti-all-rail Neanderthal perspective either.
Grow up, APT. We need people who really want rail transit to succeed to challenge this garbage. If Capital Metro ever needed boot-licking sycophants, it needed them before the 2000 election; certainly not now.
