Lyndon Henry just called me “anti-rail”. I’m so mad I could chew nails.
His “bend over for Mike Krusee side” has destroyed any chance at urban rail here in Austin for a generation, since the starter line implemented by Capital Metro will not be able to garner significant ridership due to its reliance on shuttle buses to get anywhere you might want to go.
After this failure, predicted by South Florida’s experience with a commuter rail plan which is almost identical to Capital Metro’s, Austin voters will not be willing to vote up any more rail for decades.
If anybody’s “anti-rail”, it’s him and his ilk; since their collaboration with Mike Krusee will prevent urban Austin from seeing rail until my children are middle-aged.
Update: my cow orker pointed out that lightrail_now doesn’t have public archives. Here’s the offending opening paragraph of Lyndon’s comment:
Let me just point out that, if Mike Dahmus’s anti-rail side had won last
November’s vote – i.e., the rail plan had failed – the Road Warriors would
be celebrating the “final” demise of rail transit in Austin and picking the
bones of Capital Metro for more funding for roads – highways, tollways,
etc. – in this area.
he then goes on to tell people how wonderful the commuter rail plan is, how it might be upgraded to electrified LRT (continuing his misleading crap about how sticking an electrical wire on it makes it “light rail”), and mentions the people trying to get streetcars running through downtown and an unnamed bunch of “rail advocates” trying to get light rail to run on the Rapid Bus corridor, failing to say anything about the fact that this commuter rail plan effectively precludes running light rail down that stretch of Lamar/Guadalupe.
This isn’t strictly germane, but are you aware of the line in New Mexico that’s supposedly soon to run from just north of Albuquerque, New Mexico, on south to Belen? Later, in theory, it will go north to Santa Fe. Of course, it’s running on existing freight lines.
If this is really happening, in so short a time, and in a locale without serious traffic problems, it’s quite an astonishing accomplishment. It’s being described as “commuter rail.”
I don’t know enough about the area to say whether that plan will work — commuter rail CAN work, but most of the time when people bring it up it ends up like South Florida’s line (and ours) – running on existing track is seen as an unmitigated positive, so they forget about going where the people are, or at least, where they want to go.
Most cities like ours don’t have existing rail lines which go all the way into the heart of their downtown (ours stops east of the Convention Center and doesn’t go anywhere near UT or the Capitol, for instance).
That’s the whole reason for building rail in the street – to get the people to a short walk from their destination rather than forcing them to transfer to a shuttle bus, at which point most people will decline your offer and go drive their cars instead.