Mike Levy, publisher of Texas Monthly, is at it again. For those who haven’t yet had the pleasure, Mr. Levy’s favorite pastime is finding a local transportation issue (relating to downtown, most of the time) that irks him, and then firing off an angry email to about 100 people around the city (the people he considers movers and shakers). In said email, Mr. Levy’s usual tactic is to find a city staff person whose job it is to implement some policy with which he disagrees and ascribe all sorts of sinister motivations to that employee. Said employee is almost always just carrying out the express will of the City Council, with whom Mr. Levy somehow never picks a fight directly.
Today’s example is light synchronization downtown. Mr. Levy admires Houston’s system (in which supposedly all lights on one corridor turn green at the same time – which is a disaster for air pollution and for pedestrians, since the incentive of the driver is to hit the gas and go as fast as possible while he still has greens). Austin’s system is more properly described as sequencing, in which lights are staggered on a major corridor to encourage 25mph automobile travel (better for the air; better for safety of motorists and pedestrians).
Mr. Levy, of course, ascribes this instead to a supposed desire by Austen Librach to ruin downtown traffic so that light rail becomes more viable. (Hence the title of this entry – pick the most awful reason for doing something that your audience will ascribe to your designated villain, and stick it in his mouth no matter what he really says).
Levy’s audience will probably buy it, since most of the people on his list are knuckle-dragging I-can’t-imagine-anything-but-single-occupant-vehicle-travel pedestrians-are-Communist old-school Austin Republicans. But really. If somebody was trying to sabotage commutes to make light rail look better, wouldn’t they instead gum up Mopac and I-35, since at its worst, the downtown part of the typical suburbanite’s commute is 5 or 10 minutes of the hour – 90 minute total trip? And who, dare I ask, would be responsible for the current gumming up of I-35 and Mopac?
Yes, readers, it’s the suburban wankers (assisted by Cap Metro destroyer Mike Krusee who used his power at the state lege to force an early election) who narrowly voted down light rail in 2000. Or, maybe, it’s the guys in charge of TXDOT who built highways to serve real estate speculators rather than actual transportation needs.
Or maybe, just maybe, it’s Mike Levy, who, instead of using his awesome powers for good (getting downtownites to understand that nothing but rail can fix traffic there since we ain’t gonna knock down skyscrapers to add more lanes) has squandered them on evil. Yes, folks, it’s all because Mike Levy Hates Pedestrians.
