----- Original Message ----- From: "James Young" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, September 24, 2002 10:43 PM Subject: Re: [Mpls] Traffic Reduction
Jim Young wrote: I would argue that the problems associated with cars go far beyond just safety and pollution, especially for inner city areas like Minneapolis. Automobile users don't begin to pay the costs associated with their road use. There are direct costs such as property, sales and income taxes that used to pay for streets and road. There are also huge indirect costs such as lost tax revenue from areas that were converted from tax paying property to public roadways and decreased property values in areas adjacent to high volume roadways. These costs for regional transportation roadways are not borne equally by all either. The most heavily used roads - the "attractive corridors", as MNDOT calls them, are all in the central city neighborhoods. The calls for increasing their capacity come from people who, by and large, don't live in the city and won't have to suffer the indirect costs of taking even more land off the tax rolls. Realistically, I agree that cars are here to stay but that doesn't mean that the transportation system we've built in the past 50 years is what will work well in the next 50 years. We need to think about what life will be like when the metro area has double the population it does now and even more than double the number of cars. Mark Anderson here: I think you're wrong that Mpls loses property value from public roadways. Jim Graham made a recent post saying that Phillips neighborhood land values were actually higher than more prosperous neighborhoods further south, just because Phillips is closer to downtown. Similarly, the value of the whole city is enhanced because of its central location and easy access. If we have poor transportation through the city the value of our property will decrease. Don't we want suburbanites working downtown? Without downtown and our business base, we'd all be payng a lot more in property tax. The workers downtown also pay a lot of Mpls sales tax. I think Mpls is shooting itself in the foot when it makes it harder to get downtown. I do agree that as the Twin Cities grows, public transit will make more sense economically. A train might even make some sense in some areas today. Unfortunately, the Hiawatha line makes no cost sense at all. What are the statisitics? Is it something like 2% of the commuters to downtown Mpls will take that line? And these are numbers generated by supporters of mass transit, so they are probably overstated. The Northstar makes a lot more sense than Hiawatha, since it actually goes where lots of people live, and new rail doesn't have to be laid. But I don't blame the Republicans for shooting it down, after the State was burned for almost a billion dollars on the Hiawatha boondoggle. Mark Anderson Bancroft Neighborhood _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
