Michael Perelman wrote: >>Audie Bock, the new Green Assembly representative from Cal. has a question for us. She asked, about transit issues. She quotes: "I have the impression that mass transit and highway planning are treated as two separate and distinct issues. I believe that when planning our highways in California we could incorporate mass transit. What is the economic feasibility of providing genuine mass transit throughout California? Should we, as legislators view these items as interrelated from an economic standpoint?"<< Brad writes: >How willing is she to promote the tear-down of blocks of bungalows in Berkeley and their replacement with five-story apartment buildings, or to promote the tear-down of large houses in Palo Alto and their replacement with townhouses? Mass transit seems to require much higher densities than we have at present in California--even largely-urban California, outside of a very few regions. And the currently chi-chi forms of mass transit--light rail a la BART--appear, as best I can judge, to suck down huge amounts of money that could be better spent on more busses and bus lanes.< This is a valid point. When Bock writes of "genuine mass transit throughout California" it seems to imply inter-urban train lines (along with other forms of mass transportation). If train lines are to be built for mass transit purposes (as opposed to shipping suckers to Vegas), it makes sense only where the population is _already_ very concentrated, as where they already built BART and the SF trolley system. So inter-urban lines don't seem relevant to the current agenda. The exception seems to be programs like MetroLink, which use existing Amtrac tracks to move exurbanites to work in the central city. (There is the building of some kind of inter-urban bullet train linking major California cities in the works. If it can't be scuttled, it _should_ be coordinated with the highway program. It should be built in the median strips of existing freeways and using existing railroad right-of-way.) But the quotation from Bock _also_ includes the possibility of _intra_urban bus lines and bus lanes. These make a lot of sense in a place like Los Angeles (where I live) which is spread out like crazy. In fact, it makes much more sense than the subway system that they started building here, which was gold-plated and thus extremely expensive, among other things having new tubes dug through areas having dangerous natural gas deposits. This subway was so costly that it drained funds from the existing bus system, lowering the quality of its service (especially for the working-class and "minority" communities) and spawning the Los Angeles Bus Riders' Union. (cf. http://www.igc.org/lctr/ -- Bock should consult these folks.) (San Jose seems to have built an effective light-rail system, but repeating that success seems impossible in LA.) As far as I am concerned, the building of bus lanes and investment in busses is the way to go. Every freeway should have a bus lane, not just a laughable car-pool lane. The stinky old diesel busses should be replaced by the cleaner (propane-burning) ones that are also much more accessable to the halt and the lame (as in Santa Monica and Culver City). As for "planning our highways in California," we shouldn't be building new highways in California unless they're absolutely necessary: the planning should be restricted to adding bus lanes to all of the existing urban freeways. Freeways take up too much space, encourage pollution, and they fill up with new traffic as soon as they're built. Because the rich folks have more clout, the highways destroy poor, working-class, and minority neighborhoods. (Gee, I wonder why they didn't continue the 2 Freeway through Beverly Hills.) They destroy a lot of the housing that Brad worries about. In fact, in LA, new freeways are currently completely off the agenda, simply because there's no room for them and their cost has sky-rocketed. (Our last freeway, the Century Freeway, also seems to have been built on a shaky foundation, despite the large amount of money that went into it. The very expensive project to add a second level to the 110 freeway has created one of the most concentrated strips of ugliness I've seen, in addition to disrupting traffic for years.) BTW, Brad, as the freeways become less and less free to traffic, the cities of California are slowly becoming more and more dense. Commuting by car is becoming more and more expensive in terms of time and aggravation. I see rising demand for bus service and eventually train service in the future. Doug writes: >Isn't there like zero popular support for mass transit in California? How can you push a policy, however humane and rational, that no one wants?< This assumes that we're all suburbanites and, more importantly, that all mass transit is by rail. I'd say that there's a lot of public support for busses in the urban areas. For some reason, there's a romantic attachment to trains (and especially monorails) as the main form of mass transit, but we have to break with that. BTW, there is political support for trains, to Vegas and the bullet-train project. The support comes from the types who usually win from such pork. I should note that I'm not a transportation expert. I'm just generalizing from experience in California. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html
