| That was 2008. 2008 was too close to 2000, and especially to 2004, to risk putting Lamar/Guadalupe in front of voters. And had we passed that plan in 2008, it'd be running now, and we could be working on the Lamar/Guadalupe path right now with hopefully 15,000 boardings/day on a good urban rail line to point to a reason we should build an even better one.
We're now in 2013. The election for the city's urban rail plan appears to be targeted to 2014. Reserved guideway has become a mirage; as has starting at ABIA to pick up East Riverside. Instead, Mueller is all there is to fill trains, and that's not nearly enough. The current plan has us building another suburban commuter rail line for more suburbanites who don't pay Capital Metro taxes, then messing around with some more express and rapid bus stuff; then maybe getting back to urban rail. If we approve this plan, the current thinking is that we might get to Lamar/Guadalupe in the 2040s.
Fuck that.
If we have to wait until the 2040s to put rail on an actual decent, dense, transit-supportive corridor, we might as well give up now. I know I will - I'm going to be retired by then; and if we have to wait that long to build a rail line that more than a handful of people will actually use, our city will be in such deep shit that I'll probably have moved, or at least will have encouraged my kids to do so.
It's time to go for broke here. Lamar/Guadalupe or bust. 2040 is too long; and Mueller is too suburban. Yes, it's going to be hard. Yes, Guadalupe north of 27th is a bitch. But we're out of time - the plan hatched up by the typical gang of consultants and politicians and tepidly supported by sycophants like the Alliance for Public Transportation isn't going to get us anything worth getting until almost everybody reading this blog is retired.
It's time to stand up for Austin, who pays 90% of Capital Metro's bills, yet isn't slated to get any real rail service to its densest residential areas until the 2040s. It's time to stand up for serving existing density over pastures and new suburbs. It's time to admit that Rapid Bus is a piece of crap that isn't going to make more than a trivial difference on the corridor.
It's time.
More soon. |
