Someone said on Sun, 13 Jul 2003 23:36:14 -0600: > "In response to a question about how much money might be lost if the project were delayed to pursue the mayor's plan, Jeanne broke the bad news. The city stands to lose $1 million the state kicked in for the design study at the minimum." >
This whole thing is starting to feel greasy - very greasy. Should have known it was too good to be true. Should have known the state and federal DOT's inept funding policies and attitudes would shine through in flying colors (for the benefit of the motorists) and require highway capacity expansion. To hell with people's health and the planet! We must satisfy the needs of the motorists, whatever it takes. For your information, here's an exchange I had on http:www.thedailypage.com (Isthmus web page forum) that I thought I'd share for those who might have interest in beating a dead horse: An eastsider wrote: Best way to stop sprawl? Make commuting a pain in the butt. An SUV driver responded: Why do say that? If you make commuting a pain, then businesses are going to locate elsewhere, don't ya think?>... Eastsider: Doesn't really matter as much where the businesses are at. The idea is to get people to live closer to where they work and shop. If you work out by East Towne, it makes more sense to live there and do your shopping there to, thus avoiding the headache of wasting half your life in transit. Stopping sprawl doesn't always mean making downtown 20 stories high. Stopping sprawl is also making new development on the pedestrian scale of the downtown neighborhoods. However, I will admit that initially, by making East Wash more congested, you are definitely up the pollution factor, just by virtue of having more cars sitting and idling for longer periods of time. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- --- ----------------------------------------------- My post starts here. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- --- ----------------------------------------------- MTN: I think you've got the right idea. The best way to stop sprawl is to make it so that people will drive less. But there are other ways to do that than to just allow the roads to get abhorrently congested. The way you get people to drive less is to offer them better alternatives. But it's difficult, because, for most people anyway, it's hard to match the convenience and safety or a car, and the price of gasoline. So what you have to do is to either make it more costly for them to drive (by raising the tax on gasoline in Madison); or you can offer people rewards for driving less (bus tickets, car pool vans; money for keeping their annual mileage on their household car odometers below some threshold number). You can also do both of these, using the money brought in by the higher gas taxes to pay for the rewards that are offered to people (say in Dane County as a whole) to drive less. By doing it this way, you can reduce the need for the 6 laner without hurting anyone and without polluting the air. It would probably HELP businesses along the way since there would be less congestion, which usually makes it more difficult for people to get in and out of driveways. It would also probably increase purchases by local neighborhood residents, since walking and bicycling to the local establishment would be nicer (less noise, pollution, more green space). Once people got wind of this, they would think twice before moving out to Columbus to live when they spend most of their waking hours in Madison. Few people like to miss out on freebies, even if it makes things a bit more inconvenient for them. And if the price of gas goes up as high as it should, people would give the distance they have to travel, and the amount of time they have to travel, a higher priority in determining where they want to live AND work. ________________________________________________________________ The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today! _______________________________________________ Bikies mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.danenet.org/mailman/listinfo/bikies
