-----Original Message-----
From: Garwood, Robin
Bruce Gaarder wrote:
"It's quite clear that transportation related deaths are way down on a
deaths
per million passenger miles basis"
I can believe and accept this assertion. However, it does not get to what,
in my opinion, is a fairly central question: why must we put in so many
millions of passenger miles per year? Why can't we design our cities and
neighborhoods in a way that will allow human-powered transit to be a viable
option for a greater percentage of citizens?
This leads to the central point I hear Mr. Avidor making. Our society
continues to encourage and subsidize driving an automobile, which is
essentially a bad behavior. Ken did a good job outlining the automobile's
brutality. I can attest to this, having nearly been struck by a car after
an accident on Lyndale on Sunday, while biking down the street.
But the best indictment of the automobile is, in my opinion, its extreme
inefficiency. A miniscule, ridiculous amount of the energy used by an auto
engine goes to actually performing its main duty: moving a human being
around. The percentage is typically in the single digits. Even if we
change the energy source from petroleum to hydrogen, the inefficiency of the
very concept of the automobile will continue to make our lives difficult.
Where will we get the electricity to produce the hydrogen?
[TB] In this city, even metro area, we've long passed the point where human-powered
transit will be a viable option. We are very spread out, the activists in many
neighborhood object when certain jobs come to their neighborhood because that's not
what they want as neighbors.
The Avidor assessment that drivers are bad, unfortunately also applies to bus drivers,
bicyclists and an occasional pedestrian. We have bad operators of all forms of
transportation. Daily on my walk to work, I'll see transit busses run the red light
at 12th and Nicollet, often after having made a complete stop to drop off passengers.
How often do you see a bicycle stop at a stop sign? A pedestrian cross against a
light? The problem isn't that an occasional violation takes place. Maybe we blame it
on Al Gore, Sr. for introducing the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 <g>.
In our northern climate for much of the year it isn't reasonable to expect many people
to walk or bicycle. The roads and weather aren't conducive to it. Most of us just
aren't going to walk or ride very far outdoors when the temperatures are below zero,
some aren't able to.
We need to support a good mass transit system. A system that has routes across town,
not just to the core(s). A system that will allow people to reverse commute as easily
as to commute to the core.
I think I could make a good arguement that we don't need more roads (or lane miles) in
the City of Minneapolis. We need to maintain the infrastructure that we now have, but
I'm not sure we need more. We handle the demand for additional capacity with mass
transit. Part of the reason that people insist on driving to downtown is that parking
is to cheap, its cheap because the City owns most of the parking spaces and doesn't
require the profits that someone else would.
We suffer not as much from what the City does or has done as we do from what the
Legislature refuses to do. The MN Legislature has a tremendous anti-Minneapolis bias.
If we had transportation support that approximated our portion of the state
population we would end up with somewhere near 7 per cent of the state transportation
dollars, we don't come close. That would allow us to maintain a very good mass
transit system.
We can't continue to allow the Legislature to abuse us.
Terrell Brown
Loring Park
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