Visit the Citizens for Effective Transit in the Twin CIties web site at www.effectivetransit.org
for lots of transit information, with a growing focus on our area. It's citizens at work, with no grants to support it, so additions to the site don't happen every day. Visit every week... Anne McCandless said that there was a lack of public transit service. Look to the facts: The met council's long range plans have said that $440 million would buy buses and infrastructure to double the number of buses on the street (another 900). Instead, flowing down the drain is $725 million and more for the Hiawatha toy train, which does nothing for most bus riders and will consume a lot of CMAQ (congestion mitigation and air quality) funds from the feds to run it. Then there is the DEIS for the so-called central corridor, which proposes lrt between the downtowns on University Avenue for "only" $840 million more. If you dig in the report, you find that with it there will be twice as many extremely congested intersections and the impact on air quality will be "slight" (some areas up, some down). If you believe the ridership forecasts, the two would account for about 1/4 of the total system ridership, with most of that being folks who already ride the bus. The other 3/4 of the trips will not have been improved by lrt. You could guess, as the met council and Ramsy County have done, that a doubling of the number of buses would increase ridersip by 40%. The two lrts might, by official projections, increase their ridership over plain bus by 25%. That's a 25% increase on a 25% share, or about a 7% increase for the whole system after spending around $1.5 billion (almost four times what it would cost to double the number of buses). More people ride the bus when the wait isn't as long, the schedule is more reliable, the system goes more places, and/or the fares don't go up. The Strib and the met council, among others, always blab about the public "needing" to provide "transit choice". What the taxpayers should provide is transit, so that people can choose between walking, biking, "car pooling", driving, or taking transit. If you will ride a train but not a well-run, well-maintained bus, that's your individual preference and problem, not a problem the taxpayer needs to worry about. One of the very vocal supporters of lrt in Houston has written that nobody rides the bus but minorities and the servant classes, and that's why lrt is needed. By inference, he doesn't ride with "those" people. Bruce Gaarder Citizens for Effective Transit in the Twin Cities www.effectivetransit.org Highland Park Saint Paul [EMAIL PROTECTED] TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Send all posts in plain-text format. 2. Cut as much of the post you're responding to as possible. ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
