When we were in Hamburg, we didn't have a car, and we very seldom regretted not having one. Our neighborhood was structured so that many things we were interested in -- grocery stores, restaurants, Shelby's language school -- were within walking distance. For things that weren't walkable, we had a myriad of transit options -- bus, subway, and commuter rail.
Now that we're back in California, we use our car to get everywhere, because that's pretty much our only choice. And there are a collection of interests arrayed to make sure that remains the status quo. This week OCTA -- Orange County's transportation agency -- announced that it was pulling the plug on CenterLine, a planned 9.3 mile, $1 billion light-rail line through the center of the county. Right-wingers and NIMBYs everywhere cheered to hear that this socialist boondoogle was going down to its death.
But then -- then! -- OCTA announced that in CenterLine's place, it wanted to pursue BRT, Bus Rapid Transit -- a system in which buses have their own dedicated traffic lanes -- a move that produced this masterpiece (registration required, but you could always use BugMeNot) on the editorial page of the Orange County Register, our local 'paper' of record:
There's much that can be done to enhance traffic mobility other than mass transit. Roads and streets can be widened, off-ramps improved, new freeways and toll roads built and so forth. But the responsible agencies need to want to do these things. Steeped in anti-car and environmental dogma, government transportation planners too often don't believe in doing them.
Do these people actually exist in the same Orange County that the rest of us do? We've already got streets that are six or eight lanes across. We've already got freeways that are ten or twelve or fourteen lanes across. Insane people are proposing to extend the 57 freeway on top of the Santa Ana River. But yet, everytime I go out during rush hour, I thank God that I get to work at home, because there are so many cars out there that driving is downright unpleasant, if not jammed-solid impossible. I think that we've already reached the point of diminishing returns where it's only a matter of time before anything new that we build -- no matter how wide it is, no matter what technological marvel of a metering system controls the flow of cars -- is completely jammed and we're back to square one again.
Not only will we be spending hundreds of millions on road projects of ever-decreasing utility, but for these streets and freeways that have already been widened as far as they'll go, making them any wider is going to destroy just as many, if not more homes and businesses as any commie-pinko light rail line or bus transit corridor ('homes and businesses would have been lost along CenterLine's right-of-way!' was another cheerleading point for the Register) -- still, somehow, that's all a-okay.
It seems to me that some people who've been steeped in pro-car and anti-transit/anti-environmental dogma need to wake the hell up. Shouldn't we be increasing our options while we still have the luxury of doing so?
Posted by Kevin at February 8, 2005 09:01 AM