Add Phoenix To Cities Overcoming The Light Rail Phobia
Phoenix... and Dallas, Norfolk, Denver, St. Louis, Baltimore, Portland, Minneapolis, Memphis, San Diego, New Orleans, Charlotte, Houston, Salt Lake City, Sacramento, Cleveland, Kenosha.
Red states. Blue states. Cold states. Warm states. Big cities. Small cities. Aging cities. Booming cities. Conservative cities. Liberal cities. East, west, north, south, coastal, Midwestern.
(Maybe I missed a few, so here is a list.) And many have commuter rail, subways, and other coordinated rail systems.
But not Milwaukee. Or Madison - - for three reasons: Fear of talk radio, business community passivity, and lack of political will at the state and local level.
There is nothing meritorious about being the exception. The message we send is that we are stubbornly content to be left at the station with clean, city-friendly and job-creating transit options declined.
5 comments:
You forgot to add a few reasons:
-Low ridership
-High cost per rider
-Buses work better and routes can be modified easily
To Anonymous:
If buses work better, why is ridership down in Milaukee?
And why is light rail a hit in the Twin Cities, et al?
And, why do many people, myself included, hop over the state line to Harvard catch Metra, whose ridership continues to grow each year, as does their network and schedule. Metra had to buy back used railcars it sold because it's trains have hit capacity.
I have met people from as far away as Madison and Janesville that go to Harvard to catch the train to Chicago.
And, furthermore, if we had not allowed the Chicago and Northwestern line to Lake Geneva and Williams Bay to die, both Chicago and our local Walworth County economy would be gaining hundreds of thousands of tourist dollars through the cost savings of riding the train to be spent locally, rather than exported out of the region or country in the form of petrodollars.
In case you hadn't heard, we import 66 percent of US oil consumption. Anything we do to foster domestic and local manufacturing and sustainable transportation to decrease oil consumption will help us with our trade deficit, which is hollowing out the US economy. Trains are an important component of a sustainable transportation infrastructure.
So... you really believe that people who don't want to ride buses will ride trains?
Joshua: You actually believe that tourists would pile their families and belonging on to a choo-choo train for a vacation in Lake Geneva?
Are you serious?
That's comical.
To Anonymous,
Its too bad this blog does not allow downrating or troll rating of comments, as would your favorite site, Free Republic. Say something to piss them off, and you are kicked off in a New York minute. Same for Daily Kos on the left, although it takes quite a bit more ridiculous fact-free inflammatory commentary to get banned from that site.
Anyway, I digress. Your comment in response to mine is the classic troll comment, in which you fail to cite a single fact in support of your arguments, and make bold assertions that my comments are "comical". Talk about ad-hominem attacks. You do not even have the courage to sign a username to your commentary.
To return to the topic at hand, Lake Geneva and Williams Bay were built by the trains. Tourists came up from Chicago by the trainload well into the 1940s and '50s. The fast roads of the 1960s to 70s, are gone thanks to the gridlock of the Chicago suburbs, and it takes much longer to drive to Chicago than it did to take steam trains 100 years ago. And, a lot of people do prefer the train to the bus, among them the late Paul Weyrich, the conservative of the Free Congress Foundation fame. He wrote many pieces for conservative publications and cited studies that many people prefer trains to the bus. They are faster and more comfortable, and are not affected by weather and traffic on shared rights of way as buses are. If you want to get people out of cars, the train is the way to go.
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