Saturday, April 4, 2009

The Mission

If you choose to accept it, is to only build a transit system for people who can't afford to have a car. If you deviate from said mission, you will be endangering the... eh why should we listen to guys like this?
Once again, UTA has demonstrated that it doesn't have a clear idea of its mission. Should UTA provide sensible, economical public transportation to the Wasatch Front, or should it just build things? Should it try to serve the population that cannot use automobiles, or should it spend public funds in an impossible quest to lure wealthy commuters to mass transit?
In fact yes, public transit should provide quality transportation for those who can not use automobiles. But we shouldn't say you're poor so you can't have quality service. Perhaps we should start saying, you're rich, so why should we subsidize that suburban freeway. You can pay for it. There are many reasons to provide great transit service instead of just adequate including the idea that better transit for those who need it most is better transit that can be used by all. Complaining about it just makes it look like the forces of better transit are winning. Cheers to that.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Transit & rail lines have been neglected for so long there are years worth of back loged of projects.

Also we all know that road don't make money.

Pedestrianist said...

We clearly see this playing out on our own local level, with the MTC disproportionately spending on extending BART into the exurbs rather than building up the urban network of BART as well as the regions other operators (which carry far more passengers).

We can paraphrase:

"Once again, The MTC has demonstrated that it doesn't have a clear idea of its mission. Should the MTC provide sensible, economical public transportation to the urban core of the Bay Area, or should it just build things? Should it try to serve the population that cannot use automobiles, or should it spend public funds in an impossible quest to lure wealthy commuters to mass transit?"

Matt Fisher said...

That's been done time and again. Some crap about what some roadfans (my response to "railfans", and I'm rather unashamed to be one) think the mission statement of transit should be about.

Richard Layman said...

The basic ur goal or objective is optimal, efficient mobility. Cities need to plan from that perspective. Then all these questions or criticisms are answerable.

I will lay out the structure of transportation planning this way in a set of blog entries that will come out sometime this month.