I really like the idea of setting a baseline for ridership and road usage so you can use it for performance measures later. I hope that is what they are looking at. It might also be illuminating to see regions compared to each other. I hope they would take pedestrian and bike counts as well.
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The draft streetcar network plan is out in Portland. Looks pretty extensive.
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New Jersey is expanding the transit hub tax credit to include industrial areas that use rail access.
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Smart Growth is killing cities!!! Or rather, it's more NIMBYs. Not that I can't blame them, we don't really need more high end housing in this region do we? Considering almost all of it is high end. And looking at it from a tax perspective, building four houses that are 250,000 versus a million dollar single house brings in the same taxes in property, but greater taxes in local services such as restaurants and groceries. Has anyone ever looked at those numbers?
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This is cool. Making subways rainproof FTW.
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This could bring transit sexy back.
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Colorado Railcar reincarnated?
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More NIMBY articles! This time on the peninsula HSR version. My favorite quote:
Whatever option is chosen, peninsula residents simply want a transparent process that considers their opinions, said Nadia Naik of Palo Alto, who helped form a citizens' group, Californians Advocating for Responsible Rail Design. "That would give us tremendous peace of mind," Naik said. "Nobody's done that. We get a lot of, 'Oh, you're just 50 people who complain.'"
Is it really 50?
9 comments:
The anti-smart growth guy is incoherent. The best I can get from him is that he's pissed that the planning commission didn't let him build a gated community.
If the Peninsula cities want HRS to be underground then it should be - as long as they pay the additional cost.
Granted that I'm way over here in Minnesota so I don't know how the housing market over there is. But still, bitching about not being able to build McMansions? In California? Now? Are you just trying to waste your money?
FRA compliant rolling stock is so ugly. I just wish the FRA would grant instant waivers for PTC systems, and then have Oregon Ironworks design DMUs (they already make what look like some great LRVs).
Ah yes, OIW's awesome LRV with its awesome speed of 25 mph. And it's not their design, it's a licensed version of an Eastern European product. I'm somehow... not very impressed.
They can improve on it. That LRV wasn't designed for running on a separate ROW. I'm sure they can make one that does.
Just because you can put one together, doesn't mean you can design your own one with different characteristics. And we don't really even know how well OIW has been putting the cars together, since I believe they just delivered their first car a few weeks ago. Perhaps an automobile analogy will help: just because a factory can assemble a Yugo with plans bought from Yugoslavia, doesn't mean that they can design a competitor to, say, a BMW.
Yeah, that anti-smart growth piece is pretty typical pissed-off landowner who can't develop material. It really doesn't have anything to do with NIMBYs. He just wants to build McMansions on hillsides.
His reasoning is flat wrong. Residential is almost always a net drain on city budget, esp. in a place without preexisting infrastructure (and I'd imagine the terrain will make putting infrastructure in even harder).
I liked the photos of the young lady in the subway map dress ("transit sexy"). I suppose the expensive designer original has the subway line straps and the Target knockoff has plain straps. She would certainly get the attention of any transit fans in the area--even those who don't do much "girl watching" because they're too busy "train watching". One can imagine a scenario: "Hey buddy! Quit staring at my girlfriend!" "Take it easy, dude, I'm just checking to see how far it is to my stop."
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