The Future is in the Past

Orphan Road has photos of a 1920 plan for a Seattle Subway System. It looks awfully familiar.

Second Avenue Sagas discusses the 1960 New York Subway Expansion that never happened.

Switchback laments the loss of the Arborway Branch of the Green Line in Boston. The State has a legal obligation to run it as a rail line again, but they just paved over the tracks, hoping the thought will just go away. I would say that Boston is second to AC Transit in rail hate. Not an easy feat when everyone else is trying to put rail lines back.

A post on the Political Environment Blog discusses the loss of a rail fight in Milwaukee back in 1997. Then Governor Tommy Thompson loved the idea, but apparently its demise was due to right-wing radio. It seems like some things never change. The city still can't quite beat back the scourge of winger radio and in a city that's set up well for transit (weighted density 5,830) with approaching $5 gas, things are starting to look up a little when the main paper is pushing both sides a bit harder.

Had Tommy stood up to the local conservative talk radio hosts who still use "light rail" as an all-purpose anti-urban code phrase, workers and students commuting from Waukesha could be riding the rails with some of that $4-gallon gas money in their pockets.

We can learn much from the past, so we don't make similar mistakes going forward.