Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Always Someone Cooler Than You

Supervisor Chiu and others have called for a second Freeway revolt. This time its a bit more passive, but its good to have people start speaking out in favor of even more spending on transit. What is also shows is how clueless MTC is when it comes to the United States as a whole.
In response, Randy Rentschler, a spokesperson for the MTC, called the RTP "the most transit-friendly plan of any metro area in the entire country."
I'm sure it's not as friendly as New York City. As Ben Folds says, always someone cooler than you.



But the bigger point that even if you were the most transit friendly plan in the United States, that isn't really saying much, considering how regions in the United States treat transit.

3 comments:

Cap'n Transit said...

Thanks for that. As I'm sure you know, for pollution, efficiency, social structure and carnage, what matters is not how much transit there is, but getting people to shift from cars to more sustainable modes. To do that, you need to reduce the relative value of driving.

It doesn't matter how much transit capacity you build if you simultaneously build more car capacity. It's good to see that people like Chiu get this.

And no, I'm not sure that our plan is much better than yours. We've still got way too many highway widening plans on the table.

Alon Levy said...

Really? I thought PlaNYC had no increase in highway capacity...

Cap'n Transit said...

Isn't it a regional transportation plan that Pan is referring to, Alon? If so, the equivalent for NYC would include some of the crappy regional highway proposals like the Tappan Zee widening.