Important transit lessons from New Orleans disaster
Tom Kirkendall has linked to an important piece that should be mandatory reading for City of Houston and Metro officials:
Those who fervently wish for car-free cities should take a closer look at New Orleans. The tragedy of New Orleans isn't primarily due to racism or government incompetence, though both played a role. The real cause is automobility -- or more precisely to the lack of it.
[snip]
What made New Orleans more vulnerable to catastrophe than most U.S. cities is its low rate of auto ownership. According to the 2000 Census, nearly a third of New Orleans households do not own an automobile. This compares to less than 10 percent nationwide. There are significant differences by race: 35 percent of black households but only 15 percent of white households do not own an auto. But in the end, it was auto ownership, not race, that made the difference between safety and disaster.
"The evacuation plan was really based on people driving out," an LSU professor told the Times. On Saturday and Sunday, August 27 and 28, when it appeared likely that Hurricane Katrina would strike New Orleans, those people who could simply got in their cars and drove away. The people who didn't have cars were left behind.
Critics of autos love the term "auto dependent." But Katrina proved that the automobile is a liberator. It is those who don't own autos who are dependent -- dependent on the competence of government officials, dependent on charity, dependent on complex and sometimes uncaring institutions.
[snip]
Rather than help low-income people achieve greater mobility, New Orleans transportation planners decided years ago that their highest priority was to provide heavily subsidized streetcar rides for tourists. In the late 1980s and 1990s, New Orleans spent at least $15 million converting an abandoned rail line into the 1.5-mile Riverfront Streetcar line. In 2004, New Orleans opened the 3.6-mile Canal Street streetcar line at a cost of nearly $150 million.
New Orleans was planning to spend another $120 million on a Desire Street streetcar line.These tourist lines do nothing to help any local residents except for those who happen to own property along the line.
Sounds very familiar. Tom adds:
If a part of Metro's long-term strategy is to make certain segments of Houston's population less "automobile-dependent," then one of the lessons of New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina is that we should make clear in any future Metro referendums that such a strategy can have deadly consequences in the event that an evacuation of Houston is required.
Posted by Anne Linehan @ 09/05/05 11:27 AM | Print |
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