More op-eds on mayor's Metro expansion plan
Yesterday it was Reps. Gene Green and Sheila Jackson Lee who, while expressing concern for the lack of community involvement in determining the new plan, failed to express any concern over Metro's continued slashing of bus services.
Today it's David Crossley, President of the Gulf Coast Institute, who gets misty-eyed as he talks of Paris and Shanghai and dreams of a Houston where people gratefully leave their cars behind to hop on mass transit:
People may not think so now, but they are going to like this service very much. That is, they will like it if Metro can adhere to the concept of high-quality service. If they build it, we will come, and once we do we're going to need a lot more of it.
Well sure, if Paris and Shanghai love it, Houston will, too!
Each generation of these new BRT vehicles is sleeker and more refined.
It sounds world-class.
Crossley's op-ed appears to be a shortened version of his "analysis" of Metro's plan which is on the Gulf Coast Institute's website. The entire piece is quite a (utopian) read:
The longer I study the mobility issue - which I suspect may be at least as much as any other person in our region, if not more - the more convinced I am that the key to livable cities with a high quality of life is an efficient, convenient, safe, extensive transit system, beginning with the urban areas.
Oooooookay. Maybe for Crossley (who is very impressed with his transit knowledge) a high quality of city-life is based upon the shiny sleekness of transit, but most residents are more concerned with good schools, low crime and low taxes.
The new Metro plan, if implemented as promised by 2012, will deliver 97 miles of transit instead of the 36 envisioned in the referendum. While this plan is more ambitious than the previous 2012 plan, nothing in the recent announcements addresses the rest of the referendum plan, which projected out to 2025, and that needs to be addressed. Metro has assured me that “The plan is still to implement METRO Solutions as originally planned.”
Oh, well, I guess that settles that. Crossley has been assured by Metro so we can all rest easy.
Or, how about with the $2 billion taxpayers will have to shell out, we just buy each transit rider a new hybrid car?
Posted by Anne Linehan @ 07/02/05 09:18 AM | Print |
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