Urban planner screws up and tells the truth: their goal is to make driving a car harder.
This became glaringly obvious recently, when the CEO of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Phil Washington, reeling from data showing a steady drop of transit riders, decided that the only solution was to make driving worse.
“It’s too easy to drive in this city,” said Washington. “We want to reach the riders that left and get to the new ones as well. And part of that has to do with actually making driving harder.”
And if you listen to the DFL apparatchiks that infest the Met Council, you hear the same thing – just a little quieter.
Well, outside friendly confines, anyway.
I’ve experienced this mainly in Minneapolis.. Major roads closed for monyhs, despite little to no work happening. Traffic lights synced to make smooth driving impossible. The burbs seem better, but they’re still under Met Council requirements.
I see it all over–there is actually talk in Rochester of putting in light rail, as if that won’t tear up already overloaded city streets and make life even more difficult, and at huge expense. I’ve been phrasing this as the tyranny of the steam engine–although they’re not used much anymore for transportation (apart from firing coal fired power plants used to power death trains), the assumption by urban planners still seems to be that you need to design everything around large vehicles driven by large engines, and that you cannot miniaturize things to be more flexible.
As someone who has been without a car for nearly 3 years now (by circumstance, not choice) I cant wait to bail on metro transit. They are complete and utter garbage. It is funny when Leftists have fruedian slips though. This is 100% about controlling people. If they cant control you they hate that because cleary you are too dumb to make your own decisions.
City planners failed to predict or stop the post WW2 flight to the suburbs. They are one example of the caste of “experts” who can be wrong about everything, again and again, and yet still maintain the respect of the ruling class.
How this can happen is more worthy of study than whether or not the privately owned automobile causes homelessness and racism (answer: “It does!” say the urban planners).
Crazy people will do what crazy people do – but how they do it is quite another matter.
Example A) Have the federal government borrow money from China to build a bike path in Minneapolis.
Example B) Propose spending $100 million to bury the Southwest light rail line away from the delicate eyes of the ubber-rich, all the while lamenting the shortage of transit funding for “marginalized” people.
But like I say, crazy is as crazy does, but how about the local media at least admitting that this is all F****d up?
Never gonna happen.
For comparison’s sake:
Average efficiency of city buses: ~ 25 passenger-miles per gallon of diesel, about equivalent to 17mpg with gasoline. Suburban territory, or about what my 1997 GMC Sierra with 5.7l V8 gets.
My mileage driving to work this morning: 42.8mpg. (Golf Sportwagen, manual)
I think it’s time to discard the notion that bigger vehicles with bigger engines are more efficient. For starters, a bigger, heavier vehicle needs a bigger frame, and you’ve got to be able to stand up in it to find your seat. My VW doesn’t have that problem.
BB you have a hitlermobile? I dissapoint