The finger pointing concerning the METRO Red Line Wreck is in high gear.
There is one area of concern that you will not hear about in the MainStream Media:
Dysfunctional human settlement patterns in the METRO station areas.
The failure to evolve supporting settlement patterns (aka, ‘land use’) in the station areas is the primary reason that “most of the METRO trains leave most of the METRO stations mostly empty most of the time.”
No shared-vehicle system can operate efficiently pumping one way in the morning and the other way at night PERIOD.
If there was Balance between the station area travel demand and the METRO system capacity there would then be far more revenue to keep the system maintained and far more citizen support for the absolutely necessary stable funding sources.
There would also be no need to push the system beyond it’s capacity to serve peak demand.
Of course, there would also be far fewer wrong size houses in the wrong locations with underwater mortgages – but that is another story – see last post.
Want the details on what needed to be done and what STILL needs to be done? Read EMR’s 1989 report “It Is Time to Fundamentally Rethink METRO and Mobility in the National Capital Subregion” most recently revised and updated 18 October 2004.
Want to see a clear ‘blueprint’ for where and how Fundamental Transformation could be done? Google “Blueprint for a Better Region.”
And before anyone gets off their hay wagon and tries to pitch cheap shots about how the ‘real problem’ is building a heavy rail based shared-vehicle system in the first place, read the full analysis of one of the leading anti-rail quacks recent scribblings summarized in this abstract:
“Clifford Winston and Vikram Maheshri attempt to use benefit-cost analysis to make a definitive
statement about the social desirability of urban rail transit in the United States. Their argument is
deficient on several elementary analytic and statistical grounds. They underestimate total benefits, and therefore net benefits, and their failure to examine the suitability of their data and to pay attention to the usual caveats associated with benefit-cost analysis further undermines their
assertions. As a result, these findings should not be used to inform either the debate or decisions
about investment in urban rail systems.”
The study can be found at www.vtpi.org
Lets point the fingers at solutions, not the villains or the strawpersons. It has been 20 years and time is running out.
EMR
