Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Take the MTC's Transportation/Development Planning Poll

It's at http://www.mtc.ca.gov/planning/2035_plan.

You can vote for personal priorities of the region's problems and possible solutions.

A glaring omission, in my opinion, is that no mention is made at all of encouraging employers to put workplaces near transit. We can vote to raise the gas tax, put future housing by train stations, etc, all we want--but until we start paying attention to making the work end of our commutes transit friendly, it's not going to do much good.

Still, it doesn't take long, so make yourself heard.

At least they give you the option to vote for a few good ideas that are currently "beyond the pale", making planning a regional effort, instead of leaving it in the hands of cities, which generally are controlled by NIBMY jerks.


Pantograph Trolleypole said...

This questions is annoying. I'd rather focus more on transit and biking etc than build more roads. But they don't give you that choice.

Which of the following strategies should be a higher priority for the Bay Area?

Option A:
Making investments to maintain the existing system of roads, and the existing bus, rail
and ferry service in the region

Option B:
Making investments to build new roads and add more bus, rail and ferry services in the region.

Option A - Maintain existing system
Option B - Build new roads, add more transportation services
No opinion

295bus said...

Yeah, I wanted to vote for "maintain transit and build new transit and f*ck highways", but they didn't give us that choice.

I voted for option A, maintenance of existing roads and transit. I figured transit can absorb new users a lot better than highways. If more people take transit, you might have trouble getting a seat, but you'll still get to work OK--and increased revenue might even mean trains and busses run more often. Try and squeeze more cars into a crowded freeway, and the system will just become unusable.

Put childishly: if we don't build any new transit *or* freeways, transit wins!

Or more philosophically: Freeways only work as long as we commit to providing an unlimited supply of pavement for new drivers. This is a sisyphean task that we're just not going to be able to keep up forever. Better to face up to this now than to learn it the hard way, by going broke. Transit is a much more economically sustainable way of getting people to where they want to go.