Killing Mass Transportation

Dear Reader,

In the January 2009 issue of the Sustainable Times (please see page 1) I have written an article (or essay, or rant, one of those anyway) about the need to move away from the auto-centric model of urban and suburban planning and design that we have been following for the past half century and replace it with a community- and ecology-based model.
One aspect of such a shift that I haven’t gone into in that article is the need for new means of transportation.
Indeed, if people are supposed to abandon their cars or at least use them less, they must have alternatives available to them.
Right now we don’t have any realistic alternatives to the automobile in the Madison area.
While bicycling is becoming more popular, it is still nowehere near its potential (countries like Denmark and the Netherlands show us the way).
If we want bicycling to play a serious role as a year-round means of transportation, we have to provide the appropriate infrastructure and put the bicycle on equal footing with the car - not just legally, but practically.
For instance: Reduce the width and number of car lanes on streets like University Avenue or Mineral Point Road and put wide and safe bike lanes on those roads (safe in the sense that they separated from car traffic by a physical barrier and not just a white line - please see picture on page 12).
Communities should also provide covered bicycle parking lots at popular destinations. That could be done cheaply by reducing the number of car parking spaces in urban parking ramps and replacing them with bike racks.
A much larger role also has to be played by public transportation.
Conventional thinking notwithstanding, public transportation is more cost-effective than inidividual motorized traffic.
Rightwing demagogues and other economically illiterate populists who rant and rave against every tax dollar spent on public transportation conveniently ignore the fact that the public already subsidizes the automobile much more than it ever could public transportation, even if the latter was free for all users.
And talking about ‘free’: The majority of the Madison City Council and Mayor Dave Cieslewicz are, with all due respect, just as erroneous, narrow-minded and shortsighted in their thinking as the aforementioned demagogues. For all the mayor’s talk about supporting public transportation, his actions speak much louder and what they say is: “To hell with public transportation, we need more cars on the road and in the city.”
His support of a 33%-fare increase (from $1.50 to $2.00) and his childish temper tantroum when the city’s Transit and Parking Commission at first refused to go along (they might have changed their mind by the time this issue of the Sustainable Times gets distributed) indicate that his real agenda is not to expand public transportation, but to kill it.
With all the talk in Washington by the incoming Obama administration of public investments to get the economy moving again, now would be the perfect time to get a long-term investment into the sustainable future of Madison and Dane County going - for instance by building a wide and dense public transportation network.
Instead, the Madison city government does what every self-respecting Republican administration would do: it discourages people from using public transportation by raising fares and cutting services.
Oh, were have all the Progressives gone?