Harold Goldstein recommends a different prescription to Dr. Transit

Harold Goldstein writes in response to "The Doctor is In"

You make excellent points but I cannot understand what you are arguing. The point of the article is to say why people do not make significant use of metro. What you are doing is to say why these reasons are suspect. Well, great, that serves no purpose. What is needed is for metro to fix these reasons or explain to people why they are avoidable.

-- Dr. Transit concurs with the diagnosis, although he thought that was obvious.

Well, I agree that those issues need to be addressed. You need to think of my posting as the beginning of a discussion. You can't address problems-issues if you don't know what they are or you don't have more specific insights into the problems.

E.g., responding to budget problems by going to two-car trains at night on certain lines shows a limited definition and exploration of that particular "problem." It is up to us to become "consulting transit physicians" and super-duper "diagnosticians" to figure this out. I hope that we, both "us" and the broader community, can continue this discussion. We all must be committed to earning our CTEs.

Harold continues--

In the meantime you are also making excuses for metro. The problems with metro ridership began at the beginning; it was a horribly designed system from the start. The decision was made to focus on the CBD work trip exclusively. Any other travel was almost incidental to the original plan. Further, most knowledgeable observers predicted that the development at the metro stations (and of course the reason that development now is spreading away from stations is that those areas are already developed or the costs of land there is too great) would generate more traffic than the system would remove from roads. Thus the net effect of the metro system would be to put more drivers on the road.

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Dr. Transit says -- I disagree with you in a way about the design. You are absolutely right in what you say, except that by failing to recognize that the system design was done in 1959, that it reflects completely different circumstances, even though it took 40 years to actually build it out, and by then most everything changed.

One of the ways to deal with this general issue is to "force" development to occur in ways that promote efficiency in transit. Now that's completely divorced from planning and development. However, that's completely intentional as the dominant planning and development paradigm in the United States is focused upon the car, development of greenfields, and segregated uses.

Arlington County, with its well-developed transportation demand management planning systems, is a best practice model for this. Too bad that non-federal development in DC isn't required to use similar planning models. (E.g., in a development in our neighborhood, we have a commitment from the developer to provide on-site aboveground spaces to either or both Flexcar and Zipcar. But I don't think any other ANC has pushed for this across the city.)

That this happens, and then people complain about not enough roads, etc., requires some magic drug like ibogaine be administered. But Dr. Transit doesn't have a medical license.

The competitive advantage of the center city is dependent on strengthening and expanding transit. (This is covered in my very first blog entry which is a reposting of something I had in the Philly Daily News). Frankly, the reason that DC as a center city is currently resurgent has to do with the current design of the Metro system. As a center city advocate that doesn't totally bother me, but as I say we must continue to develop the transit infrastructure to makeit work for more people.

Still, adopting the Ride On model throughout the region would be one way of providing a solution to one of the problems that gets in the way of people utilizing the subway system. By not really discussing it, the Post missed an opportunity to move the discussion forward.
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Harold says -- Simply put the metro system in dc is a dinosaur ... using 19th century planning and technology (ie NYC for one of many), at a ridiculous cost, to build a system ostensibly for the 21st century but which is hopelessly mired down.

You are right to look at options like light rail but once the Metro investment was made the area is now locked into it. Funds will not become available for a significant improvement in public transportation in my lifetime.

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Now Harold, you're writing to Dr. Transit, not to Dr. Gridlock. Dr. Transit is committed to participatory democracy. The prescription is more advocacy, not rolling over.

While Dr. Gridlock recommends organizing against elected officials calling for transit-oriented-development which granted, does bring more riders to an overburdened system. It takes a Dr. Transit to suggest pro-livable region actions such as regularized funding for Metro, sales tax support for transit, buying more subway cars now, etc.

Dr. Transit learned about advocacy at the University of Michigan, and then by working for someone who had worked for Ralph Nader. We have to demand that change occurs. Unlike Tony Kornheiser stepping up to create the "Redskins Bandwagon", we are going to have to create our own "Pro-Transit Bandwagon." Dr. Gridlock isn't going to do it for us. Dr. Gridlock's patients are the drivers who write to him, Dr. Transit is an environmental doctor concerned aobut sustainable land use and resource planning.

The city proper is only the fourth largest market for sales of the Washington Post. They publish twice-weekly editions of the Extra in Southern Maryland, Prince William and Loudoun. That's because there is so much advertising. The Post benefits from sprawl, even though by and large, it does an acceptable job raising issues about the cost of sprawl, all the while cashing those checks from advertisers.

Getting back to advocacy, while $300-$600 million will be collected to pay for the construction of a baseball stadium, imagine the same amount of money being invested in the realization of streetcars/light rail proposals embodied in the joint WMATA-DC Department of Transportation study. Bringing back streetcars would have a return on investment of ten to thirty times. At best, the baseball stadium will have a 1:1 return.

And if you believe in ground up efforts like the McKinney Avenue Trolley system in Dallas, it can be done for even less, at least in certain places.

The money is out there, we just have to figure out how to capture it for transit and infrastructure instead of letting it go to baseball player millionaires and centimillionaire (and higher) owners.