Unconstrained thinking about mobility in Montgomery County

Bikes at Takoma Metro. Ride On (Montgomery County) and Metro buses in the background.

Last night I made a presentation at the monthly meeting of Action Committee for Transit, the 20 year old or so transit advocacy group in Montgomery County, Maryland (ACT has a spin off affiliate in Prince George's County as well).

I had fun, the room was full, the projector worked, it was a pretty good Powerpoint presented without notes and lots of images, I was still editing the presentation on the way up there on the subway, the questions (and I hope the answers) were great.

Plus, as a pro-DC person, it was nice to go up into the 'burbs and tell them what they ought to be doing. We get plenty of it from the other end--especially from Len Sullivan of NARPAC, who seems to think that DC needs to be reoriented towards embracing the car even more than it does.

You heard it here second, as an advocate, (in response to one very good question), I can't ever imagine taking on the issues of:

1. increasing gasoline excise taxes;
2. congestion pricing and tolls for entering Washington, DC.

Too hard, almost impossible politically, and there are other ways to make coming into the city work better by means other than driving. (And instead of gasoline excise taxes, let's just ban free parking, and price parking more at its cost rather than subsidizing it. As hard as that would be to do, I think it would be easier than substantively raising the excise tax.)

So when I got home I spent hours more fine-tuning the presentation, adding significantly to certain sections based on expressed interests during the talk.

I probably need to add three more slides and then I would like to do the presentation again.

So if there's a group out there interested, where there would be at least 20 attendees, let me know.

People seemed to think it was interesting, especially ideas like a regional railroad system, and they called my perspective "regional," (where I think of it as more pro-DC) and while they didn't name it directly, clearly my profoundly and strident "transit-first" perspective is atypical in most suburban places, where the world revolves around cars.

Thank you to Ben Ross for inviting me to speak, and to Ken Firestone for helping me develop the ideas conveyed in the presentation.
Baby Blue comic strip, Sunday 10/8/2006. (Look at it full-sized on the Washington Post website in the Comics section.)

Index Keywords: transit