Secrets of the City

I see Bob couldn’t help but comment, probably still all flushed from reading the latest David Brauer post.

Hmmm. But how many MORE cars would be on the road without mass transit like the LRT? I think that’s the point of the whole “save the environment” approach when arguing for mass transit.

Just like the much-vaunted “green” electric car will still result in tons of pollutants released into the atmosphere. Just not out of its own exhaust but, instead, out of the smokestacks of the generating plants that will supply the electricity the car uses.

People still believe anything that comes out of the Cato Institute?

I have some Bear Sterns stock options you might be interested in.

Randle O’Toole: In his most recent book, The Best-Laid Plans, O’Toole calls for repealing federal, state, and local planning laws and proposes reforms that can help solve social and environmental problems without heavy-handed government regulation.

So apparently the automobile is sustainable as long as sprawl continues, and the only costs are in constructing roads. How would these boy geniuses build their way out of double the parking and traffic density in Uptown?

I have some Bear Sterns stock options you might be interested in.

Ooh, I’ll sell my Lehman Bros options to pay for them!

From what I’ve seen there’s a lot of underground parking being built.

Why is this trash even distributed throughout the internet…..

Seriously….

Plow over Lake Calhoun in uptown and build another highway to reduce congestion!

These super-biased think-tanks with an agenda are a joke.

Has anyone read the book Traffic? I just finished it. It’s about traffic and whatnot. I highly recommend it, especially for this discussion.

Traffic?

Bix, that book does look good.

Kevin, this isn’t the first time I have had to set Mr. Westover straight, I doubt it will be the last. He pops up on MinnPost, the Saint Paul Legal Ledger, talk radio, the blogs and on the PiPress op/ed page (he is on the PiPress Editorial Board). Every now and then he says somthing about smoking bans, ethanol or now — light rail — that merits a response from me.

Didn’t this study get released debunked and sent home crying last year? Whatever…moronic rightists fund a ‘think’ tank to broadcast their own foregone conclusions, I call that a fool and his money being soon parted.

That may be the worst MNSpeak summary of an article I’ve ever seen. It’s a long and complex (props to MinnPost) piece on the subject and JACC snags one out-of-context quote.

Anyways, for starters it’s not just about how *much* energy something takes; it’s the origin of that energy. Light rail is electric, so if we got off our sweet asses and built more renewable power, it’d already be hooked up, which is part of the appeal.

It’s also important to think of the development that follows public transport like rail. We’ve seen what car-based thinking creates, and we call it the outer-ring suburbs. Ick. Public transport-based development inspires dense, diverse development.

I admit it’s interesting to try to calculate energy per passenger-mile, and it’s true that sometimes this number is surprisingly disappointing. But to dismiss the whole enterprise on this statistic is missing the point about forward-thinking transportation.

It’s too bad a rail system didn’t get developed 25 years ago, when it would’ve been 1/5th the current cost. But, geez, back when a “modern stadium” was considered something domed for multi-use like the, uh, Dome (and they have one in Tokyo, too, but a better ball club playing there), and the country was heading into a deep recession, forward thinkers were few and the dollars even fewer. And there was a Republican in the White House.

I just want a monorail or a maglev or something. It takes too long to get to the airport on that slow ass LRT.

Plow over Lake Calhoun in uptown
I think Vlad is onto something here, we could call it art and have it funded by the new Constitutional amendment.

I know good will eventualy come out of LRT. At one point in time there was a rail line in front of my house that carried commuters to downtown St.Paul, now it’s a lovely parkway.

At least Peter McLaughlin finally admitted that it’s not about transportation. That’s a big step.

I’m glad others have already pointed out how ridiculous anything coming out of the cato institute is.

I won’t even bother looking into the assumptions this asshat pulled out of his … well, ass, to make these calculations, but even assuming they’re somehow true, electrically-powered rail transit has all its emissions generated at a point source (power plant) which is much easier to contain and switch to renewable energy than an entire fleet of automobiles. As far “zomg dirty feeder bus service!,” that’s a bunch of bullshit too. Any city with a market big enough to construct rail transit has already been buying CNG or hybrid buses for years now and most have plans to transition their entire fleet as the older diesel buses end their lifecycle. How many people driving cars are going to be driving anything cleaner anytime soon by choice?

plus blah blah blah transit encourages denser development which requires less energy for travel since everything is closer together etc. etc.

cato institute, and this asinine summary = fail.

I’m glad others have already pointed out how ridiculous anything coming out of the cato institute is.

To paraphrase the late, great Peter Sellers: “Cato?!? You fool!!”

Westover and O’Toole are complete asshats.

noodleman, the Twinks would whup on the Yoimuri Giants.

Au contraire, billiam. The Yomiuri Giants were the equivalent of the NY Yankees in Japan when I lived there. Oh and Nagashima were the Japanese Maris and Mantle, and the Giants were the last Japan ML ball club to allow a foreigner (i.e. American) on their roster. (Technically, Oh was Taiwanese but his foreigner-ness didn’t count because he was bigger than Babe Ruth.)