Robert -- when I said Tom was missing my point, I wasn't
referring to your message. I agree with what you say here.
BTW, in reply to Dan, there's an interesting article in the Post on
the Blackwater corp and the idealistic young kid who joined them
hoping to make a difference.
It's in Friday's paper -- same issue as the Metro "death spiral"
I've been worrying about for months.
(note: Metrorail opponent Chris Zimmerman is quoted, one of the
trolley-N-bus "transit advocates" who voted, as a member of the
MWCOG alongside then-chair Kathy Porter -- not to budget ANY money
for railcars in the Metropolitan Washington long-term (2025)
capital plan, which is an official funding request document,
and continues to say "the money just isn't there" even as he pushes
to "double the DC area's transit ridership" by, you guessed it, 2025 --
-- in an MWCOG vote only a few months earlier, as well as local govt
resolutions -- presumably C.Z. hopes to alleviate crowding by taking
people OFF Metro and putting them on trolley and BRT lines. In fact,
he & D. head John Porcari said as much when the K St. Busway and
(political nonstarter) M Street Trolley were first proposed as an
alternative to a much-needed (and Georgetown-backed) M Street subway.
So now we're trying to take people OFF the trains by widening roads
and removing trees for surface trolleys, rather than building railcars.
Make sense?
This takes us back in time to 1995, when Parris Glendening et al.
predicted that Metro would become a white elephant for lack of riders,
because it served so little of the DC area...
The fact that the rail cars are needed to meet CURRENT ridership
projections, never mind doubling them, escapes his notice,
as I mentioned back when this vote took place, a year or two ago!
Post by Brian Robinson OR Carol Goter Robinson OR Bill RobinsonBrian: It is interesting to me that Metro [now apparently part of the
Office of Information Awareness] isn't interesting in tracking the
movements of "tourists." Do they really think that prospective terrorists
and the other suspicious individuals that Metro is constantly asking us to
identify for them are going to spend $5.00 on a SmartTrip Card? I suppose
that Metro can sell all of the collected information on my commuting
habits to corporate marketing types in order to balance their budget ...
did you see the "Death Spiral" article in the Post today? Is Metro going
the way of SEPTA? Stay tuned ...
Robert
On Thu, 01 Apr 2004 18:18:29 -0500, Brian Robinson OR Carol Goter Robinson
Post by Brian Robinson OR Carol Goter Robinson OR Bill RobinsonBrian: I don't understand what this means. Is WMAtA eliminating rail to
bus transfers entirely?
Robert
Only for farecard users, it seems. This is quite the reversal from
DC's (failed) effort to install farecard readers on buses -- now
that the bus revamp is complete, that effort is dead (Fairfax, home
of the SmarTrip card corporation and sundry other intelligence firms,
described farecards as an "obsolete technology" of interest only to
the less affluent and less frequent users -- who need to be "pushed"
into adopting, ahem, Smartrip).
I am not trying to suggest that the primary intention is tracking individual
citizens. That is merely a side benefit of interest only to crazy
people like John Poindexter. Who cares where their interests may lie!
--BERý