It’s all a matter of time horizons.\u00a0 If you have a long term investment horizon, you can think big.\u00a0 If you’re thinking short term, you need something that makes an impact right away.\u00a0 As this applies to transit and transportation planning, it’s much easier to implement a service, such as a bus route than it is to plan, design, and build a rail line.<\/p>\n
Advocacy for change is important, but some are annoyed with the focus on the near term instead of keeping our eyes on the long term prize.\u00a0 The Overhead Wire<\/a> takes Streetsblog to task for perceived Bus Rapid Transit advocacy.\u00a0 Buses are great, and we should certainly invest in them and upgrade them wherever possible.\u00a0 But we also should acknowledge that they don’t have the long term impacts that rails do.<\/p>\n You want less people to ride transit? Then build inferior transit. In all actuality though, this country needs more Metro Subways. You know, the kinds of things they have in first world countries on the European continent. Washington DC is an example of a place that has developed more recently around the subway. Regions that build BRT will always be car cities. If you want to truely transform regions, we’re going to have to think bigger.<\/p>\n I think a lot of people talk about Arlington County because of the great success it has had in development. Yet no one talks about what Atlanta was like on Peachtree just north of downtown or in the Buckhead area just north of there before MARTA. Not a lot of people seem to realize that San Francisco is much more dense now because of BART and Caltrain connections as well as the Muni Metro than it ever would have been without. In fact, certain companies have pushed the MTA in San Francisco to make Muni better or they will leave. They wouldn’t be saying that if we had a system that actually worked.<\/p>\n The problem with places like San Francisco and Atlanta is that they didn’t go far enough. They built a couple of lines and then stopped. If we truely want to see our cities transform, we need to go further and without BRT as THE substitute idea for Heavy Rail or Semi Metro Light Rail. It’s an outrage to think that people actually think this is a real alternative to transform our cities and turn the population to transit. It’s just us being cheap. We’re already cheap with transit, and look where that gets us. To more people riding cars and more sprawl.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It’s important to note the Arlington County case.\u00a0 The “Oranjington<\/a>” corridor is always hailed as a paragon of transit oriented development.\u00a0 And it is.\u00a0 But any quick glance at aerial photos from that area shows plenty of surface parking lots yet to be redeveloped:<\/p>\n