Hope For A High-Quality Transit Future
Light rail often gets knocked because it takes time to build. This is, as I’ve been arguing here, a very short-sighted approach to living. It is why I posted about The Long Now Foundation - to relay the information that long-term planning is good, and necessary, and long-term projects should not be avoided just because they take, by definition, a long time to complete.
Many long-term projects that were once derided by any number of people for any number of reasons are now deemed ‘worthy’ - the Golden Gate Bridge took four years to build, the initial BART system took five years to build, the Sydney Harbour Bridge took nine years to build, the Sydney Opera House took fifteen years to build. Long-term planning is good.
But one aspect of building our future is often left out of the discussion — hope. Not to rip off this year’s number one-rated marketing campaign, but hope can be important to the well-being of the population. Obama, of course, always talked about ‘hope’ — it seemed to make people inclined towards thinking big about the future - thinking positively about the changes we can affect if we work together towards common goals - even impossibly-big goals, like curbing global warming. Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogota, creator of its now-world famous BRT system, said he aimed to transform the city quickly - not to fix all the problems overnight - but instead, to give people something to be hopeful about. James Howard Kunstler, fierce critic of suburban sprawl, suggests that we need to create ‘places worth caring about’ so that we can ‘dwell in a hopeful place.’
Can you imagine San Francisco without the Golden Gate Bridge or BART? Or Sydney without their own incredible bridge, or that humanity-inspiring opera house? What if the haters and short-term thinkers had won out?
It’s OK to engage in long-term planning. It’s OK to take on big projects. In fact, we should encourage long-term planning, and when appropriate, big projects. They will not address our immediate needs in the short-term, but they will give us something to be hopeful about, and the power of hope should not be underestimated.
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