Three Years For Chinatown Light Rail Line?
Not too bad - if they can keep it under four years.
I can’t say I’ve ever been involved with a major construction project, but I imagine it’s pretty much one disaster after another, 24-hours a day, for years on end. And that’s without whiny locals screaming at you for noise, or for taking away parking, or complaining that “We should have just built BRT!”, or whatever. In short, I’m pretty understanding of delays on major projects — that any get finished at all is a bit of a miracle, in my opinion.
I was really hoping for a streetcar line on Columbus Ave (in North Beach/Little Italy), but I’ll take any kind of rail we can get - even the underground kind. And if we’re smart, we’ll keep Drilling, Baby! Drilling! until we hit the water, then we’ll turn left.
Here’s what the scene looks like right now - there are occasional sharrows, though I don’t see any in the snapshot below (look across the street on the left, after you advance a bit):
Off to the left, you’ll see an approaching Academy of Art Bus. I can’t keep track of all the art schools in this town, but one or more of them sure employs a whole lot of buses that like to haul ass all around the city. Don’t get me wrong - they’re generally nice-looking buses. If I was going to get run over by a bus, I’d much prefer it be an Academy of Art bus rather than one of those Muni bendy buses — let a man die with some dignity.
But those art buses are really everywhere, because the school owns real estate everywhere, apparently. It’s like a colonization program or something. And many of them are serious-sized buses - not short-buses. There’s got to be more we can do to get some of those artsy-fartsy kids onto bikes, so we can take some of those ginormous buses off our streets. Someone needs to get in touch with Mr. Derylle Evans so we can see about helping him really green up his transportation program.
Back to the new rail line - I have to say, I’m really not a big proponent of underground travel. In general, it’s not human. I don’t think humans were generally meant to burrow and travel underground, like groundhogs, or insects. This underground thing should be avoided, generally speaking.
What to do in cases of just heaps of people in very small amounts of space, like New York City? I’m not sure. Maybe we humans don’t need to be packed in at 30,000 people per square mile? Maybe if above-ground light rail can’t do the job, then we need to stop growing in this city? These and others are the questions we should be considering now that we’re all long-term thinkers who are looking 50, 100, 500 years out, right? Cities have 51% of the population, but use up 75% of the energy. We can talk about economics and stuff, but I’m more interested in real economics - growing food, building and maintaining housing infrastructure, etc. Lots of modern economies in cities are about re-arranging numbers in the spreadsheets - no real value added to humanity.
Back to underground travel again - there are some things that can be done to alleviate the general ‘anti-human attitude’ of underground environments. One of them is to make all underground stations ridiculously spacious with super-high ceilings - this prevents feelings of claustrophobia. Many of the District’s stations manage to do this pretty well. Much of making underground locations more inhabitable is obvious - like making our stations clean and bright and generally kick-ass, like Copenhagen’s:
[Image: Wikipedia/Frozbyte]
Hopefully North Beach businesses don’t scream too much when we take away their parking to give pedestrians more room. I don’t expect us cyclists will get more than a crappy little bike lane, but I haven’t looked at the plan. As you can see from the Google Street View embed, it’s pretty tight through there on Columbus. If you take out the parking, that gives you enough sidewalk space for pedestrians, but then you only have two travel lanes in each direction. A single bus takes up one to one-and-a-half travel lanes — not to mention they are loud and crappy and kill what would otherwise be a great pedestrian environment.
Well, I guess sharrows are pretty awesome. Anyone who requires more is just a wimp.
[Groundhog Image: Wikipedia/Eiffelle]
Leave comment (0)[p.s. The Forums are open for participation.]
