A great vision from APTA (American Public Transit Association), but I’d be more interested a political and financial plan to get us there.
A great vision from APTA (American Public Transit Association), but I’d be more interested a political and financial plan to get us there.
2 responses to “Lovely”
Do you ever get the impression that all these planning studies get proofed by the same set of bureaucrats cum Valley Girls? I’m sorry, Chris, but this report feels so five-minutes-ago.
It’s like those newsreels from the (1939?) world’s fair or a visit to Disney’s Tomorrowland. Most of the predictions seemed out of date the minute the shows opened.
Here’s an alternative vision:
Building on the successes of turn of the (21st) century DARPA Grand Challenge and simultaneous development of autonomous drone aircraft during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, all motor vehicles operated on public roads had to be fully autonomous robots by 2035. The US death rate from motor vehicle collisions dropped to 83 that year, all involving human driven vehicles operated illegally.
Ride sharing and local transit service merged into something that people from the early part of the century would have called computerized van pooling after nationwide congestion pricing forced out commute hour single occupant vehicles.
By 2020, all newly manufactured road vehicles used electric propulsion with hybrid supercapacitor/battery storage systems. Charge times had been reduced to two minutes for passenger cars and ten for over the road trucks.
These developments combined to eliminate on street parking. No new bike lanes or sidewalks were built after 2030 except in for a few unique situations as all traffic could safely share the same ROW’s. Streets became narrower, but still left room for fire and other emergency vehicles.
80 year old Angelina Mitchell lives independently and uses a robot jitney (RJ) service for all of her local trips. TriMet consists of a few high capacity rail corridors fed by competing RJ operators. The last TriMet human operator retired in 2027.
Still, it’s nice to know that others see the value in a simple single universal payment system for all passenger transportation modes.
Why would I want to pay taxes for something that doesn’t benefit me? I am not sure whether the projects envisioned by the APTA are necessary or not. And if they are it still behooves us to do them within reasonable cost limits. What has been happening in this new Congress is appropriations way beyond what is actually needed.