Found this post by accident but I thought it was an interesting comparison to Toronto’s own Save Our St. Clair group. It seems back in 2003 “one of the hottest spots in the ongoing battle between automobile-favoring road warriors and transit proponents is currently centered in Orange County, California, just south of Los Angeles. The Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA) proposed a brand-new light rail transit (LRT) project. OCTA’s CenterLine Phase I project was an 11.4-mile LRT system.”
The opponents were a group called FAIR (Fund Alternatives Instead of Rail). Much like Toronto’s SOS, FAIR spread their own misinformation about the effects of an LRT line: value of homes would drop, crime could go up, it creates congestion, and that the project was not supported by the community. There were groups that helped support the line, and local independent media to scrutinize the situation, but the line eventually was cancelled due to an acrimonious political culture of Orange County. Something that didn’t surface in the St. Clair ROW row (sorry for the pun), but reared it’s ugly head in the OC was the issue of class. Low-income people use transit, not the middle class, and FAIR seemed to play on this wedge issue with their unsubstantiated case that transit would bring crime to the more affluent neigbourhoods.
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But Matt! Where are the raised curbs? Why is the pedestrian crossing the tracks without benefit of ten lanes of left turns, right turns, bicycles, loading zones and parking? Where are the Hydra-headed traffic signals?
Designs like this are a dangerous, pernicious influence on our cities. These people obviously don’t know how to design Light Rail, and they’ll just have to come to Toronto to be re-educated.
We might even be able to convince them that subways are a better idea.
Steve
This image is of Portland’s LRT. It was the only image I could find that looked like the Centre Line design. You gotta check out the FAIr site. Its like SOS on steroids.
Orange County is America on steroids.
I love street cars, sorry, “light rail,” and regret that Montreal no longer has any. But also have to admit I don’t actually see the advantage to laying down rail lines in city streets instead of priority bus lanes. A bus can divert, go around obstacles. They’re fun and nice to look at, but aren’t buses better? Or is it a mainly a diesel exhaust vs electric thing?
“Crime”, in American political discourse, acts as a placeholder for race, not class. A similar set of choices erupted into a scandal in Buffalo, when an African-American teenager died crossing a busy arterial street on her way to a job in the mall. It turned out that the mall has specifically requested (or the bus company had specifically promised, or both) that busses on certain lines not stop at the mall. Guess who lived in the neighbourhoods those lines went through.
I similar wave of mis-information was broadcast against the proposed Bay Link LRT from Miami to Miami Beach, the most offensive of which was the argument that the LRT would bring crime from downtown Miami to the Beach (like criminals don’t drive in Miami???)
Such attitudes are not as far off as you think.
I once interviewed a Vaughan City Councillor when the sub-divisions were going up around Canada’s wonderland, and he told me his constituents didn’t want transit in the area because they thought it would bring crime to the area, and…wait for it…increase pollution because of the diesel buses.
The irony is that according to him, traffic congestion was the number one concern of his constituents.
It just shows how “low rent” our politicians are in the GTA.