Transportation pictures

As I noted here and here (among other places), we've been thinking about additional options for commuting. The bikes arrived at the store today. More on them in another post.

Of course, I had scheduled the day off, thinking I was going to a Mayor's Budget Forum, and got the dates wrong! The Forum I thought I was going to attend is actually scheduled for Monday, which I have also scheduled as an off day. There is another Forum scheduled for next Tuesday (8 March), and I plan to attend it as well.

I'm going to as many of them as I'm able, simply to make it clear to Mayor Fisher that bicycle infrastructure is important to me and to my friends. I have long said I'm not a fan of poorly-designed bike lanes, but I believe in the need for well-designed ones as a way to encourage folks to ride more--whether for pleasure or utility or whatever. Cycling for ANY reason is an important part of our transportation picture, for reasons that both of my readers already know well. Sadly, though, work realities will keep me from attending every one of the forums. I've missed one, already, for example. I look at it as sort of like voting--in the "Vote early, vote often" sense.

There are many things I think that we as a community need to do, and not enough money for half of them. However, I think that investment in public transit and other alternatives to single-occupant motor vehicles will pay far greater dividends than investment in more lane-miles of interstate.

I got to hear portions of a program on NPR the other night titled, "Back of the Bus." I intend to sit for a while and listen to more of it if I can figure out how to make my computer play the audio. If not, I'll read as much of the transcript as I can. One thing I heard in the ten minutes or so I was able to listen the other night was that when MARTA, the light rail system around Atlanta, was being built, a lot of poor neighborhoods were bulldozed to make way for the project. In the three or four decades since, however, one important factor has arisen as an indicator of real estate prices--proximity to a MARTA station. Where poor neighborhoods were razed for MARTA, new owners have increased the property values many-fold, so that the poor who were displaced by MARTA now cannot afford to live close to it.

Atlanta was not alone in this. City after city leveled houses and shops in less-affluent areas creating space for limited-access freeways that would allow folks to live in segregated suburbs and work in the city, not having to live in integrated neighborhoods. In my own lifetime, I remember the "white flight" of folks leaving Jefferson County due to a school desegregation plan that had me graduate from a high school twenty miles from my home in Middletown instead of one six blocks from my back door. Much of Oldham County's growth in the 1970s and 1980s was due to this phenomenon, and its growth continued right up until the housing boom went bust a couple years ago as folks figured that Oldham schools were better than Jefferson County's, Oldham County neighborhoods were more homogenized, and so on.

Cheap gas and faster roads contributed to this, of course, and the latter is discussed in "Back of the Bus" as well.

Of course, now that gas is getting far more expensive, folks are starting to think about living in town rather than "out in the 'burbs." Some are predicting that many suburban neighborhoods will soon resemble areas of blight now only seen in really poor areas of our west end, with many abandoned large McMansions boarded up to keep out the miscreants. I don't see it happening in the next five years, but I may be wrong--there are certainly pockets of suburbia in other metro areas where clusters of houses sit vacant due to foreclosure after folks lost their grip in the economic downturn.

Along with this, folks are starting to realize that they don't HAVE to take little Johnny to ball practice across town--there is a league down the street that will do. Little Megan can take music lessons within five miles of home instead of fifteen miles away--her success is largely determined by her own diligence, anyway. And who

I think this is an important group of concepts for our local politicians. It will take political will that reaches far beyond a term or two, and I doubt that we will see it happen in this era of tea party nutcases like Rand Paul and the current (mis)governor of Wisconsin--both seemingly determined to give even more wealth to the already-obscenely-wealthy. One of the things I was glad to see when Jackie Green ran for Mayor was that he forced some discussion over how transportation figures into the future of our community.