Newswire: February 16, 2009
No more car czar, says the Obama administration. GM and Chrysler will be supervised by Geithner. Doesn’t he have enough on his plate?
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States and cities scramble for stimulus dollars. Except South Carolina?
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Metro ‘in final negotiations‘ for most of the LRT expansion. Maryland Transit bureaucrat tells us that it hasn’t been as long and painful as we think:
Metro’s negotiation process seems to have taken a reasonable length of time, given the scope of the project, said Henry Kay, a Maryland Transit Administration deputy administrator.
“I can see us easily taking that long to contract for far less value with far less at stake,” Kay said. “They’re making a commitment to provide service over many years.”
Whatever.
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Meanwhile, from around the blogosphere, plenty of good chatter about transit:
More Transit Discussion, Sort Of
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Take a look, enjoy the reading!
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: blogs, car czar, discussion, Geithner, METRO, negotiations, Obama, South Carolina, Stimulus, transit
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While I am extremely happy to see Metro finally squaring this down and (hopefully) starting work soon, I take the efficiency argument from Maryland with a grain of salt. Having lived up in the Washington area for several years, I can tell you that Maryland is hardly the gold standard for efficiency. They have been talking about the Purple Line for decades. It is still in the planning stages because of similar problems we have here; a decision to build heavy rail is made, then they change their mind and go with light rail, then they change their mind to BRT, then they change their mind again to just regular bus, then they go back to light rail. They wasted years and years and probably about as much money in “planning and review” as the cost to build the entire system.
Anyway, my biggest complaint about Metro is that they set themselves up for failure. They make overly optimistic timelines (like building the initial system by 2012) and refuse to be straight with the public about the delays. This is particularly a problem here in Houston because unlike Maryland or DC, we don’t have an established transit backbone yet. There are still many, many people in this city (and this state) that are opponents of ANY transit, so any hint of failure simply provides fuel for their fires.
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