transportation

There have been a lot of goings-on this week at the Bev Perdue Campaign. Most of you have seen the TV ad by now, but we also released a couple of new ideas as part of Bev’s Building a New North Carolina series. Let me tell you about them…

Creating a DOT that works for North Carolina
Click here to read the four-step plan. The gist is that we must get the DOT’s house in order by decentralizing bureaucracy so that decisions are made in the field. Then we must hold contractors accountable so that we get projects on time and on budget. Combine that with ending the $170 million transfer away from the Highway Trust Fund and we can start to reign in the outrageous inflation of construction costs that is skyrocketing the projected costs of our transportation needs.

Cool Cities Assistance Initiative
Many of you may be aware of the Sierra Club’s Cool Cities program. The Sierra Club’s volunteers have done a fantastic job across the state getting their municipal governments to sign the US Mayors’ Climate Protection Agreement. 37 cities and towns in North Carolina have signed the Agreement, the 4th most in the nation. The Agreement calls on municipal governments to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 7% from the 1990 level by 2012.

Bev’s Cool Cities Assistance Initiative would give grants and funds to help the cities and towns who have signed the Agreement create their initial emissions reduction plans and then carry them out. The initiative is especially helpful to small towns that don’t have the resources or staff to carry on these projects.

I've driven my pick-up truck in every county in North Carolina over the past five years, and I have to say: I don't get all the whining and complaining about North Carolina's roads. To hear the road-construction lobby talk, you'd think we were all dealing with two-laned mud-filled ruts and such.

Sure there are improvement and maintenance needs, but compared to some of the other problems our state is facing, I don't put building highways anywhere near the top of the list of investment priorities.

The issue hit me right between the eyes this morning when I read this story about the so-called Highway 17 Association. It's hard to tell who this association is made up of, but it's a safe bet that developers and contractors like Fred Smith are behind it, people who line their pockets when taxpayer dollars get spent on road projects.

Attention everyone who lives in Durham (city or county), Chapel Hill, Carrboro, or Hillsborough (or inbetween CH and Hillsborough) - you are part of the DCHC MPO (Durham-Chapel Hill-Carrboro Metropolitan Planning Organization), a government entity. Please take a few minutes to fill out .this transportation survey

One of my friends who took this said that her results were 'skewed' because she doesn't have a car or a drivers' license, as if having a car and license was the natural state of being.

How the costs of a society that relies on automobiles stack up?

Americans used to love their trains.

Casey Jones, the Golden Spike, the Wreck of the Old 97-all are a part of our legend, and even today trains are seen as a romantic link to another time.

These days, we see the future in trains.
There are a variety of new train concepts floating around-literally-and new variants of traditional designs as well.

There is one train concept, however, that has the potential to completely change all we know about moving people and freight.

It’s cheaper to build than any other current design, but more importantly, this concept appears to forever alter how we think of energy use for mass transit.

Having piqued your interest, let’s add background information to set the stage...

Yesterday I wrote extensively on bus-riding as a skill. I think the term I was looking for was anxiety, not skill. Yeah, it's easy enough to look up bus times and stops online, or in a pamphlet, but until you've actually ridden the bus a few times, and overcome assorted problems (getting off at the wrong stop, getting on the right bus going in the wrong direction, whatever), you don't really have the confidence to be a regular bus rider. I know that this sounds kind of silly to most of the experienced bus-riders out there, but I remember having to DRAG my husband to the bus when we first got together. Now he hops on without a second thought, but he used to be anxious about it. Think about when you first learned how to drive - that was anxiety-inducing too, wasn't it? And if it wasn't, it's likely that you didn't understand the gravity of your new privilege.

Robert the talkative bus driver has been told to stop talking: http://www.newsobserver.com/102/story/561030.html

Seriously, I never thought of riding the bus as a skill, but it is.
Consider:

When you decide to take the 'plunge' and ride the bus, you have to learn a lot:
- Where your bus stops are
- What time(s) your bus comes by
- How much it costs to ride the bus
- How long it takes to get there on the bus

These are not trivial issues.

Learn where your bus stops are - you have to know where the bus stops are for each route you take, on both ends of the route. You have to know which side of the street you're going to need to be on for which direction you're going in. And you have to know if your drop-off spot is different from your pick-up spot. Take TTA from Franklin St. in Chapel Hill to the American Tobacco Campus in Durham, for example. You ride route 403 to get there, and it lets you off on Blackwell Street, inbetween the parking lot for DBAP and the door for Satisfaction Cafe. When you're ready to leave, you go back to the spot that the bus dropped you off from, but there's no sign on the other side of the road! If you're lucky enough to have a schedule or a laptop, you soon learn that the pick-up spot for the 402 route is down Blackwell, right at the corner, and in front of the entrance to the parking garage on the other side of ATC. There is no line-of-sight from the drop-off spot to the pick-up spot. And once you know it, you feel kind of dumb that you didn't know it before. But why should you? It's logical enough that Blackwell should have two bus stops, so you get annoyed at TTA for putting the stops so far apart with no information about the opposite stop. This is just one small example.

Transportation issues:
- Road repair and improvement
- Long-term changes in the common mindset - I want to find a way to put permeable pavement peoples' radar...
- WHY can't more people just ride the bus?
- How to get Duke's transportation people talking to the rest of the MPO
- and finally, getting my lazy bum back on a bicycle immediately, if not sooner.
Which leads to personal health:
- I need to start exercising more.
- Which would be much more likely if there were a safe way to bike from CH to Duke.
- Which takes me back to transportation issues - how can we, the citizenry, work on widening Erwin (just 2 feet!! And not even along all of its length!) in Orange Cty? And if so, how do we get Durham to work on it for their part? I KNOW there'd be so many people all over that road, on their bikes. Well, on the side of it.

Nancy Pelosi and her Democratic steering committee members have made an excellent decision in placing Heath Shuler on the Transportation and Infrastruction Committee.

Anyone who either grew up in North Carolina or has lived here for any time knows that one of our major issues is and always has been roads. Heath Shuler will be in a position to possibly bring us some help. OK, I know this committee deals with so much more than roads, but it was the first thing I thought about when I saw the announcement.

I may be showing that I just don't know how these things work. I don't think I'm talking about pork, because I know some transportation projects are funded with pork. I guess, I'm assuming that when states/cities are looking for federal aide for roads projects, this is the committee that makes the decisions about which project gets their funding. It's encouraging to think that our state might not have to fight so hard to get its fair share.