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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2kNH3Ps:
icedcatte:
madmaudlingoes:
sweaterkittensahoy:
ruiniscrazy:
grandpaahab:
severalowls:
beyonslayed:
babyhair:
babyhair:
I’m v passionate about public transportation and honestly idk why any major us city doesn’t have a light rail system
*azealia banks megaphone gif*
PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION IS A HUGE EQUALIZER THAT GIVES DISENFRANCHISED PEOPLE ACESS TO GREATER RESOURCES CREATES LASTING STABLE JOBS AND PRODUCES CAPITAL FOR METRO GOVERNMENTS TO INVEST IN PROJECTS THAT IMPROVE QUALITY OF LIFE
because *republican voice* that’s socialism
Because they did have light rail systems, extensive ones. And then it started hurting car sales and the automotive companies got mad:
http://ift.tt/1CIaJW9
So, with pressure from those guys it was effectively replaced by the Interstate system even within cities, and from then on urban planning was done specifically with every family owning a car in mind, which resulted in the vast urban sprawl of the suburbs built from the 1940s onwards, and why it’s now impossible to get anywhere without a car in most of the US. Which is basically unheard of elsewhere in the world unless you’re in the middle of nowhere.
Of course the cost of owning a vehicle has gone way the hell up since 70 years ago, resulting in a horrible situation for anybody living on minimum/near-minimum wage!
Remember in Who Framed Roger Rabbit when they dismantle the red car to make way for a big fat freeway with personal automobiles? Yeah, that was a lot more historical retelling than just a jokey cartoon movie thing.
Which, ironically, is usually the point of jokey cartoon movie things.
As someone who worked in light rail for 18 months (with emphasis on streetcars), I can tell you the following reasons it is a fucking pain in the ass to get light rail built anywhere it doesn’t already exist:
First, you have to get people to VOTE for a light rail.
Then, you have to bid out the light rail, and this can take–at minimum–18 months to two years.
Then, after choosing the proper bidding, you have to ARRANGE to even get materials where you need it.
While you are also getting materials, you have to be certain the people supplying you the trains are worth a good goddamn in terms of delivering reliable trains. There are a number of companies whom are COMPLETELY reliable, but if you are selling your trains as USA manufacturing, it’s a goddamn crapshoot. I’m pretty sure, with the demolition of my former employer, no one makes trains in the US anymore.
I wanna be clear on this: The US was not making fucking stellar trains that everyone should want. We legit bought plans from a company that’s been making trains for DECADES and pretended like we knew what we were doing. WE DID NOT KNOW WHAT WE WERE DOING.
For every two years it takes to prove you can pull off the thing, you’re going up against new elections, either from the state/federal level or from the local level, and it is hard as shit to keep up the momentum for light rail when you can’t even get a goddamn track laid before there’s a new election and someone halts construction.
Also there are people who are against transit SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE it helps poor people. The piss-poor excuse for a rail line in St. Louis can’t expand into St. Charles County, even though that would give people in the exurbs a much easier way to get to the airport/downtown, because–and I quote–“it might draw a bad element” out to the fortress of White Suburbia. It goes beyond NIMBYism to outright hatred of the (racialized) poor.
This is exactly why the suburbs of my area have such garbage bus schedules and the bus routes hardly hit anywhere in said suburbs. Pure unadulterated racism and hatred of poor people to boot. It’s so bad that you can’t rely on the buses if you need to get to work because buses come like once every 60-80 minutes and if you miss your bus you get stuck waiting for at least that long.
oh my god we had lawsuits out here over the bus routes extending to the suburbs. Buses! Not even rail! And I mean. People died. There was a posh mall built, and the buses WERE NOT ALLOWED to go to it. Problem: poor people get mall jobs, must commute from poor inner-city neighborhood to posh suburb somehow. Solution: Bus stop on OTHER SIDE OF MAJOR FOUR-LANE 65 MPH HIGHWAY WITH NO CROSSWALK OR TRAFFIC STOPPING DEVICE OF ANY KIND. Outcome, unsurprising: young mall employee’s ENTIRE SELF FUCKING OBLITERATED ALL OVER ROAD trying to cross highway in dark to catch bus after evening shift at mall! Horrifying! Deplorable! Tragic! Completely fucking predictable!
Lawsuit. That’s what it took. Even after that there still had to be a lawsuit. Nobody said “oh my god someone is dead, we should fix this.” NO THERE WERE STILL ARGUMENTS. Like somehow it was okay anyway!
THAT is how much white people hate black people and, by extension, public transportation.
(Bonus: those interstate freeways put in to connect downtown to suburb were almost always, and certainly in the case of my city, carved straight through middle-class African-American neighborhoods, extremely deliberately. Bonus bonus: said freeway, in our city, was built with overpasses EXPRESSLY DESIGNED to be too low for city buses to fit underneath, meaning public transportation COULD NOT USE THEM. I am not making this up. Google “Robert Moses” to find out more about the human piece of shit responsible for this. Oh, he did this everywhere, not just my city. Good to know.)
icedcatte:
madmaudlingoes:
sweaterkittensahoy:
ruiniscrazy:
grandpaahab:
severalowls:
beyonslayed:
babyhair:
babyhair:
I’m v passionate about public transportation and honestly idk why any major us city doesn’t have a light rail system
*azealia banks megaphone gif*
PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION IS A HUGE EQUALIZER THAT GIVES DISENFRANCHISED PEOPLE ACESS TO GREATER RESOURCES CREATES LASTING STABLE JOBS AND PRODUCES CAPITAL FOR METRO GOVERNMENTS TO INVEST IN PROJECTS THAT IMPROVE QUALITY OF LIFE
because *republican voice* that’s socialism
Because they did have light rail systems, extensive ones. And then it started hurting car sales and the automotive companies got mad:
http://ift.tt/1CIaJW9
So, with pressure from those guys it was effectively replaced by the Interstate system even within cities, and from then on urban planning was done specifically with every family owning a car in mind, which resulted in the vast urban sprawl of the suburbs built from the 1940s onwards, and why it’s now impossible to get anywhere without a car in most of the US. Which is basically unheard of elsewhere in the world unless you’re in the middle of nowhere.
Of course the cost of owning a vehicle has gone way the hell up since 70 years ago, resulting in a horrible situation for anybody living on minimum/near-minimum wage!
Remember in Who Framed Roger Rabbit when they dismantle the red car to make way for a big fat freeway with personal automobiles? Yeah, that was a lot more historical retelling than just a jokey cartoon movie thing.
Which, ironically, is usually the point of jokey cartoon movie things.
As someone who worked in light rail for 18 months (with emphasis on streetcars), I can tell you the following reasons it is a fucking pain in the ass to get light rail built anywhere it doesn’t already exist:
First, you have to get people to VOTE for a light rail.
Then, you have to bid out the light rail, and this can take–at minimum–18 months to two years.
Then, after choosing the proper bidding, you have to ARRANGE to even get materials where you need it.
While you are also getting materials, you have to be certain the people supplying you the trains are worth a good goddamn in terms of delivering reliable trains. There are a number of companies whom are COMPLETELY reliable, but if you are selling your trains as USA manufacturing, it’s a goddamn crapshoot. I’m pretty sure, with the demolition of my former employer, no one makes trains in the US anymore.
I wanna be clear on this: The US was not making fucking stellar trains that everyone should want. We legit bought plans from a company that’s been making trains for DECADES and pretended like we knew what we were doing. WE DID NOT KNOW WHAT WE WERE DOING.
For every two years it takes to prove you can pull off the thing, you’re going up against new elections, either from the state/federal level or from the local level, and it is hard as shit to keep up the momentum for light rail when you can’t even get a goddamn track laid before there’s a new election and someone halts construction.
Also there are people who are against transit SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE it helps poor people. The piss-poor excuse for a rail line in St. Louis can’t expand into St. Charles County, even though that would give people in the exurbs a much easier way to get to the airport/downtown, because–and I quote–“it might draw a bad element” out to the fortress of White Suburbia. It goes beyond NIMBYism to outright hatred of the (racialized) poor.
This is exactly why the suburbs of my area have such garbage bus schedules and the bus routes hardly hit anywhere in said suburbs. Pure unadulterated racism and hatred of poor people to boot. It’s so bad that you can’t rely on the buses if you need to get to work because buses come like once every 60-80 minutes and if you miss your bus you get stuck waiting for at least that long.
oh my god we had lawsuits out here over the bus routes extending to the suburbs. Buses! Not even rail! And I mean. People died. There was a posh mall built, and the buses WERE NOT ALLOWED to go to it. Problem: poor people get mall jobs, must commute from poor inner-city neighborhood to posh suburb somehow. Solution: Bus stop on OTHER SIDE OF MAJOR FOUR-LANE 65 MPH HIGHWAY WITH NO CROSSWALK OR TRAFFIC STOPPING DEVICE OF ANY KIND. Outcome, unsurprising: young mall employee’s ENTIRE SELF FUCKING OBLITERATED ALL OVER ROAD trying to cross highway in dark to catch bus after evening shift at mall! Horrifying! Deplorable! Tragic! Completely fucking predictable!
Lawsuit. That’s what it took. Even after that there still had to be a lawsuit. Nobody said “oh my god someone is dead, we should fix this.” NO THERE WERE STILL ARGUMENTS. Like somehow it was okay anyway!
THAT is how much white people hate black people and, by extension, public transportation.
(Bonus: those interstate freeways put in to connect downtown to suburb were almost always, and certainly in the case of my city, carved straight through middle-class African-American neighborhoods, extremely deliberately. Bonus bonus: said freeway, in our city, was built with overpasses EXPRESSLY DESIGNED to be too low for city buses to fit underneath, meaning public transportation COULD NOT USE THEM. I am not making this up. Google “Robert Moses” to find out more about the human piece of shit responsible for this. Oh, he did this everywhere, not just my city. Good to know.)
