Last month (on the 9th of March 2010), I went to the ACT for Transit meeting in Silver Spring. I have attended a few of their meetings and their mission is to promote public transit. They are advocating for the Purple Line and other transit projects in the DC area.
This is my first Diary so please bear with me.
I went to their meeting and took a voice recorder. With the Permission of Donna Edwards, I recorded her talk and question session. This illustrates why electing better Democrats matters.
She talks about the need for long term (6 year) planning for transit needs. Transit projects are long term capital investments and unfortunately the Whitehouse wants to do an 18 month plan as opposed to congress that wants to allocate money for the next 6 years. She also says that the Republicans on her committee are also interested in moving towards transportation options that are more community friendly (biking, walking mass transit). This surprises me and suggests that the goals are the same, the questions are in how to achieve them.
She said, in Maryland we will probably get one projects of national significance funded. Examples of this sort of project would be things like Suburban DC Purple line or the Red Line in Baltimore. This means that unfortunately there will be some competition within the state delegation as to which project gets funded. She thinks that the Purple line is a fairly good candidate for federal funding because much of the planning has been completed and there isn't too much community disagreement on it.
She additionally linked improving public transit infrastructure with fixing and improving water and sewer infrastructure. I think that this is interesting as we instead of simply looking at transit should think about water, sewer electricity, natural gas and telecommunications infrastructure as being part of the fabric that binds a nation together and possibly something too important to trust the private sector to accomplish.
Where she in my view goes wrong is worrying about crash worthiness of mass transit cars as opposed to worrying about ways to prevent collisions. I would favor a larger role for federal oversight of signaling systems. With a good signaling system the trains move faster and more safely. More reliable cab signaling and automatic train stop systems (such as ACESES adapted for transit service for instance) would do more to improve passenger safety than heavier more crash worthy cars that uses more energy to accelerate and takes more space to brake meaning that service will not be as quick nor as safe. A single national standard would on the other hand guarantee that any light rail or mass transit equipment would be able to be used on any similar system. Finally permitting light rail equipment to operate on the same tracks as heavy rail systems makes sense (its done in Europe). It would increase the utilization of existing rail lines and reduce start up costs for new systems.
The Audio is here.