----------
> From: rescuemuni-errors@lists.best.com
> To: rescuemuni@lists.best.com
> Subject: Digest rescuemuni.v001.n338
> Date: Monday, November 02, 1998 12:10 AM
>
>
> -------------- BEGIN rescuemuni.v001.n338 --------------
>
> 001 - Richard Mlynarik <Mly@POB - State of Muni and BART
>
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>
> --------------- MESSAGE rescuemuni.v001.n338.1 ---------------
>
> From: Richard Mlynarik <Mly@POBox.COM>
> Subject: State of Muni and BART
> Date: Sat, 31 Oct 1998 15:31:10 -0800 (PST)
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> In-Reply-To: <38553170@toto.iv> (pong2@llnl.gov)
>
> From: Max Pong <pong2@llnl.gov>
> Date: Fri, 30 Oct 1998 12:39:59 -0800 (PST)
>
> 1. In Willie Brown's State of the City address, he says he will
> fix Muni by appointing a committee to study the problem. What will
> this accomplish?
>
> Nothing practical. Let's hope the electroate isn't sucked in to
> allowing it to accomplish anything political.
>
> 2. Seems to be a lot of anti-BART sentiment here. So why do we
> want to put rail on the Bay Bridge and create another
> capital-intensive bureaucracy like BART?
>
> I personally want to plan to _allow_ for high-capacity rail in a
> terminally-congested corridor sometime during the 150 year design life
> of the bridge. I don't see the political will to actual make the step
> of construction being there for well over a decade or two, but it
> would be nothing less than criminal to forgo this needed future
> solution. The only alternative is construction of a new fixed link
> (bridge or tube) at a cost of circa $4 billion present dollars.
> Better to spend say $50 million now to create a useful future Bay
> Bridge... in fact just to _recreate_ the utility of the existing
> structure in the replacement structure.
>
> Rail is capital-intensive by its nature, but it is also uniquely well
> suited to serving high-throughput, high-density corridors. There are
> technical as well as political reasons for running trains; one just
> has to try to ensure that the former has mastery of the latter.
>
> There is nothing inherent in rail that creates monsters like the BART
> agency, though certainly the stench of pork surrounding anything that
> involves pouring a lot of concrete and casting and bending a lot of
> metal and paying a lot of consultants to oversee it can be powerful.
>
> Rail lines need not cost $150 million a mile to construct along
> existing rights of way in suburban environs: that is purely a BART
> defect and _need_ not be replicated.
>
> 3. All the recent and future development in Downtown (Bloomingdales,
> PacBell Park, Moscone) is being built with little or no parking based
on
> the city's Transit First policy. I can appreciate discouraging more
cars
> and traffic, but isn't improving public transit (Muni primarily) also
an
> integral part of Transit First?
>
> Yes, it is supposed to be. Getting the city to pay more than lip
> service to its legally-charatered obligations is one of the goals of
> many involved in Rescue Muni.
>
> P.S. With the overcrowded Muni Metro trains these days, the extra
doors at
> the ends of the Breda cars and the slightly greater Breda width make
> boarding and exiting much easier.
>
> True. (Of course, these design improvements could have been made for
> much less than $3 million per vehicle.)
>
>
> --------------- END rescuemuni.v001.n338 ---------------