We’re trying to have a reasonable discussion on the pros and cons of guided bus vs. rail. Throwing in some ad hominem fallacies does not add to the discussion. I’ve seen posts from different people doing that. Let’s stick to the point, shall we?

Not everyone on this blog even lives or works in Miami-Dade county, much less in the Kendall area. So you cannot expect everyone to be willing to attend a meeting for a transit system that is far from where they live and work. It makes for interesting discussion, but it typically has to affect you personally (and fit into your work schedule) to attend a meeting about it.

If so, can we count on you to stand up there and identify yourself and state your expert opinion?

If not then I doubt both your sincerity and your credentials.

I won’t add anything now to this blog. After the meeting I will return and comment on your presentation, or on your failure to attend.

An empty wagon makes the most noise.

The really disappointing thing is that people like you, who have no idea what you are talking about, go to these meetings and make statements like ‘we want world class transit’. What does that mean? We are here trying to advocate for transit, so that people like you can’t come back and say, “see transit doesn’t work here because…blah blah blah.”

The CSX corridor is not a right of way. It is an easement. That’s why it’s so narrow in so many places. CSX doesn’t own the corridor and can’t sell it or give it away. And only in your wildest dreams would they want to convert their easement to a passenger commuter system. CSX doesn’t care what you would like.

Please do your “research” properly. You may go to to the Parkland DRI Request, amended December 21, 2007 and turn to page 94 which will bring you a letter from the law firm representing Edward Easton and partners challenging CSX ownership of any railway right of way through the Parkland tract. I’ll give you two snippets:

“Available title records indicate that all but 1.53 acres of the right of way is owned by our clients, with CSX holding an easement over the land”

“Based on title records,the 1.53 acre right of way segment should be listed as being under the ownership of the successors in interest to an apparently defunct Corporation, the Mandan Securities Corporation”

Translation: No way is CSX going to give, lease, rent, share, develop or do anything else with Ed Eastons land.

This probably explains why the CSX corridor is anywhere from 48 feet wide at Bird Road down to 16 feet wide at SW 11th Street. Folks it’s only an easement across someone elses land.

TRi-Rail was invoked in this conversation as a good example of the effectiveness of trains. Let’s look behind the curtain. Tri-Rail has been in business for 22 years. It’s a 72 mile system with 18 stations located in the 3 most populous counties in Florida. It provides commuter transit to one third of the entire population of Florida. Folks, on its busiest day ever it only carried about 14,000 passengers, and that was this summer when the price of gas was above $4 a gallon. Those 14,000 passengers were actually the same 7,000 people going to work in the morning and returning home at night. Tri-Rail likes counting passengers so much that it does it twice. According to the Transit Ridership Study conducted by the Corradino Group for the Miami-Dade MPO, about 45% of those riders don’t have a car, so their riding of Tri-Rail doesn’t reduce auto traffic. About 65% of all those riders commute from Palm Beach County and Broward County to the Airport MetroRail station and then to work in downtown Miami. So that’s approximately 4550 paychecks that aren’t earned by Miami-Dade residents, and that’s about 4550 people who don’t pay property, school or most other taxes in Miami-Dade County. They work on Miami Avenue and spend their money on Worth Avenue.

TRi-Rail never gives ridership increases in raw numbers, just percentages. Their ordinary ridership is about 9000 a day, 4500 each way. A 10 percent increase sounds huge, until you do the arithmetic. 900 people, of whom 65% don’t drive anyway. Big deal!

Tri-Rail is currently on life support, and the prognosis isn’t good. We don’t need another Tri-Rail thanks.

The reason Tri-Rail, and the Central Florida Commuter Rail which was dead at birth, don’t work is that they can’t move with the population. The people have to come to the train, as Mohammed had to go to the mountain. If the train isn’t convenient to where a commuter lives and doesn’t take him where he needs to go, then the train will be as empty as Tri-Rail is.

The people in Kendall want useful transit, not nostalgia. The high end bus services now running in Austaralia, China, Japan, France, Canada, Germany, England, Scotland, and who knows where else, deliver near door to door service. They pick up passengers in their neighborhoods and take them near where they need to go. They are rubber tired vehicles that look for all the world like a Bullet Train. They gather their riders in convenient places and then enter single-use transit corridors that allow them to achieve light rail speeds. They do everything that fixed rail does and do it more efficiently. They are sleek, quiet, fast, and oh my god we can afford them now.

They will increase property values due to their environmentally friendly design, not destroy them like trains do. Forget that public relations silliness about fixed rail systems improving community value, that’s just not real world. Doubt me on that? Take the Tri-Rail from Miami International to Fort Lauderdale like I did. Don’t worry, you’ll find plenty of parking space and you might have a rail car all to yourself like I did. As you gaze out the window you’ll discover what industrial blight does to a community. The homes and neighborhoods along the tracks are economically and socially destroyed, and they’ll never be any better.

No one wants that in Miami. We don’t need to have it.

We want world class transit, not third world class transit.

We want something that we can be proud of, not ashamed of.

I don’t know Anon, but I’m going to that meeting and I hope to meet him there. He just makes common sense. And I think everyone on this blog should go there too, or refrain from further posting.

If you can’t do that much, you’re part of the problem.

And before I turn in tonight, I’ll be sure to grab my whacking stick and take out all those lightbulbs, born of a crude 19th-century technology created by that really old dumbtard, Thomas Edison.

The concept of rail transit being at best a 19th century solution sounds like the rallying call of several congressmen and uninformed people as of lately. Rail is very much a 21st century and beyond solution. As proof of this concept, there are several high-speed rail lines being built all over the country and in fact the world. Some are bullet trains such as the French TGV’s while others are maglevs such as the new Shanghai Maglev. While it is agreed that an elevated guideway such as metrorail is grossly overbuilding the area, a light rail alternative or DMU would fit into the corridor perfectly.