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| Full page ad in Miami Herald |
Traffic can't be fixed if you keep building roads, Mayor Gimenez your 836 extension idea sucks big-time, watch the damn video:
There was a Traffic Summit on Saturday. Do you know that MAYOR GIMENEZ’s new metro cars are not outfitted for surface transit? The extra bucks that would have made them dual purpose were not paid to put the electric connections at top of the cars. They can only run from the bottom. Maybe it is not too late. We could gut the whole order...
Shows they never had an intention to run the Rail South. All we are getting is bulls—t.
Few of the complaining residents were at the Traffic Summit on Saturday, although it looks like a lot of people showed up. They do not do the walk only the talk. My only complaint was one person summarized very shortly for 3 or 4 tables and the other tables got a full summary each that lasted longer. The water transportation was just glossed over.
I was part of a Facebook group that was concerned about transit down South but gave up with this post (that they deleted):
Jodi Portante Atkinson is a great activist down South on transit. Watch her video. Also Edward Armand Escobar had some good water transit solutions he is working on.Activists are people willing to walk the walk they are not just Facebook posters and worse: whiners. I don't see many people willing "to DO" here. In fact the complaining and no doing is such a bad combination I am leaving this group. You make me too depressed. If you all united and did one strategic thing you would get something done on transit. The bold move is needed but you all are, all over the place. I suggested a building moratorium based on transit benchmarks and I suggested a Petition Drive (both bold moves). Get organized.
Anyway here is the Transportation Summit in pictures (please everyone -- carpooling is not the answer) stop bringing it up.
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| County Commissioner Daniella Levine Cava who organized the Summit |
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| Note that County Commission Chair Estaban Bovo is pictured here. I see a moratorium based on Transit availability benchmarks rather than fake traffic studies. WE NEED AN AUDIT ON PAST TRAFFIC STUDIES. They are tainted. |
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| County Commissioner in District 5, Xavier Suarez attended. |
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| Citizens at work planning for transit relief. Too bad Mayor Gimenez wasn't there. |
SEE MY POST ON A MORATORIUM although now I think we should do a finely tuned petition drive because most of these Commissioners are afraid to anger developers.
5 comments:
Until we admit that we are not obligated to build a house for anyone who wants to live here, the traffic issue will not be resolved. You can build all the new roads, bus ways and rail lines you want but until there is a slow down on the westward sprawl or some connectivity to those areas by mass transit, the problem will not be addressed. Coming back to reality, we know that developer money fuels local politics and creates state law. If you think for one minute the construction industry will be constrained, you are sadly mistaken. If I were a lobbyist for development, I could say with a straight face that traffic must not be an issue because we can't build houses fast enough to accommodate those who want to live in deep South Florida. The demand for development continues.
The members of the Board of County Commissioners are not accountable to us. How so ? Because each of them has their own fiefdom where they hand out favors, have lunches for the elderly and can back slap their way to re election over and over again. I feel confident that if some of the Commissioners had to run a county wide race, they would lose the race against the frustration of those who spend hours of their lives each day stuck in the gridlock of the Commissioners own making. We are strangled by the fiction of racial and ethnic fairness foisted upon us though single member districts. Maybe there is some light at the end of the tunnel due to term limits but that remains to be seen. I've seen Facebook posts by Mayor Flinn touting the results of some workshop held last week where he actually thinks more people will ride bikes to work and play if we only had more bike paths or that better buses on existing streets are the answer. Finally, the agenda of Commissioner Cava to wreak havoc among middle class neighborhoods has shown up in the idea touted by Flinn that neighborhoods need to evolve into more mixed use. Sorry, Commissioner, I for one do not think that my neighborhood of traditional single story homes needs to be degraded by high rise, (and in your financially insulated world) subsidized apartments, townhouses or condos. Is the County Mayor living in denial or just stupid ? No, he enjoys the arrogance that comes with several big, fat pensions on the horizon and never having to face another election campaign.
Get your hands on the report from the transportation summit from about 2006. It was made up of community folks from Community Councils, residents, community leaders and folks living in the area of South Dade. It was a large committee. In the end the vote was unanimous to run metrorail all the way south. I am sure it is on the shelf of some downtown beurocrat. It was a very good study. Miami-Dade has a long history of waiting too long to act.
Mixed used in certain cities is a terrible idea and dangerous and I, for one, do not support these mixed used, tall buildings that ruin existing neighborhoods and negatively impact the quality of life for residents.
The problem is that they should have built smaller large condos in smaller complexes out West BEFORE they built those big houses with little yards and no place to park, where there are only one or two roads in and out of there, and they confiscate your ID to visit a family or friend. Now, you cannot protect these neighborhoods at the expense of ruining the older neighborhoods, because you want to "rail" them down. This is not going to fix anything.
They built all those nicer communities out West and into Broward, forcing people to abandon the older neighborhoods. They are locked into themselves with no real jobs nearby. THAT is the real problem the developers and politicians created since the 1980's - 1990's when this trend began and they did not foresee the future. The rail never made it to Miami Dade college North or South campuses, never made it to FIU, never made it West. And besides, a lot of people who live in Broward work in Dade and vice-versa.
A recent article in The Miami Herald stated that 64% of people living here are now renting. Another problem is government dependency.
The real solution will take a whole generation, but it will help if more jobs are closer to where people live.
And, what if I do not want to take that damn bus or rail? What if I still want to be free to drive wherever the heck I want to go, from Broward county to SW Dade to NW Dade to Hialeah and all around, to work, dine out, shop, go to the doctor, visit family or friends, etc . . . how the heck can you do all this on a bus or rail?
The rail is also being pushed by politicians who are buddy-buddy with the developers who want to fain from this, but they will be building future ghettos.
Maybe you fix some of the traffic by altering school and work hours, so everyone does not have to be on the road at 8:00 - 9:00 AM and then 4:00 - 5:00 PM. And, what about those charter schools; parents driving farther to take their kids to school because the real public school where they can walk to is not good enough (this needs to change, too). If you combine this with other incentives for some companies to move where more of their employees live, maybe it can help.
The highways are another mess; you cannot even tell where to get off or on at some (this needs to be fixed to create an easy "hop on / hop off" left/right easy without the mess they have made of it in recent years). THEN, take all those polls and express lanes out of the way, eliminate the tolls and everyone can pay a little more on the annual auto tag to have free flowing highways!
Dear Friends down south in bedroom communities clamoring for MetroRail,
You can have MetroRail, or you can keep your low density by continuing to diss transit oriented development. But you can't have both. Please choose one.
Your pal in Coral Gables.
P.S. You CAN have state-of-art buses in the busway. That seems like a good idea to me and a lot of people. I would ride it.
P.S.S. Yes, I know you were promised MetroRail. I was promised a VW convertible by my parents. All I got was a used minivan. I was mocked mercilessly in college.
If you had viable Transit options, like a reliable Rail systems, the buswasy was put there with the thought of expanding properly through rail. Keep and sit on the parking lot known as US1. Mayor Giminez is is an insult and joke to employees and citizens of Miami-Dade County. The "SMART PLAN" is a ponzi scheme being exsposed.
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