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Abulifia is playing with words, only with words rather than facts, when
he argues about the age of cities. The crucial facts concern when and how
the city had its significant growth. San Diego is an automotive city,
regardless of the age of its oldest building.<br><br>
And I have been downtown frequently, by trolley, by bike, and by car; and
during the working day, also. I know the situation, but I also know the
situations in many other cities, and San Diego is not nearly as congested
as many other cities, and is less centralized, also, because its recent
growth has been in the automotive era. <br><br>
Abulifia asserts that I think that San Diego need not plan for the
future. That's just one more ignorant assertion, that depends on
Abulifia's belief that planning for growth requires much expansion of the
mass transit system, probably rail based. It doesn't.<br><br>
<br>
At 06:34 PM 1/15/2008, Abulifia wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite=""><font face="Verdana" size=2>I
see the "old cities" argument never does quite go away even
when it flies in the face of ::REALITY::
<br><br>
Exactly how long does a city have to be existence in order to get its
mass transit act together - 100 years? 200? If that is the
criteria, then San Diego, having been visited and named in 1542 by Juan
Cabrillo, has that covered and then some. Now to be fair, San
Diego didn't really start to pick up in population until WW II, but even
then, we're talking over 50 years to get some kind of mass transit system
in place. The city has had more than enough time to plan for future
population growth; It simply chose NOT to. Whether that was
due to political expediency or just plain laziness, is
immaterial. San Diego did not just come into existence 10 or 20 yrs
ago. It did not just discover that it had a traffic problem.
BTW - If you want to get technical, then SF is actually younger than San
Diego having been settled in 1776 vs Cabrillo's 1542 visit.
And Boston, as well as NYC are also considerably younger cities than San
Diego by at least almost 100 years. But I won't quibble with
technicalities. The fact remains that San Diego has had the time to
plan for growth. <br><br>
And as to your assessment that San Diego's mass transit rider population
is "small," let me ask you this much - Have you ever taken the
trolley downtown? Or the bus, for that matter? Have you
ever actually been downtown during the week and experienced the
magnificence of gridlock and mind numbing fees for parking? I'm
guessing not in this lifetime, otherwise you wouldn't casually make such
a staggeringly ignorant statement. <br>
If the mass transit numbers were so small, Mr. Forester, then 67% of the
voters in 2004 would not have approved a 40 yr extension of Transnet,
which has been estimated to generate an addtl $14 billion to improve the
region's transportation infrastructure. If your statements were to
be given any kind of credibility whatsoever, then you would have this
listserv believe that San Diego didn't have a congestion problem OR need
to plan for future growth. <br>
</font></blockquote>
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John Forester, MS, PE<br>
Bicycle Transportation Engineer<br>
7585 Church St.<br>
Lemon Grove, CA 91945-2306<br>
619-644-5481
<a href="http://www.johnforester.com/" eudora="autourl">
www.johnforester.com<br>
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