Shock and Awe - Getting Seniors to Support Mass Transit

[cityimrov]

Does MJ have any money to run a Shock and Awe Ad campaign for public transit?  As the baby boomers get older, the worst they become at driving.  One day there will be so many senior accidents that the politicians can no longer ignore the problem this will cause many senior citizens to loose their drivers license due to public safety concerns. 

If this was Europe, this wouldn't be a major problem because many elderly would just continue their daily life strolling around the city.  In Jacksonville FL, asking a senior citizen to no longer drive is equivalent to sentencing them to home confinement.  The modern suburban house is miles away from anything thus stranding the elderly away from society. 

Is there any way to get MJ to put this issue front and center so that the most powerful voters (the elderly) will realize how important a public transportation system is to their well being? 

[tufsu1]

I think they understand clearly....because folks 60 and over ride JTA for FREE

[Ocklawaha]

As I'm flirting with being one of those 'elders' and at least one other MJ publisher isn't all that far behind me (I won't name names but his initials are SD - LOL!) Keep in mind those of the Vietnam generation were the very first 'green generation' the USA has had since before Robert Fulton and his damn steamboat changed things forever.  We were the ones who explored new-age thought, anti-war, anti-pollution, clean water, back to the land, country living, communes, hitchhiking, transit usage, urbanized apartment living, eternal education, the Health food craze, vitamins, renewable resources, environmental protection, mind expanding drugs and the art that went with them, and free love.  This is hardly the Driving Miss Daisy generation.

What you'll find is that over the years many of us moved into a more conservative camp, while the others remained true to their liberal roots. That's a bigger or better mix then has ever happened before.

This key to your goal is to make mass transit work. Work for you in the city, work for me at WGV, work for the guy in Middleburg, Palatka, Hecksher Drive, Kernan, MLK, JIA, Ortega or East Jacksonville.

The local streetcar systems built themselves on a level of service barely seen on the Skyway today, one slogan was "TECO - Always a Car In Sight."  As buses took over and automobiles expanded their reach into the suburbs, scheduled runs were eliminated, in some cases entire routes or systems simply vanished.  For those that remained the solution was a skeletal network of spaghetti-like routes, which in a poor attempt at "seamless" were often combined so single buses were running from Mayport to Cecil or MLK to Mandarin. (For the record, how many people do you know that live off MLK and Edgewood need an hourly bus to the San Jose Country Club?)  These schedules were built around economy and thinly disguised as an attempt at 'convenient.' 

Throughout this era many new ideas came into the transportation world, idea's like: "railroads are disappearing", "nobody rides trains," "buses are dirty," "monorails and mag-lev are the future", "streetcars are a 19Th Century technology," etc.
In some cases the transit agencies themselves started to believe in these ridiculous ideas.

In the 1980's JTA's planners would have bought rocket propelled zeppelins on pogo sticks before they would have considered anything RAIL.  Guess what? At least one of those planners is still hanging finger paintings on the rendering boards.

We need to:

Streamline, Improvise, Adapt and Overcome all of our previous notions.

Get out of the bed shared by the highway and toll road industry.

Immediately move to get something on rails - ON THE GROUND.

Move the bus system to a gridded network without the road of 10,000 turns.

We need to understand that:

50 sparkling clean buses, on alternate fuels, running ON TIME, on 20 minute headways, along the cities boulevard grid, with transfers and charming ambassador-like-cheerful employees is...

far superior to:

200 dirty buses, on diesel fuel, with no semblance of a schedule, on serpentine routes, without transfers and employees with the personality of alligator snapping turtles.

This is where you start, and in the end, the old and the young will flock to your ride. AMAZING. 

Los Angeles Orange Line BRT