27 Years Later: Jacksonville Transit

[Metro Jacksonville]

27 Years Later: Jacksonville Transit



JTA was warned in 1981 about the looming Skyway failure. Now, 27 years later, the same mistakes are being made on a grander scale. Jacksonville, welcome to 1981.

Full Article
http://www.metrojacksonville.com/content/view/638

[archiphreak]

I think this article was written by a respected journalist more than a quarter century ago and still nothing has changed.  That is a daunting reality in our present situation of attempting to change the status quo.  In light of something like this I see the reality that we have got to really step up the pressure on the City Officials to not only see reason but to actually listen to their constituents on what is really needed for the city of Jacksonville.  It could be that the only way real change is going to be affected is if the entire city cries out at once in opposition of what City Officials are planning on doing with our tax dollars.  I see lots of petitions and public hearings in our future.  Let's just hope it's enough.

[hanjin1]

We should create some sort of petition on petitiononline.com. Maybe we can get enough people to sign it and show the stupid city leaders and JTA that this BRT is a bad idea. I know not a lot of people show up to JTA's BRT meetings (mainly because they do it during work hours or at some weird ass time), so maybe this will help to educate them about how this idea is not a good idea. Then we can have a petition on what could be a better option, like streetcars, or light rail, or whatever.

I would create this petition, but I'm not the best person to put this in words, so maybe someone else is better at it than me.

[downtownparks]

Online petitions typically arent much good, BUT, it would perhaps work in spreading the word, and it gives us a list to hold up and say "see, people DO care". I like it. Good Idea Hanjin!

[jeh1980]

27 Years Later: Jacksonville Transit



JTA was warned in 1981 about the looming Skyway failure. Now, 27 years later, the same mistakes are being made on a grander scale. Jacksonville, welcome to 1981.

Full Article
http://www.metrojacksonville.com/content/view/638

I want to see streetcars or maybe light rail downtown. But I don't see what's wrong with the Skyway. 

[downtownparks]

Nothing is wrong with the skyway, its just too expensive to expand.

[Ocklawaha]

27 Years Later: Jacksonville Transit

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd2clb5T8JA
Theme Music From YOUTUBE!

Written By: George Harmon (Journal Editorial Page Editor)


Robert W. Mann is a man after my own heart. He likes streetcars and I do, too. Only I call a streetcar a streetcar. Mann prefers to describe the modern version of the streetcar as "light-rail transit," or LRT.

Funny, the JCCI study also called IT something else, a Trolley, "Their only use seems to be Tourism, not serious Transportation such as the (SKYWAY)..." Tourism was mentioned only as a means to an end here. We could start as a Tourist Operation and use THAT SAME TRACK for a modern system. Thus many more funding and building choices. Nobody in the City Leadership wanted to talk about it save The TU-Journal plus, Eric Smith, and Jim Wells.

Since I have written two columns in the past month on the proposed Downtown People Mover for Jacksonville, and am favorably disposed toward it, Mann has written to me warning the DPM could be a big fat turkey for Jacksonville.

Same guy showed up at the TU to warn them of BRT, but this time... was ANYBODY listening?

(It may already be a turkey, The Reagan administration this week ordered cities such as Jacksonville to suspend activities aimed at developing people movers, but Democrats in the U.S. House are hoping to block Reagan's move.)

We should have been so Smart.

Mann said the so-called experts on mass transit in Jacksonville ought to be paying more attention to the revival of the streetcar-er, light-rail transit- that he says is taking place elsewhere in this country and Canada.

No Way! JTA and DOT know what is good for us, then and now. It has a rhythm of a sorry situation comedy, "set up", "set up", "PUNCH". Jacksonville fiddles what others catch the spark.

Mann describes himself as a freelance writer and says a book by him is due to be published later this year by Darwin Publications ("no connection with the theory of evolution") in Burbank, Calif. He says this book will be a pictorial history of the railroad systems in Florida and its title will be "Rails 'Neath the Palms."

George left off Class Clown, who would have thunk it? Taking the act from Jacksonville to Colombia and back and not a damn thing has changed but the faces, hair color and waistline. Oh, and that Medellin, Colombia (which DID listen) is now so far ahead of Jacksonville we couldn't get a radar fix on them.

With that introduction, I will let Mann write most of the rest of this column, which first questions the wisdom of the Downtown People Mover ever getting off the drawing boards, it is time that the Jacksonville Transportation Authority came down from the lofty Buck Rogers perch and examined a very real and cost-effective alternative to what may well be "pie-in-the-sky planning," says Mann.

What is it with Jacksonville and Buck Roger's, JTA is still here and now they are planning "Flying Buses" over the Arlington Expressway.

Downtown People Movers are relatively new in the transit world. They combine several technologies into one system. DPMs include the building of an elevated guideway that is for all purposes, a two-lane highway.

This massive structure must also contain a 'railroad' of some form of guideway to keep the cars on track.
Add to this a power delivery system and a computer system and you come out with one very expensive machine.

Elevated or exclusive lane BRT is the same thing all over again, only dumber. Does JTA own stock in Firestone??
This time we'll BUILD a two or three lane FREEWAY, but without the guideway feature or clean air. Add a driver for replacement of computer (guided) system, and it still comes out about the same. This time if the poor fellow faints while hurtling down the EL over Arlington Expressway, and you happen to be on his bus, your just SOL! 

"As originally planned, the Jacksonville system would virtually be a gift from Uncle Sam, a three- or
four- mile $150 million dollar gift. The trouble with gifts of this nature is that someone has to pay to maintain the thing and what happens if the entire system proves to be a turkey? What about 5 or 15 years from now? Will a sleek little box that rolls along, akin to an airport shuttle system, really be the answer for an urban sprawl that may someday reach St.Augustine?"

"I don't intend to spend any more time with DPMs. One only has to travel as far as Morgantown, W.Va, where the federal pilot system has been operating for years, to see this whole thing is a turkey!"

It took JTA 27 Years to answer the what happens question. Now they say if it fails, it will be the fault of Jacksonville not being "ready" for real Transit. If it succeeds we just rip it up and put down Light Rail! Huh?

Mann says there is an alternative to a DPM in Jacksonville "but I fear that the JTA, City Hall and perhaps our news media will have to do their homework to see how real it really is. It is called LRT, for light-rail transit. LRT is a rebirth of the old, clunky trolley in a modern high-speed vehicle that can operate on many present track systems."

Hello? Anyone home?

Mann then offers an imposing list of cities in which planned LRTs are being built or planned. "Light-rail systems are presently being built in Buffalo, N.Y., and San Diego, Calif., and planned for Portland, Ore; San Jose, Calif.; Denver, Col.;; Baltimore, Md.; Dayton, Ohio; Sacramento, Calif.; and Vancouver, British Columbia.

Aren't you glad we are SO MUCH SMARTER? They all left us in Transit dust, except for Dayton... They went back to revamp their REAL TROLLEY-BUS system and now they too have departed our station.

"The transit vehicles operate in any number of ways - elevated, just like the DPM, subway, new track in the street, in a median strip, lane separations, transit malls or down the same route that the regular freight railroads use, which in our case includes much lightly-used switching line.

This WOULD HAVE BEEN, COULD HAVE BEEN, MIGHT HAVE BEEN, as good as Austin. Sorry Gatorback, still WAY behind Medellin!
SEE ALSO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMV0_kN2n_U
and:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4eC6n4JfNY

"LRT is electric and clean. It is better on labor than the bus systems since the higher-capacity cars can be linked into trains of up to four or five cars with a single driver. As for speed, which includes time at stations and stops, the average bus in the United States does little better than 11.5 mph while the light-rail vehicle in Buffalo will do 23 mph. LRT has a much higher ridership than the bus systems on a worldwide basis and the vehicles can be bought 'off the shelf.'

Hardly a single thing has changed in this picture too, except for the gap between LRT and Bus speeds getting a bit wider in spite of Bus RAPID Transit. Simple, now the Highway guys just bust up their numbers and quote BRT speed AS IF it were somehow a magic and different vehicle, NOT! They even find highways where the buses can go 70 MPH and quote THOSE numbers into their formula... Bus goes 11.5, LRT goes 23 but BRT GOES 70! oooh can I play too? During the great depression the streetcar companies that had grown beyond the suburbs became known as "INTERURBANS"...oooh! THEY got a challenge along the "CINCINNATI AND LAKE ERIE" Interurban Railway, to race an airplane. The race was held and OMG, The Trolley ran out from under that old Tri-Motor Airliner at just under 90 MPH! In France the TGV train, recently hit the 350 MPH speed mark. So what does that have to do with us you ask? Pop the hood on that old "CLUNKY" Trolley and behold, the SAME core Machine at heart.

"Look at what San Diego has done. The Southern Pacific railroad line from San Diego to Yuma, Ariz., was crippled by a flood several years ago and, even as a freight railroad, Southern Pacific had little interest in the industrial switching tracks that remained stretching from San Diego to the Mexican Border. The city and a short-line railroad operator made an offer on the tracks and soon were given the OK by the railroad.

Damn Jacksonville! We need more Terminal Railroad access all along our Port. We also need rapid, clean and fuel wise transit too. Ever consider killing two projects with one stone? My BAD! Not nearly wasteful enough.

"Transit planners decided that the existing track was valuable and decided to string the single electric wire and improve the line, where needed, for a ready made LRT system. For a dozen blocks or so downtown a street was ripped up and two tracks were laid in the center in what will remain a running transit mall with restricted auto traffic. And as the sleek new German-built cars leave downtown they can spring like an Amtrak streamliner with crossing lights flashing and bells ringing.

Will San Diego will have these Trolleys running to Phoenix, Arizona, before we see anything springing around here. From the BRT elevated freeway over the CSX at Edgewood, one might see Amtrak as it leave the Bus RAPID TRANSIT in it's dust. This is the same BRT that zooms right past the Murray Hill Shopping Area?

"Portland is building along a freight railroad line and a former freeway right-of-way [yes the freeway was scrapped in favor of LRT]. Calgary, Alberta, is putting its system along existing railroad lines and medians while others are working on deals to operate LRT by day and at peak hours, and allow the freight railroads to switch by night.

So we are going to re-re-reinvent the rubber tire and build ANOTHER Skyway (We haven't finished the first "Free" one yet, BTW, have we hit those ridership numbers?) HEY JTA? Are those big fuel tanks leaching into your drinking water over on Myrtle? "We're going to study RAIL...yadda...yadda...yadda," Now you have everybody all excited, just tell me which one pays the organ grinder while your Monkeys Dance?
We have been this route before, remember? "TROLLEYS MUST COMPETE WITH AUTOMOBILES...a mostly TOURIST thing." Like I believe anything is going to be different this time. 

"In Jacksonville, there exist opportunities which exist in no other city: a spider web of tracks fanning out from Union Station to Southside, Ortega and Orange Park, Baldwin, northwest Jacksonville and Dinsmore, within a mile of the airport, onto Blount Island, etc

It's all still there, just waiting for a Frankenfurter Moment, when you ghouls discover the, "SPARK! The very essence of (transit) life itself..."

"Imagine a transit mall or LRT lane from the Union Station to the Union Street viaduct area and from there north into Springfield on the old Seaboard Coast Line tracks, then west to within a block of the Eighth Street hospital and then south to Union Station as a starter."

So you at City Hall, the TU and media, JTA and all the rest, "Honey I'm home..." and I'm still preaching and teaching the same gospel, 27 years later.

"Then tell yourself that it is already there save for the downtown mall and the trolley wire and it wouldn't have to compete with the automobile. Next tell yourself that San Diego built a 16 mile system for half the cost of our Four-mile DPM and used not one penny of federal money! Next ask: Who really runs things at the JTA?"

27 years and I'm still calling them as I see them, if that makes you uneasy, that's okay, my fight is not with any individual, named or otherwise within these Forums. It is with a bloated highway bureaucracy that is corrupted from without and within. JTA you are their victim too, and they have been feeding you a bowl of STUPID, every morning for nearly 30 years. Which of your "experts" is writing the check to finish the Skyway? I don't understand people that want to target anything less then excellence.

I have run out of space and cannot begin to answer Mann's questions, and am not sure how well I could. So I will end with this question: What do you readers think of his ideas? I'd like to know.

So will I George, What do y'all think of "his" ideas? Your silence is deafening.

Ocklawaha
Some Cities Age like fine Wine, Jacksonville has aged more like MILK! "27 years to "smart ass perfection".

[Lunican]

This is pretty unbelievable.

[Sportmotor]

CHRIST that is alot of quoting

[Ocklawaha]

CHRIST that is alot of quoting

I'm not CHRIST but I might be as close as Jacksonville gets if we don't change our ways! If you enjoy the sarcasm as I do, check out the crystal ball for 2010 in the Break Room.
http://www.metrojacksonville.com/forum/index.php/topic,6882.0.html

This is pretty unbelievable.

It's probably time for an update to this, I think some announcements are going to be made shortly that won't exactly be my revenge, rather its going to be a reckoning!

OCKLAWAHA

[CS Foltz]

Ock...............already made a visit to the "Crystal Ball" (see comments) and hope to hell the current Administration see's the light and soon! I await for reckoning to take place!