RAIL ALTERNATIVE
I was glad to see your article on tracks “de-railed” (although you stole my intended pun).
It’s dismaying, however, to learn that the rail has been shelved for over 20 years into the future. So what’s plan B for mass transit?
Highway 1 widening will have consumed about a half a billion dollars, and if you drive from Santa Cruz to Watsonville around 9 in the morning, you’ll observe the widened section is moving (actually not moving) similarly to the previous yet to be widened sections.
Los Angeles built the 14-lane Santa Monica freeway only to see it turn into a miles-long parking lot during commute hours before they wised up and started building mass transit.
Tragically, cutting down 1,100 trees for the latest widening project will similarly offer little relief after several years of additional congestion from construction.
The Regional Transportation Commission (RTC), according to the article, has paid about $1.25 million to consultants for the soon-to-be-buried-for-decades rail line.
Wouldn’t it be reasonable to invest a small fraction of that amount to investigate Personal Rapid Transit (PRT)—a method that has existed for over 50 years and is now spreading throughout the world?
PRT—lightweight vehicles for four people or two people with a wheelchair or bicycle—can be built at a small fraction of the cost and would not overburden existing bridges.
It could go on ground level, where privacy issues are concerned, and using simple streetlight-type poles elevated over street crossings, eliminating a major problem with surface rail.
Due to its simple nature, PRT can be in place much quicker and can be solar powered with electricity from collectors on its own right-of-way. PRT can offer many more access points without expensive stations, and this could increase Metro ridership using bus feeder lines.
PRT offers, due to its accessibility off the mainline, faster travel times since it goes directly to your destination. This could greatly reduce traffic on the crowded freeways and be a more environmental modality.
Much more information can be found by googling PRT, including a simulation of PRT traveling around various Santa Cruz locales.
It’s definitely time for the RTC to get its head out of the 20th-century thinking box and move toward solving our transportation quandary.
Fred Geiger | Santa Cruz
ONLINE COMMENTS
POLICE SURVEILLANCE
While I agree with Stephanie Singer’s letter about the hazards of Flock mass surveillance cameras—which recent reporting reveals are hackable in under a minute flat by any basic hacker—there are also very serious related concerns about doorbell cameras. Ring is now a partner of Flock, and allows Ring camera owners to opt in to share their doorbell camera feeds with law enforcement.
Ring makes it sound like doing so is a service to public safety, but what it really does is widen the police dragnet of all our comings and goings, in a faulty system that targets the innocent. A suburban mom was grilled by law enforcement due to being mistaken for being a package thief, by a license plate reader that misread her plate.
So if you have a Ring camera and you don’t want it used to potentially target your migrant neighbors and others under the new mass surveillance state, where the government can query a database and use AI to predict whether you “might” be a criminal based on your travel data (which is faulty, subject to hacking, and has already resulted in accidental arrests of innocent people, US citizens and legal immigrants alike), you can choose NOT to share your Ring footage with the cops. Don’t opt in.
FIXING DANGEROUS TRACKS FOR BIKES
Will Mayall’s excellent, common-sense approach deserves to be seriously discussed by the members of the RTC before they move ahead with the proposed multi-billion grandiose intercity rail and less desirable confined trail project and the inflated sales tax that will be required to cover operating expenses.
Will wrote: “Fixing the small things first isn’t just practical. It’s the only credible path toward the big things. Until we can deliver on everyday basics—smooth pavement, working buses, safe crossings—grand promises about zero-emission rail are just noise on top of broken tracks.” Or, as one RTC member said, the ZEPRT project “is sucking all the oxygen” from all other county transportation needs.
This lack of attention to fixing the “small things” applies to County infrastructure in general, of course. We have waited for years to have the broken drainage system of the original Arana Gulch Multi-use bike/ped path along Brommer Street Extension repaired. It was installed behind the retaining wall and worked when the $7.5 million project opened in 2014. It was broken two years later. It is still broken. As are three of the Dark Sky-friendly nighttime lights for the asphalt path.
Jeane Brocklebank | Goodtimes.sc
