A post to The Cap Times' "Laptop City Hall," based on a press release from the Dane County Executive's office, reveals seven of the nine appointees to the newly created Regional Transit Authority. The TransitMadCitizen can't comment on the appointees from Sun Prairie or Fitchburg (knowing nothing about them other than what was published), but as far as the other five are concerned, well, let's just say that anyone who hoped that the creation of an RTA would bring some new blood and fresh thinking to local transit planning is in for some disappointment.

Don't get me wrong--on the basis of public service record and familiarity with transit issues these choices are pretty much unobjectionable.  These are all folks that have been heavily involved in the transit discussion to date, in some cases for decades.  There may even be a certain unassailable logic to that, given that this is a fledgling body that will need to hit the ground running, probably without much in the way of staff support.

But maybe part of the unease this observer feels has to do with just how safe, how familiar, indeed how obvious and how predictable these picks are.  It's as if Mayor Dave, County Executive Falk, and Middleton Mayor Sonnentag didn't even think about it, just reached for their usual, reliable, loyal "go to" people on transportation.  Not one of these appoinments gives even the slightest hint of being an "outside of the box" choice.  Indeed, these are the people who have, over the past decade or so, designed and built the boxes framing the current transportation debate.  So we can look forward to many of the usual insiders having the same conversations amongst themselves in similar fashion to all the other iterations of the transportation debate.

The fact that all five are associated with fairly clear pro-rail positions (four were on the Transport 2020 panel that recommended rail) should, I suppose, be a cause for celebration on the part of those like me who also support rail.  So why am I not happier?  Maybe it's because I still think that, especially in the case of an issue of this magnitude, support of a body with this much authority should have to be earned, not programmed in from the start, and that such a body's final decision carries more weight if reached through genuine deliberation, by people without announced preconceptions, rather than as a foregone conclusion.

But I also was hoping that a new body might take a look at the projects that have been proposed to date with fresh eyes.  A certain amount of group-think has, I fear, grown up around the Transport 2020 rail proposal.  For example, there's a huge unresolved operational problem with that proposal as we consider the likelihood of intercity rail coming in to Madison over the same tracks the proposed light commuter rail line intends to use.  Yet there has also been an almost willful refusal even to acknowledge this issue, much less confront it honestly.  Will the same people responsible for this also finally fix it?  Maybe, but my optimism isn't exactly unbridled.

So we are left with what are at once entirely reasonable, and, from some standpoints even laudable, yet also strangely uninspirining (perhaps because uninspired and unimaginative) choices.  It's hard not to feel an opportunity has been missed.  And as one who strongly supported creation of an RTA, I'm experiencing one of those slightly queasy "be careful what you wish for" moments.

Today's State Journal covers the travails facing Greyhound bus passengers at the new "depot" on South Soughton Road, miles from its former site in downtown Madison.  What's especially depressing is that anyone paying attention should have seen this coming as the debate over the proposed redevelopment of the former downtown bus terminal Geryhound shared with Badger Bus proceeded to eventual approval of the project and, finally, razing of the facility.

A local group called Madison Area Bus Advocates deserves credit for sounding the alarm, and has no doubt earned the right to an "I told you so" moment, however bittersweet.  But one can't help asking whether they and others who fought to save the downtown terminal didn't partly contribute to the current situation.

There's no question the city dropped the ball.  Allowing the depot to close without a coherent replacement plan, or at least strategy, in place, suggests a failure of leadership and vision.  But by focusing on trying to stop redevelopment of the former bus depot site, and insisting that the city commit forthwith to making the site a multi-modal transit hub, the bus advocates seem guilty of a certain degree of strategic myopia of their own.

There was no legitimate (or at any rate, legal) basis for stalling a redevelopment project which arguably represents a better use of that particular site.  The site was not, as the bus advocates insisted, the ideal site for an intermodal station.  Conceivably, a site across the street, at the former Milwaukee Road train depot, held some promise as a potential station linking intercity rail, commuter rail, and intercity bus service.  But whatever multi-modal station opportunities proposed commuter and intercity rail service might create will take years to come to fruition, and the focus of most thinking on those eventual opportunities is shifting away from downtown, toward the Dane County Regional Airport or, more recently, the concept of an east-isthmus "Yahara Station."

So notions of having the city use eminent domain to stop the redevelopment and begin redeveloping the site as a multimodal station seem like a singularly unproductive line of attack.  A better strategy would have been to accept from the outset that the old bus depot was doomed and that the site was going to be put to other uses, and that any final decision on a permanent alternative was years away.  That would have freed all involved to focus on realistic interim, short-term (three-to-five-year) options--clearly understood as such--for keeping bus service downtown.  That conversation does not appear to have gotten very far--and now Greyhound is out on the remoter reaches of Stoughton Road and the Badger Bus has no terminal as such, just stops at the UW Memorial Union, a gas-station-and-convenience-store across from the former bus depot, and the Dutch Mill park-and-ride.

Of course, the process might have led to this anyway.  Badger Bus, for its part, seems to have bought into the "Megabus model" that eschews "depots" for pickup and drop-off stops, so it might not have been interested in any alternative "station" site.  Apart from the outcry from bus riders and their advocates, there was little groundswell of interest.  The quote, in today's State Journal piece, from the Greater Madison Convention and Visitor's Bureau conveys all too clearly just how marginal intercity bus service, and the people who use it, are to the powers that be.

All the more reason it might have made sense for advocates to avoid marginalizing themselves further by painting themselves (or those they were trying to persuade) into a corner, and by making the search for a perfect permanent solution the enemy of some sort of temporary solution that, while by no means perfect, might have been better than what we ended up with.

 

Filling out this week's reaction to the Nov. 6 RTA vote is this gem of blind, incoherent rage from the Sun Prairie Star, which would be more interesting if it weren't so predictable from this particular source. 

Editor Mertes can't even be bothered to get his basic facts straight.  No sales tax was approved in the County Board vote, no rail system was endorsed, and the RTA doesn't apply to the entire county.  The alleged unanimity of "experts" and "studies" indicating  the area lacks the necessary density and that rail nearly everywhere is a "money loser" is a figment of his feverish imagination.  As for the notion of rail being shoved "down the throats of county taxpayers who neither need it nor want it," the Star might want to take a closer look at an Edgewood College poll conducted countywide two years ago that found solid majority (65%) support for a sales tax to pay for road maintenance, buses, and--explicitly in the survey question--commuter rail.

His allusions to suburban flight and the politics of resentment are, on the other hand, all too credible--and the article perhaps more revealing than intended of the sheer primitive ferocity of that resentment.  The Star would do well to recall, however, that most of the last round of county board candidates (and the most recent county executive candidate) who sought to ride that resentment into office were notably unsuccessful.

I'm also not convinced this editorial really speaks for all or even most Sun Praririans, many of whom stand to benefit from an alternative way to travel into Madison for work or entertainment.   It's worth noting that Sun Prairie mayor Joe Chase, an outspoken RTA supporter, was re-elected handily over a vocal opponent of rail and the RTA. 

The Star, for all its heat, doesn't burn particularly bright.

 

 

Literally.  Four of the five Madison-area residents queried in a Capital Times' person-on-the-street "quick question" about a proposed sales tax to support expanded regional transit under the administration of the recently approved RTA support the idea (albeit to varying degrees and with some qualifications).   This statistically irrelevant and totally unscientific "survey" means...well, exactly nothing, really--though if the RTA and rail were as pervasively unpopular as the opponents insist, one might expect any more or less random sample to pull in a larger proportion of skeptics.  

RTA supporters were not, it's worth noting, necessarily supportive of rail per se.  The related comments section on the article provides a roundup of the usual comments from several of the usual suspects, using the story as another opportunity to charge into the fray on their favorite hobby-horses.

...there is an equal and opposite reaction.  And this is definitely the week for reaction to last week's action by the Dane County Board to create an RTA--and for reactionaries to rule the RTA-related news.

First, the profile in Wednesday's Capital Times, of local anti-commuter-railer Bill Richardson, main protagonist behind a web site called The Great Train Robbery.  That web site has been and will presumably continue to be, among other things, a pipeline for "information" from national libertarian and anti-transit sources to the local political discussion, or at least what passes for it on local talk radio.

Then one of those talk radio personalities, Vicki McKenna, receives a profile of her own in today's (well, technically tomorrow's) Isthmus.  You get some sense of where Ms. McKenna is coming from from her own web site.

I suppose, in a sense, the two profiles balanced out what, from their subject's perspectives, was a bad week, given that the spirited and vocal opposition failed to stop the creation of the RTA.  From the pro-transit perspective, it actually a public service for two major local publications to run these profiles with a day of each other.   They were going to run sooner or later.  Best to get them over with early, quickly, and at the same time.  Like vaccinations.

Thucydides begins his history of the Peloponnesian War this way:

Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote this history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war, and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it (Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, Crawley trans. w/intro by T.E. Wick.  New York: The Modern Library/Random House, 1982, p. 1).

OK, OK.  Transitmadcitizen is no Thucydides.  But this weblog does take some inspiration from the opening lines of that masterpiece.  Believing the looming political battle over transit in general and rail in particular in Madison, Wisconsin, to be a great and potentially momentous one with huge ramifications for this city's (and the surrounding region's) future, TransitMadCity is one attempt to chronicle and comment on that battle.  And while this chronicle begins with the battle in some respects well under way (who can ever pinpoint when these kinds of debates really begin--or end?), last week's creation of an RTA, which more or less explicitly has also set the clock ticking on a referendum on a transit sales tax, takes that battle to a new level.

Thucydides, of course, was chronicling a war between rival peoples, whereas here we are dealing with a political debate within a community.  Yet already the tone of that debate has taken on some of the character of something much more fundamental than a simple policy disagreement.  It has already begun to appear as a clash, if not of rival world-views, at least of sharply contrasting basic views of how transportation does or should work.

That the Transitmadcitizen is no disinterested observer of that battle, but a participant with a very definite pro-transit take on it, will be clear enough immediately, but bears stating explicitly in the interest of full disclosure.  I have no intention of being impartial.  I do hope to be as regular a contributor to this blog as possible given an unrelated day job.  And I do hope to pull in as much information from as many sources as I can given that same constraint.

Madison, though on an isthmus, is not an island.  Its transit debate is directly affected by transportation debates at the state and national levels, and at least indirectly influenced by similar debates in other localities.  So pulling information from those other debates will be an essential part of covering the local battle.  My objective, however, will be to interpret that other information through the lens of Madison's particular one and offer any such information with clear reference to the local situation.

So this isn't just another clearinghouse of information about transit matters across the country.  It's an attempt to address the local debate on its own terms, but also as a microcosm of debates either long under way or just getting started in communities both very similar to and very different from our own.  Perhaps citizens of other communities will find the discussion on these postings illuminating from their standpoint--or see their experience as relevant to the situation here.  That's certainly one legitimate objective of this weblog.  Mostly, though, it's one Madison citizen's effort to comprehend, as that citizen seeks to participate effectively in, what promises to be a defining moment in one metropolitan region's history and evolution.

Again in the interest of full disclosure, and as prior readers (if any) of this blog will notice, I have deleted a handful of earlier, very intermittent, entries that were, looking back, an attempt to warm up.  Just as the RTA vote by the Dane County Board has turned the transit debate into a new kind of thing, so I've decided to make a fresh start with this weblog with this entry.

And now, having done so, enough of preliminaries and warming up.  Time to plunge in.