No cars on Richmond?
This post dates from April 1, 2007. It should be read in that context.
The “talking points” sheet is real. So is the inherent conflict of faulting a proposed mode of transportation for not meeting standards that your preferred mode doesn’t even come close to meeting. But I have no reason to believe there is any proposal to remove cars from Richmond. That’s a good thing, because that would be a pretty bad idea.
Be sure to read the forums for a lengthy discussion on alpacas, a topic I have given short shrift to in the past.
. . .
One would think that if people are opposed enough to a project to go to a 2-hour meeting about it, they would know what to say. But, for John Culberson’s February Town Hall Meeting, the leading anti-rail-on-Richmond group printed up a stack of flyers of “talking points.” They’re in progressively bigger, bolder, text, so they must be important. So what can we learn from them?
Their basic demand is a means of transportation that:
- “does not create congestion”
- “does not pollute our environment”
- does not “increase flooding”
The problem is that the means of transportation that currently dominates Richmond does not meet any of those goals.
Here’s Richmond today:
I see congestion, I see pollution, and I see lots of concrete that leads to runoff that creates flooding.
Now, if the rail opponents are intellectually honest, they cannot find this acceptable. They will be looking for a means of transportation that involves no gas or diesel or electricity or power plants, that has no emissions, and that requires no pavement. And there’s only one that meets those criteria: walking, barefoot, on grass. The logical conclusion: a Richmond that looks like this:
(Not visible: pack llamas carrying an extremely ugly brass bed.)
I might point out that cars are an important part of our transportation system, and that we could in fact get some cars off the road and eliminate street-level emissions (and could eliminate all emissions if it were powered by wind power, like Calgary’s system) by building an electrically powered light rail line that stops where people want to go, not in the middle of a big, wide, polluted, congested, flood-prone freeway.
But to believers in BIG, BOLD, TYPE and “talking points,” that may just not be radical enough. I can see the signs already:
Just off the picture to the left: a sign that says, “COMMENT IN OUR FORUMS!!!”