FOLLOW me on my popular Twitter feed. Just click this photo! @hbbtruth - David - Common sense on #Politics #PublicPolicy #Sports #PopCulture in USA, Great Britain, Sweden and France, via my life in #Texas #Memphis #Miami #IU #Chicago #DC #FL 🛫🌍📺📽️🏈. Photo is of Elvis and Joan Blackman in 'Blue Hawaii'
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All Aboard Florida and the Federal Railroad Administration announce an additional public scoping meeting/open house in Fort Lauderdale as part of the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) process. The EIS will evaluate the potential environmental and related impacts of constructing and operating an intercity passenger rail service between Orlando and Miami with intermediate stations in Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach.
The public scoping meeting/open house will be held on Wednesday, May 29, between 3:30 and 7 p.m., at the Holiday Park Social Center, 1150 G. Harold Martin Drive, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33304. We invite you to attend and share your comments on the project. There will not be a formal presentation or comment period. Information from previous public scoping sessions will be shown at this venue.
If you cannot attend but wish to submit a comment, they must be mailed or emailed to Catherine Dobbs, Transportation Industry Analyst, Office of Railroad Policy and Development, Federal Railroad Administration, 1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE, Washington, DC 20590, or catherine.dobbs@dot.gov.
Please visit our website for more information and share this email with interested parties so they can receive updates from All Aboard Florida. Make sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
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My May 6th blog post, below, about my perspective on the public outreach efforts of All Aboard Florida and SFRTA/Tri-Rail, left no stone un-turned -or thrown if it deserved it
For those of you who are curious, I have still never received a response to my April 12th email to SFRTAExecutive Director Joseph Giulietti about whether or not Hallandale Beach will have a commuter train station as part of their proposed Tri-Rail Coastal plan, which currently shows no proposed station here in their released plans. Tomorrow will make five weeks and counting since I wrote it, which itself, was the second effort to get an honest answer from SFRTA/TRi-Rail, with my previous email never getting a response, either.
More Transit Policy Woes in South Florida: With stealthy and self-sabotaging friends like All Aboard Florida and SFRTA/Tri-Rail, pro-transit advocates in South Florida don't need any more enemies; 'All Aboard Florida' fails to schedule a single public scoping meeting in Broward County this Spring despite Fort Lauderdale being a proposed station, while SFRTA chief refuses to answer a simple question -Will Hallandale Beach have a station under the proposed Coastal line plan?; Just because you're pro-transit doesn't mean you have to ignore displays of transit incompetency or mismanagement when you see it!
Tri-Rail Coastal Link, partner56239248 YouTube Channel: Tri-Rail Coastal Link, Uploaded April 28, 2013. http://youtu.be/fFZR6ljK3og And as if I didn't have enough to say about South Florida transit issues and the way taxpayers and customers are often taken for granted or treated in either a patronizing or condecending fashion by transit agencies or transit groups, it seems that Tri-Rail is guilty of engaging in historical revisionism, too, as caught byeagle-eyed writer Sean McCaughan, above and below below to devastating effect. Congrats to him for seeing the situation for exactly what it is and not being duped as they intended. http://miami.curbed.com/ Tri-Rail Coastal Link Video Rewrites Miami's History, Gives Richard Florida All The Credit by Sean McCaughan Thursday, May 2, 2013, http://miami.curbed.com/archives/2013/05/02/trirail-coastal-link-video-rewrites-miamis-history-gives-richard-florida-all-the-credit.php
Below is a copy of an email I wrote and sent last Tuesday about the continuing communication and outreach problems afflicting some transit agencies and transit-oriented groups in the State of Florida, far too many of whom, it has been my misfortune to see over the years, have an often over-inflated image of their own role and influence in the larger scheme of public affairs. Some even seem to live in their own world, where they set their own rules. That's a fantasy world, of course, but sometimes, well-intentioned outsiders, like reporters or bloggers, are reluctant to pop their balloon and ruin the illusion they've created of being important. A world where they're rarely if ever held to account by the public at large, and more specifically, by local taxpayers or residents affected by various transit plans and schemes.
Me, I'm not afraid of popping other people's illusions, so this blog post today should be read for exactly what it is -me bursting some bubbles.
That fantasy public policy world I've just described is what many of us who are paying attention think of as the bad side of South Florida policy, where some self-interested types with connections or degrees or letters after their names, often think their access to the public teat is unlimited, and can never be turned off. This allows them, or so they think, to act with varying degrees of patronizing indifference and condescension towards the public and customers. (Think The Beacon Council and MDX, for instance!)
As it applies to the world of public transit and planning and design, they're under the mistaken impression that people who generally are pro-transit, especially those in favor of long-range trains or short-range commuter trains, like me, will just pretend they don't see displays of incompetency, stupidity and arrogance when it's right smack in front of them.
Well, not me.
The email was sent to Broward County Commissioners Sue Gunzburger, Barbara Sharief, Chip LaMarca, Tim Ryan, Fort Lauderdale Mayor Jack Seiler, with a cc to Florida Dept. of Transportation (FDOT) Secretary Ananth Prasad in Tallahassee.
It was also sent as a bcc to well over a hundred interested parties located between here and U.S. DOT HQ in Washington, D.C., with multiple stops in Tallahassee, Orlando and Broward County, and, necessarily, included other South Florida mayors, city commissioners and city mangers, as well as to certain selected reporters, foundations, non-profits, transportation websites and bloggers.
Naturally, that list started with the great folks over at Transit Miami. http://www.transitmiami.com/ As much as I'd relish the opportunity to ask the folks at All Aboard Floridaface-to-face at this afternoon's 4:30 p.m. meeting in Miami -with my video camera rolling- how they square intentionally ignoring Broward County 's residents with an honest effort to engage in outreach to the South Florida public, there's zero chance I will be attending it, since going into downtown Miami late in the afternoon is truly a fool's errand. More so if you are starting from Broward County, even if, like me, you're just north of Aventura. Besides, did you see where the geniuses involved have scheduled the meeting? 1600 N.W. 3rd Avenue, as show below in Google Maps.
What a great location for a transportation meeting!
Yes, in keeping with what apparently is the genius brains at work over at All Aboard Florida.
they've consciously chosen to NOT locate the meeting close to the FEC tracks they plan on using in the future,or, anywhere near where the most-likely customers of the service will be coming from, but rather in the Overtown/Culmer neighborhoodof Miami.
Awesome!
For those of you who are reading this far from these shores, or, even those of you reading it closer-at-hand but not hip to that address, it's NOT exactly the safest place in Miami at the time when the meeting will be wrapping up at night.
Congrats for all the bad planning and bad outreach, folks!
Yes, hard as it is to believe, it appears that the folks behind this All Aboard Florida scheme seem not to have even considered the real possibility that prospective customers or taxpayers like you or me can support the overall goal, but NOT like or support going forward with it with the particular group of managers attached to it now, since they sure don't seem very smart or savvy in trying to get their OWN message out to people who would actually be supporters or customers in the future. It's called knowing your universe. (It's like the 'Florida Marlins' screwed-up marketing/outreach for so many years while they were playing at Dolphins Stadium near the Broward and Miami-Dade county line, where, despite well over 60% of their season ticket holders living in Broward and Palm Beach counties because of the ease of the drive to the stadium via the next-door Florida Turnpike, the Marlins refused to show common sense and place a store or even small kiosks at nearby destination shopping malls like Aventura Mall or Pembroke Lakes Mall, where actual baseball fans and families go to shop. No, instead, showing their customary arrogance and bad judgment, they had their one-and-only store located in Little Havana. Really. Yes, the continuing myth of the Little Havana baseball fan dies hard. But the reality was that those fans would listen to the games on the radio (in Spanish) and buy a Marlins ball cap every 5-6 years, but would only actually go to a game every few years. Look how well that worked! Thud. Good luck Marlins getting casual baseball fans who live in or north of Fort Lauderdale to head down to Little Havana with their kids on a Tuesday school night when the Padres and Rockies come to town!) It's just like how beleaguered fans of the Dolphins or the Marlins can root for the players but NOT like or support their owners, and, frankly, rather hope that Stephen Ross and Jeffrey Loria meet their demise sooner rather than later, so that fans don't have to continue to be so conflicted with their emotions towards the teams.
Clearly if ignoring Broward residents on purpose is part of the All Aboard Florida playbook, it's NOT a Silver Linings Playbook, but rather one of a dog chasing its tail, over-and-over. A public policy story that some of us have seen played-out in South Florida for well over forty years already, with all the disastrous and logical results we see around us today as proof. By the way, as of today, May 6th, 24 days since I sent that email to Joseph Giulietti, the head of SFRTA/Tri-Rail, about prospects for a Tri-Rail Coastal commuter station in Hallandale Beach, I still have NOT heard from him or his staff. Too late! My patience with him and their indifference to taxpayers has officially expired. -----
April 30, 2013
1:30 p.m.
Do any of you have any idea why there isn't a single scheduled All Aboard Florida scoping meeting being held in Broward County, esp. In FTL, the only currently-announced prospective station in the entire county?
Prior to starting this email to you today. I checked their website and went through their archives, http://www.allaboardflorida.com/to see if there'd already been a public meeting in Broward somewhere that I somehow missed out on hearing about.
I don't know, maybe something that took place while I was in Sweden back in mid-January, and ignoring everything locally right before my trip?
No, nothing's already been held in Broward-and there's nothing scheduled
for Broward in the near-future, either.
If you know the answer to this question or have a good guess, please let me know...
I'll be sure to mention this lack of common sense to anyone I know whom I run into at the Broward MPO'sCommitment 2040 meeting at the Hallandale Beach Cultural Center on Thursday
This screw-up with All Aboard Florida ignoring Broward County residents is just the latest in a series of completely inexplicable decisions involving transit in South Florida that make it hard for a longtime pro-transit advocate like myself to have much faith in either the "system" or the people who are supposed to be running and managing transit and transit-related issues in
South Florida, as well as public outreach.
They always find a way to let you down.
Over two weeks ago, for the second time, I contacted SFRTA/Tri-Rail to get them to say definitively, one way or the other, whether their current plans for utilizing the FEC tracks foresee a train station in Hallandale Beach or not, since their current plans on their website for a Coastal line state that Hallandale Beach will NOT have a station.
But we all know that there can always be closely-held but public information that they have which they have not yet chosen to place on their public website, which is why my email to them needed to be sent -to get the truth.
As you can see at the bottom of this email, I contacted SFRTAExecutive Director Joseph Giulietti on April 12th to get his input, since he'd surely know better than anyone what was what.
And again, I'd already contacted them back in late January with this same basic questions, and never heard anything, which is how and why I specifically wrote to Mr. Giulietti earlier this month.
The response after 18 days: nothing from him, nothing from his staff -just lots and lots of NOTHING.
Like I said earlier, "They always find a way to let you down."
For now, just color me underwhelmed at the self-evident oversights that characterize South Florida transit, where, with the current cast of characters in place making policy decisions that affect lots of people and cities in this region, it's hard not to notice that taxpayers and customers almost always come in last.
DBS, Nine-year Hallandale Beach resident
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This ad appeared in last Wednesday's Miami Herald.
SFRTA Fast Start Plan from SFRTA IT on Vimeo. SFRTA IT Vimeo video: SFRTA Fast Start Plan for Tri-Rail Coastal, Uploaded June 2012. This is one of the two competing proposals for a commuter line on the FEC railroad tracks connecting downtown Miami and Palm Beach County, but this plan as written does NOT currently envision a stop where I live -and where Gulfstream Park Race Track & Casino and the Village at Gulfstream Park retail complex are located - Hallandale Beach. Not that you've read that anywhere in any of the local newspapers or heard it mentioned on local TV newscasts. Or even heard it publicly discussed at HB City Hall. Well, now you know! As planned, we are completely skipped-over and screwed!
Transportation Odds & Ends: Is the news that Ray LaHood is staying on as U.S. Transportation Secretary good or bad for Florida? Especially now that straight-shooter John Mica is no longer chair of House Transport. Comm.?; SFRTA's current Fast Start plan for "Tri-Rail Coastal" completely ignores and skips over Hallandale Beach and Gulfstream Park Race Track & Casino, Village at Gulfstream Park retail complex
Meanwhile, this email was sent to you from a city where the most-popular place on the city's 4 FREE Mini-bus routes, the Publix on Hallandale Beach Blvd. & S.E. 14th Avenue, does NOT and has never had a simple timetable posted there so that riders would actually know when the bus departs.
Yes, as most of you know, I'm a big, longtime supporter of transit, esp. the South Florida East FEC Corridor studyeffort, have gone to all manner of transit-oriented forums in South Florida since moving here nine years ago from the Washington, D.C. area, where I rode the DC Metro twice a day, 6 days out of 7.
I'm all for thinking globally and acting locally, but what if your city's elected officials and highly-paid city administrators are, simply put, stone-cold incompetent?
What then?
Then, all the clever and punchy public policy platitudes in the world, and attending or watching all the seven50.org forums in the world, can't help you.
That seems to be one of the South Florida news media's remaining no-no's.
You can't publicly talk about certain cities or pols having devolved into -accurately- becoming labeled as incompetent until further notice, unless they do something to show that they have applied remediation efforts and succeeded.
And besides, why would Hallandale Beach actually want to let riders know when the bus actually departs the most popular destination, when they can, instead, erect those useful timetables at numerous sites throughout the city where no riders are ever present in large part because of the chronic lack of bus shelters to keep the sun and the rain off of riders?
The ones we have less of now than we did three years ago.
The city-controlled bus shelters that were nearly 90% dark at night for YEARS because the city was so damn negligent in properly maintaining them, something that Mayor Joy Cooper did not like my reminding people of at transit forums throughout the area where important people were in attendance.
My fact-telling ruined the illusion of the city she wanted to create and foster.
Just another small reminder why there is no street in Hallandale Beach where logic and reason intersect.
I sure hope that your outreach efforts to the public and the pro-transit populace will be better than it has been in the past. http://www.tri-railcoastalservice.com/ I will have more news next week about SFRTA's Fast Start plan and what it would mean to Hallandale Beach if the city is intentionally passed-over and does not get a train station on the FEC tracks, despite the fact that it would do more for this city -more quickly- than any other city in Broward on the route, in part because there is so much space.
Early this morning, I sent this email below about a jaw-dropping blog post about the BrowardMetropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) written at the Sun-Sentinel'sBroward Politics blog by Brittany Wallman to about forty people in South Florida.
All of them are transportation professionals or people who work for the State of Florida or local/county government in areas involving long-term planning and/or transportation, including some usually well-informed elected officials.
By the time I checked my email for the first time today, somewhat later than usual, there were over eight responses waiting for me, all saying variations of the following: "There's SO much more behind this story. I'd love to fill you in on the details!" Clearly, this story on the inner workings and petty machinations of Broward's bureaucracy will have legs, and I'll try my best in the future to tip you off as to who in the local news media is doing a good job of connecting the dots on this story, so we can all find out what the true facts are, since it seems clear that for now, facts are at a premium. So far, that entire news media list consists of Brittany Wallman.
------------- 1:15 a.m.
There are two articles below worth your attention.
I'm too tired and dumb-founded by the first story to say anything terribly original now, but even by South Florida's traditionally low standards, this definitely seems like something that taxpayers should've been hearing something more about this issuebefore it actually happened. Like maybe actually being mentioned on the 11 o'clock TV newscasts, perhaps?
Not to say I told you so... but a few months ago, I noted on my blogthat in my opinion, Broward Commissioner Kristin Jacobs getting named to theSFRTABoardwas not the greatest news in the world for people who genuinely want to see this area move forward and get out of the dysfunctional past.
This criticism of mine obviously bothered her, much to my surprise, because one of her staffers actually kept calling me for a few days to complain about what I'd written.
The problem for Jacobs and her staffer was that what I said was 100%true - that for all her talk about being interested in transportation policy, Jacobs had a funny way of showing her interest.
She has been an invisible presence at every single major regional Transportation summit, forum and what-have-you that I've attended for the past 5-6 years, where I have met and spoken with so many of you, both publicly and privately afterwards.
The internal logic of my point couldn't be rebutted by her staffer, especially when I named the many transportation events I'd been at that JacobswasAWOL for.
Call me old-fashioned, but showing up is Job One for an elected official, and a County Commissioner like her showing-up at least once in a while is the very least we can reasonably expect.
But to my mind, she's failed even that simple test. And judging by what Brittany Wallman has written below, I'm not at all surprised to read that Kristin Jacobs has once again said something that was so easily dis-proven when reality came knocking. Broward Politics blog County: MPO is laying off some employees, then bumping up salaries Posted by Brittany Wallman May 19, 2010 08:30 PM
UPDATED 8:30 p.m.
One day soon, 24 of the 25 county employees working for the MPO (Metropolitan Planning Organization) will get pink slips. And one day soon after, the 17 employees who are fortunate enough to be employed there will enjoy a pay raise.
The head of the MPO, executive director Gregory Stuart, says the facts have been twisted and that the reality is not as bad as it looks.
