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.
Just some policy considerations to think about in the new year as plans, great and small, are proposed as solutions to real-world problems here in Hallandale Beach, Broward County, South Florida and the United States... and where you readers out there in the blogosphere live, from Stockholm to Santa Monica, Notting Hill to Sydney.
First, since some of you newer readers don't already know, I worked in Washington, D.C, and lived there and in Arlington County from 1988-2003, where I probably rode the Washington Metro (WMATA) about 12 times a week. This, after a few years of constantly riding the CTA'sEl into downtown Chicago when I lived in Evanston and Wilmette.
At one point, I lived just a few blocks from the end of the El line at Linden Avenue.
Great in the morning, not so much when coming home in evening rush hour!
I lived right near Lake Michigan at the first house off of Sheridan Road, DIRECTLY across the street from this beautiful site, officially called The Baha'i House of Worship for North America, but which everyone just called The Baha'i Temple.
So, all that said, kudos are very much in order for unsuck dc metroblog, who on Tuesday wrote a spot-on Beltway version http://unsuckdcmetro.blogspot.com/2012/01/we-can-put-man-on-moon-but.htmlof a typical South Florida transit snail's-pace story that South Florida resident Matthew Gissen first made public in 2007 in the Miami Herald. That was a story of epic Miami-Dade County govt. failure that I followed closely and looked at for myself every time I had some free time while in downtown Miami. I finally mentioned it on my blog almost three years ago:
Similarly, Thursday, over at the GreaterGreaterWashington blog, consistently one of the best public policy blogs in the country, has a great post by Dan Malouff that bears careful reading, as well as the reader comments, since it has a very learned audience.
Malouff's post on the preposterous plan -suggested by a supposed responsible party who actually has a vote on the matter- re the Washington Metrorail's overdue line to Dulles Airport actually NOT going to the airport, is a direct response to this bit of news, which I first heard about here: http://wtop.com/?nid=120&sid=2711431
I was dumbstruck.
This sort of "planning" is something that we know about in South Florida, given the often, to be kind, counter-intuitive way things are done here.
Now in most parts of the country, creating a sensible rail option from scratch, a route from the downtown business or legal community to the nearby airport is usually a no-brainer, unless there are physical or geographical barriers that make costs prohibitive at the beginning.
Frankly, it's often part of the price to be paid for enlisting the help of the business community in getting legislation or a referendum for the system actually passed.
(Then again, they and their employees actually use it)
But as I written here and mentioned in some of the conferences and forums on transit that I've attended down here over the past eight years, in 1970's greater Miami, a rail connection to the airport, for whatever reason, wasn't deemed important enough a priority to make it actually happen, despite how ridiculous that sounds to read all these years alter.
And it has a direct correlation to why certain things are STILL the way they are in greater Miami, and from my perspective, someone who knew where almost everything was in Miami because I'd been there, most of them are for the worse.
Like building sports arenas and stadiums in areas far from population centers that make it easy for fans throughout South Florida to get to and from them easily via rail or train.
That's why getting from Flagler Street, Brickell Avenue or Biscayne Blvd. to Miami International Airport (MIA), then and now, is NOT as simple as paying for a ticket, hopping onto a train and sitting down and reading the newspaper or listening to your iPad for a few minutes, or simply look out the window, like I could in Washington, Chicago and Baltimore on my way to Reagan National, O'Hare and BWI.
That, plus the power of the South Florida taxi cab industry, which showered Dade County commissioners with campaign contributions, and was NOT interested in having customers cut out the middle-man -them!
Here in Broward County, at some point during the 15 years I was working in the Washington, D.C. area and living in Arlington County -near the Ballston Metro station- the Tri-Rail system constructed an "Airport" train station that's NOT actually at Hollywood/Ft. Lauderdale International Airport, but rather in nearby Dania, where you have to wait and catch a bus to actually get to the airport.
But then consider where I live -South Florida.
Here, taxpayers are forever hearing stories from their elected state legislators about their travel hardships, and, I guess, we are supposed to just shrug our collective shoulders and look the other way as these legislators myriad and continual ethical shortcomings and flights of fancy are done after taxpayers have routinely pay$800 for them to take round-trip, non-refundable flights between this area and no, not Los Angeles or Seattle, but to Tallahassee.
And as some of you out there in the blogosphere know independently and some from my having shared articles about it with you over the years via email, some of these state legislators actually have the audacity to publicly complain and bitch to not only local news media about their travails, but also to the FAA, whether about the paucity of airline flights or the size of those planes.
It's not the fault of South Florida taxpayers that the state capital is NOT centrally located, but rather in what is, essentially, southwestern Georgia.
This sort of bitching is so embarrassing, and only makes the Banana Republic rubric applied to Florida harder to shake.
In his post, Malouff reiterates certain basic fundamentals that I believe hold true for concerned taxpayers and chastened activists, no matter where they live, to have any degree of faith and confidence in govt. planning, and transportation planning in particular.
Two sentences in particular resonate for anyone like me who has gone to lots of public meetings in South Florida, esp. about transportation policy & process, and emerged hours later shaking their head.
Cutting so many corners that you don't achieve your goal is not cost savings, it's failure.
The absolute minimum requirement for a Metro line to Dulles Airport must be that it actually reaches Dulles Airport. Period.
Transit Miami is one of the most widely-read blogs in South Florida, especially among people interested in public policy, or, who are, themselves, policy makers. Lots and lots of very educated people who know their way around a City/County Hall and who ALWAYS vote.
Even while High Speed Rail advocates met in New York recently to discuss their hopes and dreams for the service in the Northeast Corridor, Adam Nagourney of the N.Y. Times has just revealed even more troubling financial details about the possible coming boondoggle with California's San Francisco-to-Anaheim Bullet Train, which I suspect most of the country outside of Cali is still largely ignorant of, despite its eventual ripple effects across the country, good and bad.
According to the Sacramento Bee, the California High Speed Rail Authority still plans to begin construction in September!
I've been reading about all its myriad controversies for months in theL.A. Times, and all things considered, their coverage has been pretty spot-on, and NOT nearly as sycophantic as certain Florida newspapers and pols I could name who were supportive of a supposed Bullet Train between Orlando and the Tampa Bay area, which Gov. Rick Scott was rightly opposed to.
Though I'm a strong pro-transit advocate, given my dozen of blog posts here on the subject of transportation over the years, especially the desirability of a commuter line on the F.E.C. tracks near U.S.-1, from downtown Miami to Palm Beach County, thru the most-densely populated parts of South Florida, I was always against that particular line in Central Florida.
It made no sense and couldn't possibly be successful because the distance was too short given the driving alternative.
See Jacksonville Transit blog's well-reasoned post of June 12th about why HSR failed the smell test in Florida: GOOD REASONS TO KILL FLORIDA HIGH SPEED RAIL
I've always suspected -and said on other transit blogs- that the line that would likely get the Obama money to proceed would likely be one between Chicago and St. Louis.
How's this for the beginning of a very expensive trip?
"The pro-train constituency has not been derailed by a state report this month that found the cost of the bullet train tripling to $98 billion for a project that would not be finished until 2033..."
New York Times
California Bullet Train Project Advances Amid Cries of Boondoggle
By Adam Nagourney
November 26, 201
SACRAMENTO — Across the country, the era of ambitious public works projects seems to be over. Governments are shelving or rejecting plans for highways, railroads and big buildings under the weight of collapsing revenues and voters’ resistance.
The Nagourney article follows by a few days an excellent, eye-opening story by Ralph
Vartabedian in the LAT that delves into the social and cultural problems associated with constructing the line thru several parts of Cali that are firmly opposed to it and have the financial means and the will to push back hard, namely, the Central Valley agriculture belt.
The folks who grew and cultivated many of the items in your kitchen right now.
Los Angeles Times
California bullet train: The high price of speed
Its proposed route would destroy churches, schools, homes, warehouses, banks, medical offices, stores and much more.
By Ralph Vartabedian, Los Angeles Times
October 22, 2011, 6:03 p.m.
Reporting from Bakersfield— Since it opened in 1893, Bakersfield High School has been the pride of this city and its academic cornerstone, the place where the late Chief Justice Earl Warren graduated and students call themselves the Drillers in homage to the region's oil patch.
It has withstood earthquakes and depressions, but perhaps it will not survive the California bullet train.
Cost projection for California bullet train jumps to nearly $100 billion
By Ralph Vartabedian
October 31, 2011 10:06 pm
California's bullet train will cost an estimated $98.5 billion to build over the next 20 years, an amount far higher than any previous projection, according to a business plan scheduled to be unveiled Tuesday.
Californians seem to fall into two camps when it comes to the state's multibillion-dollar high-speed rail project, with those on one side (typically fiscal conservatives) seeing it as a massive waste of taxpayer money while those on the other (typically liberals) think it's a visionary, environmentally responsible solution to our state's transportation problems.