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On June 3 Pauline Seales interviewed B
arry Scott, a volunteer for Friends of the Rail trail known as FORT.
They discussed many aspects of this problems including the equity imperative for usable public transportation, the strong potential for future state funding and the fallacy of “rail banking”.
To learn more about the battery electric street car option go to coastfutura.org
More at https://www.railandtrail.org/
You can contact Barry Scott at
Coastal Rail Santa Cruz – A not for profit organization – 831-612-6574
Wow – an informercial for the Friends of the Rail and Trail Corporation. Barry Scott, the State Director for the Oil Industry backed need.org (Who also has ties to Koch Industries) didn’t seem to disclose the materials of NEED that educate children on the need for coal, fracking and how terrible the world would be without petroleum. You can read more about Barry’s organization here https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-02-06/big-oil-gets-to-teach-climate-change-in-american-classrooms
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Anyway, lots of false statements in Barry’s infomercial. The TCAA Business Plan already showed that the funding is not there. This is why the vote was stalled. Those who were in favor simply saw, the funding, even with the rosy projections of the new state and federal progressiveness has not allocated any money for Santa Cruz rail projects. Our population density and tax base is far too low to make a rail system practical. The fact is we have not had public passenger rail service in 50 years and it declined because it is very expensive to maintain and not practical for our area. Yes, we absolutely need public transit and look at ways to avoid commuting. Such as the recent project to move many county offices from Santa Cruz to Watsonville where nearly half of county employees and a vast majority of citizens are using the services cuts twice as many commutes as a train could ever get to.
Barry also spends a lot of time in this conversation passive aggressively spreading hate, fear and confusion. That’s his job. With NEED and FORT Corporation, he makes a good living as their lobbyist. Rail banking has successfully reutilized and protected easements hundreds of times across thousands of miles for inner and inter-community active transportation paths. If Barry believes we can setup a transportation system without replacing the current class 1 excepted (aka unfit for passenger travel) infrastructure, he is deceiving the public.
We need right sized transportation solutions in this county. Bus on Shoulder, modernizing Metro infrastructure, full time on demand services for the elderly and physically challenged needs to be the priority and it needs to be done in 5 years, not 20+ years which is perfectly fine with FORT Inc. Barry also showed a complete misunderstanding of electrification, autonomous vehicles and their uses, not that anyone is silly enough to say that is the immediate solution to Santa Cruz’s problems, but Barry’s approach to revert to 19th century technology is a complete fantasy.
Lastly, the largest thing lacking in Barry’s informercial is the truth about Climate Change impact. If you ask Barry will a train reduce reduce traffic, he will admit it won’t. If you do not reduce traffic, you do not remove greenhouse gas emissions. He’ll try to use “Oh it’s vehicle miles driven” to divert the subject, but that can be done with better use of other forms of mass transit and to get out of the commuter mindset. And to say tradespeople will just load their tools on a bike and onto a train, that’s when I had to stop listening.
It’s time to get real about Santa Cruz Transit. To spend $1,000,000,000+ on a 20+ year project just to find it has no impact on our transit and environmental problems is not the right way to go. To throw out terms like social good and equity with nothing to stand up to it is just gaslighting the problem. It’s time to get behind a real plan to get Santa Cruz moving. If the RTC continues to get dragged in a nearly 20 year quagmire by the Friends of the Rail and Trail Corporation, then we need some democracy now to get the vote out to the people on what they really want.
There is so much misinformation circulating that it was a pleasure to be on your to answer important questions. The need to move away from fossil fuels cannot be overstated, and electrification of our transportation systems via electric vehicles is just a small piece in the puzzle.
Prioritizing transportation to make walking and cycling and transit more desirable than driving will make a huge difference in our quality of life. Planners are moving away from the suburban sprawl form of development to more sustainable people-oriented development that promotes walking over driving and expands transit.
Our rail and trail will work together, and the recently released RTC electric rail transit business plan proves that rail doesn’t have to use large expensive systems, we can have quiet battery electric streetcars at a fraction of the cost as seen on page 13 of the RTC rail transit business plan: https://sccrtc.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/TCAA_RNIS-Passenger-Rail-Business-Plan-DRAFT.pdf#page=13
Thanks again for including links to the Coast Futura demonstration streetcar, here: http://www.coastfutura.org
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Even the executive director is against the TIG/m privatization of the corridor for an unproven street car solution. The so called Coast Futura demonstration has yet to be licensed and will give the false impression that the system is all set an ready to go for four of these custom hand-built and bespoke street cars coming in at $4,000,000 a piece. The cost for the four that they proposed is the equivalent of 29 electric buses and the cost for the streetcars does not include any of the infrastructure required to run them, not the rail upgrades, bridge repairs, maintenance yards or crossings.
This is snake oil being sold to an unwary public glossing over the cost and schedule that is simply untenable.