No Light Rail in Vancouver!

Do Planners Really Want Public Involvement?

It is late and I am tired and I don’t have time or ideas for a lengthy post, so I am just going to vent over one of my pet peeves: how planners say they want public involvement and then through obstacles in the way of members of the public who want to get involved.

Today the plan I am concerned with is for the “central corridor,” a proposed light-rail line from Minneapolis to St. Paul. The Twin Cities Metropolitan Council published a draft environmental impact statement (EIS) for this proposal last year.

The first thing I notice is that the downloadable files are nearly 70 megabytes in size — and that doesn’t include the appendices, which are another 24 megabytes. This is a complete barrier for anyone with a dial-up connection, and can even be a problem for those with some so-called high-speed connections. The Adobe software for making PDFs has options that allow for smaller files by using lower resolutions for graphics, but all-wise urban planners have apparently never heard of those options.

On the other hand, if you have a really fast connection, it would be nice to download the files with one click; but instead, there are more than 20 different files to download. Some web sites offer one-click downloading as an option, but not the Metropolitan Council.

Once the PDFs are downloaded, they are not searchable. Instead of making PDFs (which are really just text files with graphics), they turned every page into a graphic. This not only makes the files bigger, it makes it difficult to do any research with the EIS.

I don’t know about those Windows machines, but on a Macintosh, you have to go out of your way to make PDFs that are not searchable. Why would they do that if they were genuinely interested in involving the public? Of course, they are not even remotely interested in public involvement (except for those members of the public willing to be their cheerleaders), but they could at least make a pretense of it instead of going out of their way to create barriers.

Finally, I read some of the EIS for this project, and it is a real turkey. For example, I wanted to know if they said anything about the light rail saving energy or reducing greenhouse gas emissions. They apparently never considered greenhouse gases (so much for comprehensive planning), but page 4-56 of the EIS admits that the light-rail line will consume almost twice as much energy as all the motor vehicles — both autos and buses — it takes off the road.

Nevertheless, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Met Council is promoting this line on the grounds that it will save energy. And since few people will bother to download a 70-MB environmental impact statement, and those who do won’t easily be able to find anything in it anyway, hardly anyone will know the truth.

Trackback  •  Posted in Transportation  

Dec 20

2007

16

Reprinted from The Antiplanner