Quote Originally Posted by Dexlin View Post
You're preaching to the choir, man. None of their excuses made sense. As you pointed out, the capital costs weren't really the issue because the feds would have paid for much of it, and the line had something else that most proposals around the country never had, and that's tens-of-millions of dollars in private funds. The operational costs excuse doesn't make much sense, because as you also pointed out, it's cheaper in the long-run to run LRT cars, especially the longer you extend the line, which is why they wanted to build the entire thing at once up to 8 Mile. What this was was a short-sighted decisions by so-called money men that think they know best, but who have absolutely no idea about mass transit. Penny wise and pound foolish, just like they've always been.

Snyder doesn't believe in investing in anything other that corporate tax cuts, and Bing wouldn't know how to run a bus if one ran over him.
I totally agree that it's cheaper in the long-run to run LRT cars, for sure. Te problem is that it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. With the LRT plan [[one which I'd personally prefer), the operating costs would come from only one source...Detroiters. With the BRT plan, the operating costs get spread over the entire region.

Why don't we just do LRT across the entire region? Well, because now the capital costs are way over the budget.

Why doesn't the region chip in and pay the upfront capital costs since it's cheaper in the long run? Because 99% of the region never uses transit and aren't politically motivated to spend even the money on operating costs, let alone the higher price tag for the capital expenses.

Well does that make them short-sighted, penny-wise, and pound-foolish? Yes, of course it does. But they're not the ones suffering from a dearth of transit options. They're fine with the world just the way it is, thank you very much. Is it fair that they have all the money and they don't care? It doesn't matter whether or not it's fair. They have the money, and right or wrong, their lives won't be positively affected in any tangible way in the short- to intermediate-term by transit.

Well doesn't transit eventually benefit us all in the long-term? Well I believe it does. But convincing people to make large, short-term investments in exchange for a long-term benefit takes major salesmanship and high degrees of trust. [[Imagine a moment, being one of the first people to buy life insurance: "So wait, you want me to pay you $1,000 a year...so that one day, when I die, and I'm not here to verify it, and it might be 20 years from now...you'll write a check for $100,000 to my children?" Think about how much trust that requires. Or another example, think about how difficult it is to convince troubled high school student that a high school diploma and college degree will be worth foregoing an opportunity right now to make tons of money selling drugs. It's the same challenge.) And right now -- and for very good reason, suburban residents don't have a lot of trust in Detroit residents or their leadership.

So this is the political puzzle. And in my opinion, any solution which brings all parties to the table to begin working together and building trust with some emphasis on tangible, short-term results...is crucial, even if it means the investment is short-sighted. Once you have the roots of trust and partnership, it'll be much easier to change the BRT lines to LRT lines...and then we can use the existing buses to expand the system with new routes.

Nothing happens until we convince the people who control the money to spend it. And if that means that\ they get to make decisions we don't agree with...then -- to some extent -- we should be willing to take it if brings all the players together to get this off the ground.