Merritt Mullen
Actually, I think the London Underground works quite well as does the Metro-RER in Paris (as long as there is not a strike or work slowdown in progress; all bets are off then). Be nice to have similarly good system in the Bay Area and LA Basin but California is not a wizard spot for subways even if they could get by the political stupidity. The reason that systems in London and Paris and other cities are useful is that the cities were built up around the transit systems and for the most part, were privately funded. The same is true of Washington DC and San Francisco; the really stupid thing these two did was for municipal government to take over the systems and then rip up all of the existing streetcar tracks. Same for the Red Car in Los Angeles. San Francisco is quite glad that they didn't rip out the J, K, L, M and N streetcar lines as they did to the rest of the letter lines and all of numbered lines. The current F line is on Market St. and the north Embarcadero are largely for the touristas. They are now paying a ton of money that they don't have (San Francisco, remember) to replace the old #15 car line on Third street not to mention the absolute mess they have made out of the job over the last three years with more year to go - San Francisco, again. When you try to retrofit public transit into areas like the Bay Area, LA, Dallas, Denver, etc., etc. where autos have been the dominant and often ONLY viable form of transportation for 50+ years, it mostly doesn't work without CAREFUL planning; even then, it's 50-50. How's that again? CAREFUL planning? Local governments? Yaright!
-jl John
--Q. How much ice must melt off of LAND to raise the mean global sea level ONE INCH? A. 2220 CUBIC MILES; do the arithmetic
