Dear Editor:
As we have sown with politician transportation, so have we
reaped.
Dear Editor:
As we have sown with politician transportation, so have we reaped.
Dominance of socialist transit planners at our MPOs (metropolitan planning organizations) like VTA, MTC, AMBAG, TAMC, COG, SCCRTC, etc., has resulted in nearly empty buses and trains moving at mostly taxpayers’ expense while basic highway improvements wait.
Under their leadership, we get BART extensions, but we cannot have median barriers until body counts shame our elected representatives.
Silicon Valley remains the largest urban area in North America without an intermodal facility. Salinas Valley shippers are also denied the viable intermodal alternative to trucks.
Axle weight is the largest factor in road surface destruction and bridge support deterioration, but our “senior transportation planners” at our local MPOs cannot tell me what an intermodal facility is. Neither the VTA nor its Salinas Valley comrades have any plans to restore intermodal facilities for the Central California Coast.
The worsening highway conditions are not surprising to far-sighted transportation men like Gilroy’s Al Navaroli, who I like to call the “Godfather of California Intermodal,” and Jim Nicholas, Caltrans Chief of Highway Programs who told the California Transportation Commission that California desperately needs more intermodal facilities .
In the 1960s Al persuaded Bud Antle to purchase the first fleet of 500 refrigerated trailers for piggyback shipment of produce for the world’s largest shipper of iceberg lettuce, which we moved on the Salad Bowl Express via SP-Ogden-UP-Council Bluffs-CNW-Chicago-Penn Central.
With the current truce announced last month in Washington between the Association of American Railroads and the American Trucking Association on increased GVW (gross vehicle weight) and spreading LCVs (long combination vehicles) in the new legislation to replace Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21), we have a window of opportunity to correct decades of abuse by Soviet planners at our MPOs.
Meanwhile, the Ninth Circuit’s stay on the entry of Mexican trucks into the US is likely to be overturned in the Supreme Court. Presently existing technology and truck-competitive service, at rates averaging 40 percent less than American (not Mexican) truckload freight rates, could with proper leadership give the Central California Coast Region an alternative for movement of both east-bound perishables and west-bound dry freight.
From Chinese garlic being imported, or lettuce and other California produce outbound for East Coast and eastern Canadian markets, our underutilized rail option should no longer be ignored by the so-called “transit planners” at our MPOs.
During the Vietnam War, when I supervised the piggyback ramp on the graveyard shift in San Jose, shippers and receivers had this fuel-saving alternative to highway movement.
But in their myopic enchantment with budget deficit boondoggles like Light Rail (Heavy Socialism), Caltrain, BART and county transit, our leaders steered us into our present quagmire.
Structural reform in transport policy, like the Administration’s Amtrak restructuring legislation announced last week in Washington, is the logical solution.
But until we tear down the Iron Curtain in American transport policy, we will continue to suffer the consequences of being as a transportation attorney once said of his countrymen, a house divided against itself.
It is time for a change in our transport policy: Emperor Transit First is stark naked.
Joe Thompson, Gilroy
Submitted Tuesday, Aug. 12
