I’m not sure if an opinion piece is appropriate here, so please let me know if this doesn’t fit the theme of the community, and I’ll avoid sharing such thoughts in the future.
I’m extremely frustrated with the car centric culture in my area. I live about 25 miles west of a quarry. Every day I watch trains go up and down the railroad mostly carrying gravel. This railroad stretches for several hours by car in each direction, connecting several large cities and even passing a few tourist attractions, and despite our traffic congestion problems there is little interest in trying to use this rail for actual people.
One company moved in and started running a new passenger rail service. Within a few weeks, we had protesters at the railroads complaining that drivers don’t understand railroad crossings. I saw posters about how trains were killing residents when drivers park on the tracks and get hit. I don’t understand! Where do you think the train is going to go? They don’t exactly come out of nowhere. They follow the tracks! And we’ve always had trains passing through our town before. At a later local election a candidate ran on the premise that they’re going to protect home values and our children by reducing or eliminating the number of trains passing through our town. This candidate did win our local election and sadly they succeeded in cutting down on rail investment.
Fast-forward a couple years later. Passenger rail stations were built at the endpoints of this rail to ferry tourists. I drive parallel to this rail on the way to work several times per week for almost 45 minutes each way, 20 minutes of which is heavy traffic. I get to enjoy watching people ride the train while there’s no stop anywhere near my house because our local government has sided with homeowners that a passenger rail station is “simply too dangerous.” I would have to drive over an hour to the nearest passenger rail station to ride the train, and I can literally see the tracks from my apartment.
Every time I see that train I feel bitter. I could save so much money if these boneheads would have let them build a train station in our town. Absolutely ridiculous! The train is there. The rail is there. I don’t understand why a train is such a personal, existential threat to your way of life.
@henfredemars @buckykat Nope. Both homebuyers and apartment developers are willing to pay a premium for high quality transit access, especially rail. Unless the rail service is really inconvenient and unreliable, it would substantially raise their precious property values, should they want to sell and move further out in the exurbs because they’re afraid of people who aren’t encased in SUVs.
Big oil and big auto have people convinced that it isn’t true, same with new apartments. Decades and billions of dollars to convince Americans that density is for poor people (even though its the dense places where property values skyrocket) and cars are the only acceptable transit because you don’t want to share space with a poor, do you?
@henfredemars @buckykat @PedestrianError exactly. 100% would raise property values. Wherever you go, if other things are roughly equal, closer to the train station is more 💰 💵 💴
@biciuc @henfredemars @buckykat @PedestrianError They don’t want renters moving into the neighborhood.