The final stretch of the line up Carrollton Avenue, right past my old place, reopened Sunday. (Streetcars had been running up and down St. Charles Ave. for months.) But bringing transit back to harder-hit sections of the city is proving to be a knotty chicken-and-egg problem: cash-strapped RTA doesn't want to run routes with low ridership, and transit-dependent people don't want to return to neighborhoods without transit access. Hmmmm...
http://www.ajc.com/news/content/shared-gen/ap/National/New_Orleans_Transit.htmlIn harder-hit and slowly recovering neighborhoods, however, the wait for a bus can be an hour or more. Only a quarter of the people who took streetcars and buses on workdays before Katrina are doing so now.
Civic groups want more streetcar and bus lines to link neighborhoods as the city rebuilds, saying public transportation will help attract new residents to a city where insurance and gasoline prices are pushing up the already-high cost of living....
Popular routes, like the St. Claude line linking downtown to the Lower 9th Ward, have buses scheduled to run about every 15 minutes. (actually every 20 mins. -Ed.)
But "you can't put one out every 15 minutes when there are two people on the bus," said authority spokeswoman Rosalind Cook....
"But the problem is, if people don't feel there's adequate transportation into and out of a neighborhood, they're not coming back," she (Tanya Harris of ACORN -Ed.)
said. "I can't make it clear enough: People follow infrastructure; infrastructure should not follow people."What to do, what to do? Maybe set up some kind of demand-response service in the really thinly populated areas (the back of the Lower Ninth, much of New Orleans East, etc.)?
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