NARP

NARP blog

TRAINS: A travel choice Americans want

» Visit the Official NARP Website


Off-Shore Attacks on Light Rail

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

“What’s going on here is a battle between commuters who want to get to work and a bunch of people who don’t want to look at trolley cars while they play golf.  If the public understands that’s what this fight is about, then the Purple Line will be built.”

--Ben Ross, president, Action Committee for Transit (Montgomery County, MD)

This quote, one of the more effective rebuttals to anti-transit advocacy that I’ve seen, appeared in a July 13 Washington Post article about a strange web site fighting the Purple LineThe Post reported that “the site’s owner is listed as a company based in the Madeira Islands off the coast of Portugal that allows clients to register Web sites anonymously…State tax records shed a little more light: Its founder is a board member at Columbia Country Club in Montgomery, whose 100-year-old golf course would be bisected by the transit line.”

Perhaps the Columbia Country Clubbers should visit Newton Massachusetts, where the Woodland Golf Club, founded in 1896, has long coexisted first with steam and diesel-powered commuter trains and, since July 4, 1959, with the Riverside branch of MBTA’s Green Line.

Next to the above article, The Post ran a nice report on plans for streetcars in Washington, DC, with a map showing potential linkage (at Silver Spring) with the Purple Line. Some trolley cars could even enter service late next year, said the headline.

--Ross Capon

Posted by NARP

Tags: light rail, nimbys, streetcars, transit
(0) Comments

©2006 National Association of Railroad Passengers | » NARP website

» Recent Entries

» Blogroll

» Terms of Service for Comments

You may register to post comments in response to NARP-generated postings on the Blog. By registering you agree 1) that all comments will be relevant to the respective posting and 2) not to post any messages that are obscene, vulgar, slanderous, hateful, threatening, or that violate any laws. We reserve the right to permanently block postings from any user who does not abide by the above terms. NARP reserves the right to remove, edit, or move any messages for any reason.

» Monthly Archives


RSS 1.0 | RSS 2.0 | Atom
What is RSS?

Add to Technorati Favorites