BOARD SAYS OKLAHOMA CITY SHOULD RE-ARRANGE THE DECK CHAIRS ON THE TITANIC…Who are these people? The same bunch, at least in spirit, that brought you “Urban Renewal” — the razing of historic downtown OKC for a few quick bucks and the subsequent 40-years-in-the-wilderness… Very certainly the same bunch who brought you the “magnificent new, state-of-the-art Oklahoma County Jail.” Oh — and their latest triumph — the hilariously blind, cramped and chintzy $250-million-per-mile “New I-40 Crosstown” and its spectacular vistas of —- ugly retaining walls (with that “tombstone-with-a-screw-in-the-top-of-it” motif repeated over and over again…) and the Producers Coop Cottonseed Compress (Wow! Look! An honest business!).Does anybody understand now why Stanley Draper insisted on “an elevated I-40 passage through downtown?” (Will the heroic statue of ‘Ol Stan holding the rolled-up-blueprints to his highway-in-the-sky standing down in Civic Center Park be taken away on the same trucks carrying off the “Old Crosstown’s structural steel? That’d be the “the steel with 50-to-75-years-of-useful-life-left….”) Maybe he figured passers-by would like to actually “see” downtown?How long are the “stakeholders” downtown going to put up with ODOT’s new “highway-in-a-hole” and its “no view of downtown?” (Remember, they’ve been carping about the “new Jail” since it opened!)

Now — having needlessly destroyed the magnificent 12-track-wide, 8-block-long OKC Union Station rail yard (300 SW 7th) to make way for the “New Crosstown,” they want us to blow hundreds of millions more trying to jam a transit hub for the entire region into the narrow, congested space between Bricktown and The Myriad.

Never mind the 50+ fast, daily, 100-car BNSF freight trains roaring right through the middle of the narrow, elevated rail corridor, and right through the middle of the MAPS Citizen Advisory Panel’s “dream passenger rail yard.” Never mind that according to BNSF, THE HEARTLAND FLYER is just about all the extra traffic the corridor can handle. Never mind that this is supposed to become the center for interfacing intercity passenger trains, regional commuter trains and local electric transit trains and trolleys with buses. No room for the extra trains, no room for buses — and they actually want to “narrow EK Gaylord Boulevard,” so there’ll be no room for anything else, either!

At Union Station they had an elegant facility with 3 existing passenger platforms (designed to serve 6 passenger tracks) linked to the city-owned, 55,000 square foot terminal building by underground tunnels, plenty of parking and bus space — and all at-grade with the exception of the beautiful, hand-built Robinson and Walker arterial street underpasses flanking the terminal one block east and west, respectively. It was close enough to the center of downtown to do what regional transit hubs are supposed to do but far enough away not to create new congestion problems. But, hard-headed visionaries that they are, allowed the silver-tongued-devils at ODOT talk them out of these treasures in favor of “something at Bricktown….”

Yep. Everything should be at least as successful as “Bricktown,” don’t you think? (80% per year new business failure rate still hold there?)

Hey — it’s YOUR money these “high powered thinkers” are looking to blow, Oklahoma. They’re already shoveling truckloads of debt down the line to your unborn offspring (can you say “unfunded highway maintenance liability?”) If you think this bunch deserves more of your money, well, then — knock yerself out.

Read more: http://newsok.com/board-says-oklahoma-city-should-buy-santa-fe-train-depot-for-transit-hub/article/3643914#ixzz1ksPADuDM