Last night, at the Progressive Dane General Membership meeting, we had a little discussion on trolleys. Some of our candidates were hearing quite a bit of anger over the trolleys when they were knocking on doors and we decided to get a sense of the membership. Needless to say, there wasn’t anyone willing to stand up and tell us why trolleys were a good idea. Some of the comments are as follows:
1. We want affordable, accessible, frequent and 24 hour transportation choices and we’re not convinced trolleys can be affordable.
2. What is the problem we’re trying to solve? The busses already run where the trolleys would run. Why would loyal bus riders get off the busses and pay more to ride the trolley?
3. A thought that there were other options to be explored and while we want to consider innovative and new ideas, this doesn’t seem to be the answer.
4. Experiences in other cities might not be all they are saying that they are, we heard anecdotes of people not liking the expensive trolleys and their construction in other cities.
5. The only argument for them are that they are “cool” and that’s not enough.
6. Many weren’t convinced that the argument that this would create economic development was a solid argument.
7. There are questions about how trolleys interact with bike lanes and the danger of crossing the tracks for our many bikers in this City.
8. Will the overhead wires lead to more butchering of our trees ala MG&E?
9. There’s no demand for trolleys.
10. While we are “skeptical”, no one seemed ready to vote against them until we saw the results of the study.
I’m sure you can add many other things to this list like trolley tracks can’t be flexible, fix the bus system instead, why would we rip up streets we just reconstructed (State St and E. Washington), they should run to the airport and downtown hotels if we’re going to do it and much giggling over Shelbyville and the monorail. And I’m sure there are many more comments. Bottom line is, I’m hard pressed to find people in this City that are behind the trolleys. And at best, people are skeptical.
