Reply to Bethesda Row after the Purple Line Opens?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This may sounds bad, but I am not looking forward to the Purple Line opening.  Bethesda Row is already congested with people and Purple line will make it exponentially worse.

I also worry we'll see a lot more crime and bad people. BR is, at present, a pretty safe, wealthy enclave where teens can roam freely without worry.  Sure there's crime, but it's mostly not locals. We've all seen the Nike Store robbery videos.  Purple line will be low cost transit for people in lower income areas and that isn't always a great combination.

It's also a giant waste of public money, but I guess that ship has sailed.  Ugh.  Just wish it wasn't happening.

Also, poor Tacombi with that hideous construction plaza blocking all foot traffic for years on end.  I hope they are getting a rent concession.

[/quote]

Let's put this in some context, shall we?

The Americas were first settled by the peoples we now as "Native Americans" who migrated, most likely, across the Bering Straits from the Asian landmass. Europeans starting arriving on the continent from the late 15th century, wiping out and displacing Native Americans en masse.

Some time thereafter, landowners in the southern United States realized that they could make a lot of money for themselves by importing slaves and putting them to work harvesting cotton and other crops. About a hundred and sixty odd years ago and for reasons that are still debated, the northern United States went to war with the southern United States, with the victory of the former bringing an end to mass slavery.

To escape widespread discrimination and drawn by economic opportunities created by the Industrial Revolution, millions of freed slaves and their dependents migrated from the southern United States to the cities of northern United States. Millions of Europeans also migrated to these cities for similar reasons.

The advent of the streetcar, trolleys, and later automobiles allowed many white families - who generally earned better incomes than blacks and were not subject to discriminatory lending practices such as redlining - to flee the urban core to the emerging suburbs. Around the middle of the century, the popularity of the automobile meant that forms of public transportation between the urban core and the suburbs were no longer profitable, resulting in the dismantling of streetcar and trolley systems.

Beginning in around the 1970s, de-industrialization and various other factors led to the decay of many urban centers, impoverishing many black families who lacked the ability to move. Beginning in around the 1990s, however, reforms dismantled discriminatory lending and enabled the migration of many black families from the urban core to the suburbs. With the growth of the service sector, businesses and employment also shifted somewhat from the urban core to the suburbs.

To relieve increasing congestion on suburban streets, tackle climate change, but also to allow relatively poor families living in the suburbs to reach jobs located in other suburbs, jurisdictions such as Montgomery County, Maryland developed public transportation systems to connect different suburbs. These systems were opposed, however, by people like the OP who apparently abhor any public program that could possibly do anything to chip away at hundreds of years of rampant economic inequality in this country.[/quote]

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