Kim Delaney, Strategic Development coordinator for the Treasure Coast Regional Planning Council, spoke at our city commission meeting on Tuesday on All Aboard Florida. She is a knowledgeable and eloquent speaker and did an outstanding job to promote All Aboard Florida.
With over 8,000 signed petitions on-line and another 2,000 hand-signed, All Aboard Florida and Mr. Choo, Choo will happen whether people object or not. It won't matter that the rail line has agreed to increase public input from 45 days to 75 and from 6 meetings to 8.This is all a pretense so that they all can say "we did our best to accommodate the people to voice their concerns." This is the same strategy that the Lake Worth City Commission is using by putting on town hall meetings for the general obligation bond, etc.
AAF is a proposed passenger rail service operating on the existing Florida East Coast corridor between Miami and Orlando. Each day 32 passenger train crossings will occur between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m. AAF is under the umbrella of Fortress Investment Group, a New York City Hedge Fund. AAF has applied for a government RRIF loan that has been reported in several articles to be greater than $1.5 billion.
The train stations will be in Orlando, Miami, West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale. Lake Worth will NOT have a station and Lake Worth officials (all of them, from what I've been told, are behind this high speed rail project), must be under an illusion that a passenger will jump off the train and walk to our downtown to have lunch. Silencing the train horns will cost $23.4 million in Palm Beach County and $17.1 million in Broward County and even if we get a grant, we will have to spend some of our own money that we don't have, incidentally..
The freight trains will also travel along the corridor and are expected to stop at several designated locations allowing passenger trains to pass. The combined number of trains is estimated to be greater than 45 per day. It's all about freight
7 comments:
I guess the city should ask for a bigger bond amount.
This means that the crossing gates will be going down about every 15 min.And that's NOT counting the freight trains already on the lines. And that's NOT counting the CSX tracks that are already a pain in everyone's butt. This is just Fing insane.
As anyone who drives between WPB and Miami (or even Ft. Lauderdale) can tell you, we need better mass transit. I'm actually all for more train options even if there isn't a stop in Lake Worth, driving up to WPB to catch a train to Miami makes good sense.
anony at 4:26. Are you one of the LW commissioners or with the Treasure Coast Regional council?
why would LW be for this?
I'm for it b/c I'm a working, busy, professional and I'd be happy to take a train to Miami (from WPB) to get down there.
Sadly, so many people around here are retired or don't work and just have no consideration for the rest of us. I-95 is so overburdened, even with the SunPass lanes it easily can take me three hours to drive down to Miami.
CONSIDERATION is a two way street. To get to Miami, what will you do? Drive to WPB? Drive to Ft. Lauderdale? How do we pay for the horn silencing at 13 rail crossings? Or perhaps that does not matter at all because you don't live near the tracks?
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