St. Augustine Record Letter: Mobility is about movement
Posted: June 28, 2016 - 7:00pm | Updated: June 29, 2016 - 12:01am
By Joseph M. Rubino
Mobility is movement
Editor: I enjoyed your editorial June 27 regarding the “faint praise” for the mobility study. Your editorial seems to dovetail with many of the comments from the public regarding this issue — comments that seem to indicate some confusion and perhaps bit of bewilderment. So I thought I would throw in my own two cents of bewilderment.
Where I come from, mobility is about the movement of people and other activities related to the movement of human beings. St. Augustine does not have a problem with pedestrians moving around. It has a problem with people in cars moving around. More to the point, when you are discussing urban mobility, you are usually talking about transportation.
If a consultant is brought in, wouldn’t one think that consultant should be one with experience in the transportation sector? It appears that Littlejohn has great experience in engineering, and Mr. Kramer, who has been with the firm two years, has great experience as an urban planner.
My question is this: is this issue about either engineering or urban planning? Are we re-platting downtown? Are we going to somehow physically retrofit downtown to accommodate our needs?
Are we going to make major infrastructure changes that require civil engineers? Or are we actually concerned about the movement of people in, out, and around the city?
In doing a bit of research on both Littlejohn, and Kramer, I see nothing related to mobility. Nothing at all. My research on these folks kind of dovetails with your observation in the editorial that Mr. Kramer’s answers seem to “boilerplate, and almost vacuous.”
Might that be another way of saying he didn’t seem to know much about this whole mobility thing?
St. Augustine
Rubino is a federal transit consultant. He served seven years as St. Augustine’s citizens’ representative on The North Florida Transportation Planning Organization (TPO).
COMMENT
martystaug 06/29/16 - 04:20 pm 20Well Put.
Anyone living with the gridlock will have some very educated ideas of how to fix this traffic mess. I noticed a few people on the committee actually live uptown and in Davis Shores areas. They live with the gridlock, and hopefully will hold someone's feet to the fire when it comes to finding that "fix". But all of us living here already know, you cannot fit that many vehicles into our narrow limited streets and parking lots. It backs up all of the arteries into and out of town. Too many cars! That is the problem. Can anyone guess what the fix to that might be?
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