Help Pass KY House Bill 88

Kentucky House Bill 88 would make it easier to prosecute reckless drivers who hit pedestrians and bicyclists. By making it clear that Kentucky will not tolerate reckless driving, HB 88 will make our roads safer for everyone and will encourage walking and bicycling.

How to Help

To pass House Bill 88, we need Rep. John Tilley, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, to take action on the bill at the Judiciary Committee next meeting. We're utilizing three tactics to achieve this:

Passenger Rail did very well in the Stimulus Bill. Typically Amtrack gets $1.3 billion dollars per year. In the stimulus passenger rail gets $8 billion for capital investments on high speed corridors, in addition to an expanded yearly endowment. The struggle now becomes how to spend the money fast enough.

Politico has a must-read piece on how passenger rail became the "signature issue" the Obama administration focused on to the exclusion of other worthy projects like school renovation and modernizing the nation's electric grid.

The CART Quarterly Meeting on Friday is on, but due to the icestorm we're having to make a few changes. Dr Schimpeler can't present. Instead, we'll have a presentation on the P&L Commuter Rail Corridor, East-West Passenger bus service in Kentucky, One Road bike/ped protection, and so on.

The Clifton Center has heat and power, so please join us for a toasty presentation!

Since the early 2000s there has been no transit service linking Kentucky from East to West. It is not possible, for example, to go from Louisville to Frankfort.

If Miller Trailways has anything to say about it, that is going to change. However, they need your letters of support to make it happen!

Greyhound abandoned the last East-West service because it wasn't profitable. Congress decided that it wasn't a good idea to orphan all those small communities without any inter city transit, so they created 5311-f funds to subsidize rural intercity transit. Kentucky gets $1.8 million worth of funds, and currently doesn't subsidize any inter-city bus transit of note. Instead, that money is marked as unspent and flows into a larger pot where it is used to subsidize rural on-demand transit services - basically taxis, running with an end-user fare of about $1 per mile.

John Yarmuth (KY-3rd) will join the powerful Ways and Means Committee in his second term as representative. This is good news for public transit - his previous committees were not as helpful as W&M.

TARC is working on raising money to study the P&L / 31W corridor. Three alternatives will be examined:

1. Beefed up express TARC bus service along 31W
2. Commuter service via motor coach
3. Commuter Rail on the P&L tracks

In other words CART, Metro Council, PAL, Miller, TARC, and the cities and counties have gotten this ball rolling.

What we're demonstrating is the ability to run passenger trains like this one:

This is Nashville's Music City Star. The engine is a refurbished AMTRAK passenger engine, costing about $200,000 used. The two gallery cars each seat 150+ passengers, and are available for about $20,000 each used. So this train has the passenger capacity of about six city buses.

The other interesting thing about this trainset is it's not clear which way it is travelling. It can run "backwards" with an engineer atop the back gallery car, controlling the engine remotely, or "forwards" with the engineer in the engine. The other crewperson is a conductor.

To generate support for this idea, we secured the cooperation of the P&L Railway and Miller Trailways for a one-day, invitation-only event. Early on Saturday officials gathered for a press conference at TARC:

When the alarm goes off at 4 a.m., I ask myself, ‘Why am I doing this?’  Nobody would notice if I just went back to sleep and didn’t ride 200 miles on TARC buses for the next 13 hours.  This is brutal.  I don’t know how some people do this every working day. Why am I doing this?  Four years ago I heard about World Car Free Day on the internet and decided I wanted to bring it to Louisville.  I saw the addiction we have for our cars (having been an addict myself once) and thought it would be good for this city to start Step 1 and admit we have a problem.  World Car Free Day started in 2000 in Europe.  It has spread to over 1,000 cities around the world.  It challenges people to go for one day without their cars.  There’s a sure way to find out if your addicted to something – try giving it up for a while.  Four years ago I got CART (the Coalition for the Advancement of Regional Transportation), a local non-profit alternative transportation advocacy group to help me promote World Car Free Day in Louisville.  We posted fliers around town and held a press conference at the boardroom of TARC and no one came.  When I got back to my office, a bit down from the experience, I got a phone interview from a local radio station and we were off and running.  In the following years’ our efforts and successes grew.  We printed fliers, posters, had rallies, and web pages.  It’s a hard event with which to measure success because it’s a non-event.  People do this on their own, riding a bike to work, taking the bus, or telecommuting....

Update: registration is now closed.

You are invited to join us for a ride on Nashville's Music City Star commuter rail system on September 26th. This fun & informative trip includes tickets both for the train itself, and for a charter bus leaving from Louisville. For travel details, see the Nashville Trip page. To buy tickets by credit card, press the button:

 
Image courtesy Metro Jacksonville