New Orleans Affirmative- 7ws strategy Page
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Education Tradeoff DAEducation programs aren’t enough – public transportation is out of shape and no program exists to evacuate the poorest from New Orleans Renne 2005 John L. Renne is an Assistant Professor and Associate Director of the University of New Orleans Transportation Center in the College of Urban and Public Affairs at the University of New Orleans. He has expertise in the areas of transportation and land use planning, particularly in transit-oriented development PhD in Urban Planning and Policy Development Major Fields: Transportation and Land Use Planning Master of Urban and Regional Planning (Valedictorian)) Concentration: Economic Development Bachelor of Environmental Design (with Honors) Major: Urban Planning and Design Minor: Economics Car-less in the Eye of Katrina 6 September 2005 http://www.planetizen.com/node/17255 Herm Mass chaos. A storm of biblical proportions. Hell on earth. These are just a few accounts used by the media to describe the scene in the hours and days after Hurricane Katrina. As I write this, I am refugee in Texas just days after the storm. There are approximately 100,000 people stranded in New Orleans hoping for transport out of the City. An important question not discussed by the media is why so many people were left behind? The reason so many lives are in jeopardy is a result of our extreme dependence on cars and the lack of planning for public transportation, both for regular use and for emergencies. A brief background about my short experience in Nawlins My wife and I moved to New Orleans on August 10, 2005. I was hired by the College of Urban and Public Affairs to help launch a new program in transportation studies at the University of New Orleans (UNO). Upon finding an apartment in the Lower Garden District, I navigated the public transportation system for the first two weeks of my job traveling about one hour in each direction to and from work – a journey that only takes about 20 minutes by car. The actual travel time only takes about 30 minutes on transit but each day I would spend up to 35 minutes in each direction waiting for a transfer, which was only supposed to take about 10 minutes. It was clear very quickly that most middle class locals have long abandoned the transit system in the Big Easy. I should note that last year the Regional Transit Authority (RTA) expanded its streetcar line down Canal Street. This is a positive step forward but only a small band-aid in attempting to revive a transit system mostly used by tourists and those with little or no choice. The poorest in New Orleans rely on the transit system for their travel needs. According to the US Census, in 2000, an astonishing 27 percent of households did not own a vehicle. Not surprisingly, 27 percent of households in New Orleans are also below the poverty line. This translates to approximately 120,000 residents that have little choice in their travel plans outside of walking, cycling, or using public transport. One would assume that a city in danger of hurricanes would have a plan to evacuate the poorest third of its residents by using buses and trains. Over the past year, there has been a massive effort to educate the citizenry about the contra-flow highway lanes. The threat of hurricanes in New Orleans is not new, but to the best of my knowledge, no plans were ever created to evacuate residents who do not have access to cars. Cars CPGiving people cars doesn’t solve Litman 06, Masters of Environmental Studies, Evergreen State College (Olympia, Washington), 1995. BA, with emphasis on urban planning, Evergreen State College (Olympia, Washington), 1983. Lessons From Katrina and Rita What Major Disasters Can Teach Transportation Planners Todd Litman Victoria Transport Policy Institute 13 April, 2006 http://www.vtpi.org/katrina.pdf Some critics argue that the best way to improve emergency transportation is to increase automobile ownership and roadway capacity. In a message distributed after Katrina but before Rita, O’Toole (2005) pointed out most New Orleans residents with automobiles could evacuate with relative convenience and comfort, and so argues that the best evacuation strategy is to subsidize car ownership for households that lack vehicles. But such arguments ignore several important points (Litman, 2005). • Many people cannot drive due to disabilities, age, addictions, legal restrictions, or other problems. Encouraging such people to drive is impractical and dangerous. • Many vehicles, particularly the older vehicles typically owned by lower-income people, tend to be unreliable and unsafe. Even people who own a car need backup transport options. • Automobiles cannot be used in some disaster situations. Earthquakes, storms and floods often damage vehicles, highways and bridges (Giuliano and Golog, 1998). • Increased automobile ownership would exacerbate traffic congestion. Hurricane Rita evacuation failed due to too many private vehicles. • The reduction in hurricane deaths cited by O’Toole has been offset many times over by increased automobile traffic deaths. O’Toole argues that it would be cheaper to purchase cars for nonmotorists than to build New Orleans’ streetcar system, but his accounting ignores many costs (operating expenses, parking, road capacity, crash damages, etc.), and the used vehicles he proposes purchasing would require frequent repairs and only last a few more years, compared with the 20-40 year operating life of a train and 50+ years of a rail line. The gift of a “free” car can be a curse to financially struggling families since it adds hundreds of dollars in annual expenses for insurance, fuel, tires and repairs. At $3,500 annually ($1,000 in capital and $2,500 in operating expenses), providing cars to 100,000 New Orleans households that lack vehicles would cost $350 million, more than three times the regional transit budget, plus large additional costs to expand road and parking capacity. Relying on cars has led to mass destruction Bullard et al. 07 Robert D. Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson, Angel O. Torres Robert D. Bullard is a Ware professor of sociology and director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University. His most recent book is The Black Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century: Race, Power, and Politics of Place (2007). Glenn S. Johnson is a research associate in the Environmental Justice Resource Center and an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the same university. He has coedited a number of books, including Highway Robbery: Transportation Racism and New Routes to Equity (2004). Angel O. Torres is a geographic information system training specialist with the Environmental Justice Resource Center. He also has coedited several publications, including Sprawl City: Race, Politics, and Planning in Atlanta (2000) and Highway Robbery. Dismantling Transportation Apartheid in the United States Before and After Disasters Strike Vol. 34 No. 3 On August 29, Hurricane Katrina made landfall near New Orleans, leaving death and destruction across the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama Gulf Coast. Katrina is likely the most destructive hurricane in U.S. history. It was also one of the deadliest in decades, with a death toll of 1,325. Bodies were still being discovered under rubble in New Orleans’s mostly black Ninth Ward nearly a year after the storm. Disaster planners had failed the “most vulnerable” in New Orleans—people without cars, nondrivers, the disabled, the homeless, sick persons, the elderly, and children. The data confirm what many believed: Katrina killed the weakest. Hurricane Katrina also exposed a major weakness in urban mass evacuation plans. It shone a spotlight on the heightened vulnerability of people without cars. Katrina’s evacuation plan did work relatively well for people with cars but miserably failed those depending on public transit. More than one-third of New Orleans’s African American residents did not own a car. Over 15 percent of the city’s residents relied on public transportation as their primary mode of travel. Local, state, and federal emergency planners must have known—for years—of the risks facing these transit dependent residents. At least 100,000 New Orleans residents—and perhaps double or triple that—did not have cars to evacuate in case of a major storm. A 2002 article titled “Planning for the Evacuation of New Orleans” detailed the risks faced by the hundreds of thousands of persons without cars and nondrivers in New Orleans. Brian Wolshon, Planning for the Evacuation of New Orleans, Inst. Transp. Engineers J. 45 (Feb. 2002), available at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3734/is_200202/ai_n9045870/print. Of the 1.4 million inhabitants in the high-threat areas, government officials assumed that only 60 percent of the population—850,000 people, give or take—would be able to leave. Although the various agencies knew that this large vulnerable population existed, there simply was no effective plan to evacuate these New Orleanians. Yet this problem had received national attention in 1998 during Hurricane Georges, when emergency evacuation plans mostly left behind residents who did not own cars. Further, when Hurricane Ivan had struck New Orleans in 2004, many New Orleanians who did not own cars had been left to fend for themselves, while others were evacuated to the Superdome and other “shelters of last resort.” More telling, New Orleans’s post-Ivan emergency plan had been modified to include the use of public buses to evacuate those without private transportation. Transporting an estimated 100,000 to 135,000 people out of harm’s way certainly would have been no small undertaking. Yet when the hurricane hit, most of the city’s five hundred transit and school buses were without drivers. During the storm, about 190 RTA buses were lost to flooding. Afterward, most of the New Orleans Rapid Transit Authority (NORTA) employees were dispersed across the country, and many were left homeless. Before Katrina, NORTA employed more than 1,300 people. A year later, the NORTA Board of Directors laid off 150 of its 730 remaining employees. These layoffs included about 125 of NORTA’s 400 operators, and 21 of its 162 maintenance employees. Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 1.03 Mb. Share with your friends:
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