Marin Voice: Marin deserves practical traffic solutions
The recent effort of Marin supervisors Steve Kinsey and Katie Rice to kill the Transportation Authority of Marin’s consideration of a parking garage at the Larkspur Ferry terminal illustrates the lunacy of letting rigid ideology overrule common sense.
At its October meeting, the TAM board voted on its submission to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission of the required Regional Transportation Plan. Only projects that TAM puts on this list can get funded by MTC over the four-year planning cycle.
Putting a project on the list does not commit TAM to pursuing the project. It simply keeps the option open.
No one loves parking garages. But sometimes they’re a sensible solution or at least worthy of consideration.
Parking availability is a real problem at Marin’s ferries, which are currently the county’s most effective, convenient and popular mass transportation. Besides being a green commuting alternative, the ferry relieves vehicular traffic congestion, which tops residents’ list of what they want their elected officials to fix.
Doctrinaire rather than pragmatic, Rice and Kinsey voted to kill consideration of a Larkspur ferry parking garage by removing it from the TAM’s list. Their rationale?
Taking the ferry isn’t green enough.
Residents should get to the ferry by bus, or the as yet unproven Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit train.
Rice and Kinsey’s way to make that happen is to limit parking availability.
Rice and Kinsey seem to prefer prescriptive top-down planning over practical solutions to Marin’s current, real, traffic problem. See the full article in the Marin IJ.
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