Columnist Peggy Pierce: Mass transit needed sooner than later

Peggy Pierce

Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2001 | 9:11 a.m.

Peggy Pierce is conservation co-chair of the Southern Nevada Group of the Sierra Club.

Whoa! You guys need better security. It looks like the editorial staff from the Las Vegas Review-Journal snuck in and had their way with your Dec. 4 editorial, "More lanes are critical for U.S. 95."

Let's talk about making sense. The Sun's editorial says, "In an ideal world, where mass transportation was abundant, perhaps such an argument could be made to stop more roads from being built." You talk about mass transportation like it was a natural part of the environment.

You think those tunnels under Manhattan were there when Hudson arrived? All of the cities that have great mass transportation built it and those people aren't any more clever than we are. Of course further on you suggest that mass transportation will need to be one of our solutions for bad air, but you say, "these magically won't appear overnight." You think the widening of U.S. 95 is going to happen overnight? I got a news flash. The widening project will take seven, count them, seven years of choking dust, delays caused by construction and just general hair-pulling aggravation.

Now let's talk about the fourth paragraph in which you brought up a wholly unrelated topic in an effort to smear the Sierra Club as a way to divert the readers' attention from the paucity of logic in the rest of your editorial. The Sierra Club is a democratic organization, and any member can put forth a resolution for the consideration of all members. Twice recently resolutions to limit immigration have been put forth and twice those resolutions were resoundingly defeated. The truth is that dissension happens in all organizations, including the Sierra Club. Let me repeat. The Sierra Club does not endorse the limiting of immigration.

Having tried to paint the Sierra Club into a yuppie corner, let me say this about us and the battle over air pollution. It is true that the Sierra Club is not the most diverse of organizations. However, no one should extrapolate from that that air pollution is a yuppie issue. The truth is that asthma, which, if not caused by pollution, is greatly aggravated by pollution, is suffered disproportionately by people in the Hispanic community and people in the African-American community. The monitoring stations that most often register as being over the legal standards for dirty air are all in predominately minority and low-income communities. We may not be diverse but air pollution is.

The facts are that study after study says that building more roads will not solve congestion problems because of the phenomena of "induced travel." This means that if roads are built or widened, people will drive more miles every day than they had previously driven. It has happened everywhere else, and even the Nevada Department of Transportation admits that the widened highway 95 will be full to capacity two years after completion just as the Spaghetti Bowl is already at the level NDOT predicted it would reach in 2015. The more accurate model, using induced travel data, is not being used by the people who design our roads so their capacity predictions will continue to be inaccurate.

A monorail from downtown to Summerlin would cost $800 million. A monorail is not the best choice in mass transit but mass transit is affordable. The entire 95 widening project will cost $873 million. Mass transit will solve our transportation problems, not just put a very expensive Band-aid on them.

The Sun, the Regional Transportation Commission, everyone seem to agree that eventually we will have to have mass transit. The Sierra Club believes the time to build mass transit is now, not after we have spent hundreds of millions of dollars more on roads and not after we have each spent hundreds of dollars more trying to cure the respiratory ailments that won't go away.