The rail of two cities
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Chris OBrion
Chris OBrion is an artist, designer, and cartoonist. He has been a staff artist at daily newspapers in three different states and currently works out of Richmond, his hometown. You can check out more of his work at chrisobrion.com.
Notice: Comments that are not conducive to an interesting and thoughtful conversation may be removed at the editor’s discretion.
eternally trumpted.
Nice. Sad, too.
This is brilliant.
It might be worth mentioning though, that RVA’s depiction of light rail travels to far more interesting places than The TIde.
i’ve lived in both places and while it’s great that tidewater had the tide, it hardly matters because there’s no where to take it to. nothing happens there. there’s nothing to do. you’d just be riding it about all day, going to nothing. whereas richmond has TONS of stuff to do. i don’t know about you, but i’d rather has TONS of stuff to do.
ride a bike?
As a resident of Baltimore with a well established public transit system that embraces light rails–I have to say that they are awesome.
Would they work in Richmond–I don’t know–I lived in Richmond for five years and if the actual city is anything like the people who live there–probably not. Change does not come easy to Richmond–and the people are slow to embrace new ideas and concepts-no matter the benefit.
Even if it would be successful here, I don’t think it’s worth the expenditure at this time. Money can be spent on far more useful and needed things than light rail. Yes new stuff is cool, it’s why we like Christmas… but I don’t see that as any reason to envy another City.
Richmond had a better chance ten years ago to bring light rail back (remember, not only did we have it before, we were one of the first cities to have it) .Unfortunately a lot of the leadership was more concerned about tourists getting from Main Street Station to the Convention Center than making anything that actual citizens would use. That and their focus was on creating Center Stage.
Sadly, since then, a lot of the federal financing that could have made it happen probably got spent in Bagdad instead. our best hope now for the commuter equivalent to light rail is now Bus Rapid Transit along Broad. I urged citizens to support that initiative.
My uncle, who lives in VA Beach and wishes his city government would support Norfolk’s light rail by building on to it, believes that Norfolk is very lucky to have started working on it’s light rail when it did. If they had delayed, it’s highly likely the project would have fallen victim to the eroding economy.