Transit Corridor Plans: Cramped Quarters and Limited Mobility

Santa Cruz provides a roadmap for what you can expect.

Decades of deliberately created congestion in Santa Cruz County has brought about the recently introduced, Transit Corridors Plan. Henry Baker, Deputy Director of the Planning Department (circa 1972) told the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors that in order to gain public transit patronage, they would have to bait people with a carrot and discipline them with a stick. “Make it easy to use,” he said, “with reliable service and improved scheduling, and it will be attractive. But if that doesn’t work, make auto usage difficult, costly, and inconvenient. Permit road congestion to increase.” [emphasis added]

For over 30 years Santa Cruz County has been slowly implementing this plan. The Transit Corridors Plan is based on walking, biking and the newly acquired purchase by the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission (SCCRTC) of the 32-mile rail line. There's nothing wrong with walking, biking and trains, if honestly financed and not at the sake of your auto mobility. The voters overwhelmingly rejected the rail purchase in 2004, but the Agenda 21 Action Plan keeps coming. As part of the transportation corridor, the rail line was an essential purchase to further smart growth planning in Santa Cruz County. Tax money will be used to force mass transportation on you.

A goal behind the Soquel Corridor is to build 3,300 dense housing units along Soquel Avenue, Mission Street, Water Street, and Ocean Street in Santa Cruz – the standard “new” American smart growth stack ’n pack controlled housing scheme. As you might expect, these plans have creepy crawly ramifications. The plan does not focus solely on Soquel Drive, but encompasses Soquel Village, all of Seacliff, Aptos, the majority of Live Oak and areas in Watsonville.

Recently, the Santa Cruz County Planning Department held a “Visioning Workshop” led by a trained facilitator. While these types of meetings are arranged under the auspices of soliciting input from community members, it is the job of the facilitator to guide the group to arrive at a predetermined consensus on the plan.

Agenda 21 deceptively uses warm and fuzzy terms designed to bait people into believing they will live happily in: Sustainable Communities, Cool Cities with Climate Action Compacts, Smart Growth Neighborhoods, Walkable Communities, and Transit Villages.

The Transit Corridors Plan and the Rail Purchase are actually land use control devices that give us a more complete picture of the globalist political assault on Santa Cruz. They want us OUT of our cars and eventually onto mass transit, as more and more of us move into congested Smart Growth bastions.

We must reverse the localized Globalist advance. If the Transit Corridors Plan proceeds unabated this is what you need to imagine:

Communities surrounded by open space that ultimately you cannot access. In
these communities human action is monitored and controlled and new world human
settlements or Smart Growth patterns are connected by public transportation corridors.

Liberty is delicate and easily breached. Watch for, understand, and expose your town’s Transit Corridor Plan.

Related Links on Santa Cruz Rail Trail:

Click here for a flyer that was distributed by an attendee at some of the visioning meetings.  Some people reacted positively to the flyer, while others did not.

Santa Cruz railroad celebration - article, Cyclelicious

Rail trail a big fail - Letter to the Editor, Santa Cruz Sentinel (2nd letter on page)

Transit Corridor Plans: Cramped Quarters and Limited Mobility by Freedom Advocates 

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