1) A recent letter to the editor in the Sacramento Bee recounts experiences similar to other accounts and helps explain why so few will ride light rail on a regular basis.
"Going green isn't worth light-rail risks
"I recently started to ride light rail because of the high cost of fuel, as I'm sure many people have done.
"The trouble is that what you have to put up with in the public transportation system makes it not worth the effort. Since I have been riding, I have witnessed mentally unstable people screaming and berating other passengers, smelly homeless people, aluminum can collectors with large bags of stinky cans, people drinking alcohol and leaving the bottles, and teenagers with no respect for anyone around them.
"I have feared for my safety a few times when strange individuals have confronted me or got off the train with me when it was dark outside.
"Why should people try to be green by not driving their cars when they have to put up with these types of people? It's not worth the risk for my safety.
"– Rick Wagner, Sacramento"
2) Charlotte, North Carolina (not much bigger than Sacramento and we, who are thinking of becoming a green technology powerhouse, could note how they did it) is emerging as a financial powerhouse, as reported by New Geography.
An excerpt.
“Charlotte’s emergence has been remarkably rapid. When John Harris was growing up on a dairy farm outside Charlotte some six decades ago, it was still a sleepy little southern town. “It was a quiet kind of place back then,” he recalls. “We were a stepchild to the people back East.”
“Today, Charlotte is a stepchild no longer. Taking advantage of a traditional Southern sense of being under-estimated, the leadership in this region of some 1.5 million has worked to become not only a bigger place but an important one.
“The stepchild always has to work harder,” explains Harris, one of the region’s leading real estate powers. “We’ve always known what it’s like to be ‘have nots,’ not the ‘haves.’”
“Like Houston, Charlotte represents a classic opportunity city, a place built by newcomers used to not getting too much respect. While other New York rivals like Chicago and San Francisco could seem cosmopolitan enough to be real contenders, Charlotte has emerged very much out of nowhere, in a charge led by people who, at least before the last decade or so, seemed like nobodies.
“Charlotte’s ascendancy has not been brought about by a well-developed hierarchy but by entrepreneurs like Bank of America’s Hugh McColl, many of whom came from smaller southern cities to Charlotte in the 1960s and 1970s. In the ensuing decades, through mergers and regional expansion, Charlotte has vaulted past not only its southern rivals but traditional banking power centers like Chicago, Pittsburgh and San Francisco.”
