How many along-the-isthmus lines are needed to provide full isthmus coverage? Just one, or maybe three?

The people who blame the greens are typically not inner city residents, but the middle class. People who have jobs at polluting factories tend to be unionized and make above-average incomes – e.g. tire workers’ median income is slightly higher than the local median for an entire household, and auto workers’ average income is close to twice the mean household income.

We’re probably splitting hairs here, but yes. At any rate, when you are worried about immediate threats, like putting food on the table, paying the rent, and the dudes on the corner packing heat–more abstract issues like global warming, or even pollution from the diesel busses running down the street, take a back seat.

There’s a reason, of course, that most environmentalists in the US seem to be upper-middle class (or wealthier) white folks–which leads to the other problem you note–environmental solutions that fail to benefit (or even adversely impact) minority and lower-income communities.

Certainly, I don’t blame the poor for an inadequate attention to environmental issues, were I poor, and the TV telling me that the reason I just lost my job is because it got moved to a country where the factory can belch all the filth into the air that it wants to–I might be tempted to blame the greens for my plight, as opposed to the fat cats who made the decision in order to further line the pockets. Which is precisely WHY the TV would be telling me it was all the greens’ fault.

Amazing how it works, no?

Thankfully there is a movement called “environmental justice” intend to make sure that projects don’t throw all the environmental bad effects on the poor….

Less thankfully, the mainstream environmental movement treats the environmental justice movement like a fly in its ointment.

I hope Milwaukee gets its streetcar going too.

At that point the four major conurbations on the Chicago-Milwaukee-Madison-Twin Cities corridor will all have fixed-guideway local transit, which will improve the experience for anyone visitng one of the others immensely…. and so make the HSR more popular and more successful. (Better to have the local connections in place *before* the long-distance ones, though you can do it the other way around too.)

You mean who *think* they can afford to *not* give a crap about the ozone layer. Obviously major environmental catastrophes hurt everyone, but they usually hurt the poor the worst (they’re the ones who die from the pollution, get drowned by the sea level rise, get fried by the radiation due to no ozone layer, starve first in any environmentally-induced famine, etc….)

Thankfully there is a movement called “environmental justice” intend to make sure that projects don’t throw all the environmental bad effects on the poor….

But Madison wouldn’t have to be left out anymore than they’ve already decided to be. Since they’ve decided in a geographically rational way to have their station at the airport instead of downtown (a near geographic impossibility from an operating standpoint), how much more difficult would it to take the Commuter Train to Watertown or Portage?

As a Twin Cities resident, I’d like access to Madison, but the place many of us go to is Chicago, and ridership between the Twin Cities & Chicago will suffer more than the extra riders generated in Madison. That is not to say that there shouldn’t be trains operating from Chicago & Milwaukee into downtown Madison.