Upcoming Event: CRTP Task Force Meet & Greet!

The local volunteer Task Force which guides the Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities (CRTP) is holding a public meet-and-greet at Eureka’s Chapala Café on Wednesday, August 26th, from 5-7pm.   This will be an informal occasion for anyone interested in the issues to talk about CRTP’s plans and priorities as well as other local transportation topics.  If you come, we encourage you to pay for any food or drinks at the register downstairs before proceeding to the event upstairs.  We hope to see you there!

What: CRTP Task Force Meet & Greet

Where: Chapala Café (201 Second St, Eureka)

When: Wednesday, August 26th, from 5-7pm

“My Word”: New Priorities for Transportation

From today’s Times-Standard:

“…That’s why the first priority of the newly formed Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities (CRTP) is to spend our limited transportation dollars on maintenance and repair. CRTP is a group of Humboldt and Del Norte County residents whose mission is to promote transportation solutions which protect and support a healthy environment, healthy people, healthy communities and a healthy economy on the North Coast. After maintenance and repair, our priorities for transportation infrastructure are to fund only new infrastructure which supports healthy, livable, sustainable communities, and to cancel counterproductive road expansion projects which don’t meet these basic criteria.

These are pretty common-sense priorities, and you might think that our public agencies wouldn’t need much prodding to follow them. Given the facts, you might even assume that every available transportation dollar would be allocated to maintaining our existing critical infrastructure in working order. But you’d be wrong. Instead, transportation planners often seem dead set on continuing to spend money to expand roads even more. They often promote projects which do little to make our communities more livable, but do bring in more traffic to cause more infrastructure damage we can’t afford to fix….

It’s up to CRTP — and everyone who agrees with us — to change those priorities. You can find out more at www.transportationpriorities.org. We hope you’ll join us in taking up the challenge!”

Read the full op-ed.