The Special Transit Advisory Commission, STAC, agreed Monday to a long-term plan for area transit. The plan’s details will be released later this month, but it appears that the new plan isn’t much different than the old TTA plan that suffered a massive political defeat.

Recommendations include pushing the plan for self-powered diesel locomotives on the L-shaped route joining North Raleigh, Downtown Raleigh, Cary, RTP, and Durham. Additionally, a light-rail route from UNC Hospitals to downtown Durham would be built, along with a better supporting bus network.

Designing a rail system for an area like this, one with so many small foci, is tough, but doable. While the new plan proposes to add Chapel Hill to the mix, it still is wrought with many of the TTA’s old problems that left taxpayers luke-warm at best. The overriding problem which transit “experts” keep ignoring is that people don’t envision themselves using this plan . The more the same plan is forced, the more resistance there will be.

The focus for the plan is getting people to their RTP workplaces, but the problem with RTP is that it is, in fact, not a focal area. It is widely dispersed and commands an extra transit leg for each employee choosing to join the anticipated 14,000 daily train riders. Not many will choose to drive to a park-and-ride, wait for a train in the elements, ride the train through many stops, then wait for a bus to slowly get them to their office. Real estimates show that people with 35 minute commutes would spend at least 75 minutes for each leg.

What we need is a plan that entices people to ride; one that people realistically see themselves using. If STAC wants to put together a plan that people will welcome, they need to show us that they did go back to the drawing board by producing a dream plan we’ve never seen, with no price tag. Otherwise habitual emotions will reject this plan, too. Show that this month’s plan is just “Phase I” of a master plan that works for most instead of being the implied final product. Instead of 56 miles of rail and buses at a cost of $2 billion, shoot for the sky. Put together a plan like this one which has something like 150 miles at a cost of $6 billion. Another idea uses several interlocking “U” shaped routes to overlap and serve RTP well.

People have a comfort zone for spending and cannot comprehend numbers above that zone. Very few people will have a different emotional response to a $6 billion price tag than they would a $2 billion price tag. Either way, the John Locke Foundation hims and haws, right? The difference is that the more comprehensive plan is something people see themselves using more than just for novelty purposes.

There is a nice little dreamy transit site on the net called Carfree Cities . The site outlines a plan where 6 million people could live in an area smaller than the Triangle all less than 35 total minutes away from each other. The plan calls for the typical “string of pearls” transit-oriented-developments, but the string resembles a flower. Something similar could be done in the Triangle, actually, and would actually be able to serve many of RTP’s largest employers without a local shuttle bus system.

I’m not a huge fan of the inefficiencies of a custom-built, high occupancy transit vehicle-based system, but if we’re going to do one, let’s do one that is better than Atlanta’s. I repeatedly hear Atlanta critics who think we can avoid Atlanta’s problems by implementing dumbed-down version of Atlanta’s rail system! This makes no sense. Let’s do better.

Go ahead STAC. Dream and give us something to dream about. Give us something that excites more than 14,000 of our 1,000,000 people.