ODOT LIES ABOUT UNION STATION CONTINUE!

Originally posted in the Oklahoma Sustainability Network email forum.

In a message dated 11/25/2003 10:56:17 AM Central Standard Time,

It is a cold, deliberate lie.

The project will excavate every square inch of the original yard and all existing tracks. The ODOT plan calls for the Union Pacific (former Rock Island) track to be rebuilt - but down in the 15-foot-deep trench with the highway. There will be room only for the single mainline track and perhaps a short siding. All BNSF access (this is the line to the Airport to the southwest and to Tulsa to the northeast) will apparently be removed.

The northernmost edge of the "depression" or trench in which all this will be done will fall only about 43 feet from the back wall of the Union Station terminal building. That's about as far as from the back wall of my house to the back fence of our small suburban yard here in Moore. That's what will remain of the generous, originally 12-track Union Station yard.

The whole point of Union Station was and is that the yard, the Robinson and Walker underpasses and the terminal building were all built as an integrated unit. The yard was built at-grade to meet passengers and mail and express trucks at street level from Hudson and Harvey. One block east and west, the marvelous overpasses speed arterial street traffic UNDER the broad yard. Passengers walked from the waiting rooms through the underground tunnels to one of three platforms in the yard. All of this capital engineering is still in place - and still entirely functional. It is as perfect a potential modern multimodal center as could be imagined. It was also the place where many of our families sent our uncles and grandfathers off to war and where many other memories were made. It will all be destroyed. Without its rail yard, the depot is just a building (as Salt Lakers have discovered to their dismay!), becoming kind of a cruel joke.

You may also hear ODOT propagandists say that "the passenger access tunnels are old and would cost far too much money to bring up to ADA standards. Of course, the Santa Fe depot downtown is of precisely the same vintage as Union Station, and its age in no way prevented refitting with a new elevator and platforms to meet ADA criteria. ODOT's argument seems to be - "instead of spending minimal dollars to reuse the existing asset, the answer is to destroy the whole facility." Kind of like amputating a leg to "cure" a hangnail. It's "highway logic."

It's not enough that ODOT has heedlessly planned this travesty without so much as a cursory look at what might have been done with the elegant and irreplaceable Union Station plant - they have also ginned up a calculated cover of deliberate lies to obscure the truth to the public, hiding behind the technical nature of this kind of project! It's not just bad transportation. It's bad government.

Again, I quote the late Justice Robert H. Jackson: "It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error."

TOM ELMORE