Management is not planning: poised for a repeat of past failures. Rawhide!

There's another public meeting of the Transcenter task force this week. My understanding is that it will be another consultant defined audience participation in which regular civic minded people form small groups and come up with a bunch of mini consensus ideas that show zero imagination, ignoring obvious issues like downtown White Plains being turned into a gathering place for all manner of buses that carry few if any passengers.

So, on we go.

Where do we put the train station?

Where to we put all those new parking spaces?

Where to construct those high priced luxury rental apartment buildings that will be occupied by those highly paid millennials who will walk everywhere and add tons of money to the city school system but without burdening it with children of their own in their small apartments?

Plop the millennial worker office buildings on top of all that and, oh, make plenty of room for the bus depots, especially the ones for regional buses that will cross the new Hudson River bridge and enter White Plains for the sole purpose of connecting the passengers with Metro North into Manhattan.

But whatever you do, do NOT make the train station area either the new center of the municipality as it is on pretty much all the other train stops on that line nor functionally independent. Twenty years ago Common Council members forced the City Center developer to include that now ridiculed entrance/exit on Mamaroneck Avenue so that people would be inclined to also frequent existing retail businesses outside. That entrance/exit is now undergoing a restructuring and valet parking is being added, which will all but eliminate any exposure to businesses outside the City Center. All the better to insulate the decision makers from the impact of their policies on downtown generally and on downtown residents specifically.

Will White Plains ever actually change those pseudo interstate highways (Hamilton Avenue, Main Street, Martine Avenue) between the City Center and train station into anything that's really different? Make any of them look like Park Avenue in Manhattan as has been suggested here?

Remember that cars are the only things that really matter in White Plains. So make more lanes and more parking. Move 'em. Park 'em. Head 'em up. Move 'em out. Rawhide! (Western TV Series (1959–1965))