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El Paso /Ciudad Juarez Transportation
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PROBLEM
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El Paso and Ciudad Juarez are not very large cities yet they have great importance as border cities. A wide variety of trade occurrs here. That is one of the reasons there exists so much traffic at the border crossings and within both cities. The traffic that exists here at the border can't be improved so easily. My suggestion is to improve public trnsportation in both cities. Hopefully this way there would beless congestion at the bridges and a decrease in air pollution as well. Also some improvement can be done on the streets. the inclusion of a bike lane would help in decreasing accidents and increase the use of bicycles instead of cars. That's just another way we can decrease air pollution here on the border. The idea is to encourage people to use nore often public transportation for the purpose of decreasing air pollution abd traffic. The main goal is to create a healthy environment.
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Bus System
It would be great for many international students who live across the border to just catch a bus and come to school. Instead of having to wait in the long lines at the bridge just to get to school and pay all that money on gas. We can help all those international students by providing an express bus, which would only be for students to go from Juarez to UTEP and vice versa. The bus would have to meet at a certain location in Juarez for all students. Then it would cross the bridge on an express lane and head directly to the UTEP campus. The express bus would only run during the early morning hours for arrival at UTEP. And it would run in the late afternoon and evening hours heading back to Ciudad Juarez.
In addition to the express bus you could add on to all buses in both Ciudad Juarez and El Paso bike racks. The bike racks are just another way of encouraging the use the bus. Instead of having people drive long distances to one location and use the car just in a small area. Now they can ride the bus anywhere they want and use their bikes to travel short distances in a certain area. It gets people out of the habit of using the car for everything. It also will be a great help for college students that need their bikes on campus.
Road Improvements
With out a doubt both cities need major improvements on their streets and sidewalks. The number one improvement needed is the fixing of the potholes on the roads. Also several of the streets need sidewalks added to them. There are many streets without a sidewalk, which are used very often by pedestrians. But the one thing that we must add to the streets is a bike lane. Almost every city has plans of adding bike lanes to reduce the amount of accidents and help cyclist with reckless drivers. The addition of a bike lane is just another way of encouraging people to not use their cars since they will feel safer in a specified lane. It is easier for people to ride in a specified lane because they don?t have to worry about the cars running over them. One other border improvement that will depend on the public is the specification of lanes on the bridges. The goal is to decrease traffic at the bridges. We can obtain this by specifying lanes bridges and lanes for the different business. Each bridge would be assigned for a certain type of traffic. For example we could assign Zaragoza with all the trailers and freights, the Cordoba with business and miscellaneous, and Stanton with students and travel. Also we could have a certain number of lanes for each type of traffic; and we could also change it according to the time of day and day of the week.
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What we can do
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Reference
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Bus System
The express bus can only become reality if the students make a petition to the school and also to both city councils for the addition of this bus line. UTEP will need major support from its international students to make this bus line reality. Although it will take time for it to start running since both cities must coordinate together to make it work. The bike racks would have to be a proposal done to Sun Metro and funding would be done through the county.
Road Improvements
All of the road improvements have to go through both city councils for improvements in each separate city. The funding will have to be done by either each city or by the state they belong too. If the state funds these reparations it has to go to the state committee. Each of us as citizens of our respectful state must write letters and petitions to our city and state representatives to make these improvements reality.
Author: Cora Seidler
Class: ITS
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