The St. Pete Times took a critical look at Steve Polzin and CUTR's research interests, raising questions about the integrity of either's committment to light rail progress in the community.  I'm a little astonished because I too began a road toward such an article several times.  Most recently, when I stumbled upon a quote by Polzin in the Seattle Times in which he questions the integrity of light rail planners who, according to him, "obviously" want to lowball ridership figures:

Steven Polzin, a traffic expert at the University of South Florida, suspects that U.S. transit agencies commonly set the bar low at first.  

"You want to be successful, and obviously you want to lowball, so you can say you beat expectations," he said.

That sort of pissed me off in reading it at the time because, you know, he is technically one of our own local transit agency members if you loosely define such a person as someone who sits on the transit board. 

The reason I never ultimately posted my own suspicions had to do a lot with the same struggle the St. Pete Times article encounters.  While clearly no fan of light rail, Polzin can take on a pragmatic's role on cue.  There's just something in the end, despite his comments and backhanded derisions, that always leaves you giving him the benefit of the doubt.  He's an academic after all, and academics are by nature complicated in regard to the field of their interest.

But, at this time, I think it's important to underscore something most people have long forgotten.   Steve Polzin was the guy who first raised a key question during a Hartline Board meeting.  The question was, did HART want to authorize spending money to update a consulting report that the Federal Transit Administration required in order to keep Hillsborough County's efforts valid?  Failure to do so would knock Hillsborough County out of line for light rail in 2004. 

You can read the online ghost of the article, "Light Rail Plan Sputters Amid Doubts Over Funding".

Mind you, he didn't do this without cause, or, in absence of controversy (in 2004, many people thought light rail in Hillsborough County was a pipe dream).  In his own words, when that round of the fight for light rail really did collapse, Polzin put his position like this:

"There are others who feel like the public is probably not there right now and that we're prudent to move on to solutions that make more sense at this point in time," ... "I'm personally in the camp that we have spent too much time on something that is perhaps too visionary."

You can read the full article, "It's the End of the Line for Light Rail".

The current St. Pete Times article points out the potential in conflict between Polzin's public policy role in the direction of transit and light rail in Hillsborough County, and his association to CUTR, which has research-dollar interests in potentially competing solutions like Bus Rapid Transit.  TR actually made this connection in the website's iteration before this, but, the world was spared my grist too much because I favor evolving transit over competing transit technologies.  BRT in Tampa, as I see it, is clearing the way for light rail, and laying down a strong foundation for a dramatically improved bus network that will be needed to support it. 

But it's still a brave question by the St. Pete Times which I suppose, then, makes this a brave echo.