Cities keep building light-rail (and other kinds of rail), and people keep not riding. Reinventing Transit for a Post-COVID World
Count on bureaucrats to miss the mark.
Instead of attempting to serve modern urban areas with small-box transit services like vanpools, transit agencies in most major urban areas have reaffirmed the nineteenth-century business model by focusing on big-box transit services such as rail transit and bus-rapid transit. As of 1975, only eight urban areas still had some form of rail transit. Since then, at least two dozen urban areas that didn’t have rail transit in 1975 built or are building light-rail, heavy-rail, or commuter-rail lines, and another ten built streetcars or people movers.
None of these systems make sense in modern urban areas. Nor have many been successful. In many cases, the high cost of rail has forced transit agencies to cut bus service, resulting in few or no new riders. The worst case has been Los Angeles, which built several new rail transit lines and lost five or more bus riders for every rail rider gained.
There is much more with links to stories like Honolulu, where its proposed $3 billion transit system is now estimated to cost $12.4 billion.
$15,000 for every resident of urban Honolulu, most of whom will rarely if ever use it. When does it become so expensive that it loses their support?
And the story of Denver, where its new transit system serves downtown quite well. But downtown Denver only has 6% of the region's jobs. The Denver Tech Center has as many jobs, and is on a rail line, but it only sees 2% of workers use transit. Because a 19th Century solution to a 20th Century problem isn't what we need.
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light and heavy rail systems are completely successful.
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Oh, you thought their mission was different. No sorry, think banana republic and it all makes much more sense.
I know. All you have to do is look at California's high-speed train to nowhere.
DeleteIndeed. Here in Arizona, the only real money the light rail gets moving is via CONTINUED CONSTRUCTION, and yes, those giant "wrap" advertisements on the sides of the "railcars" ( In light of the many collisions btwn cars and the Lightrail here in Phoenix, I can only surmise that part of the problem is that, since the top to bottom, side to side billboard wraps on the "railcars" looks so much like a billboard, and billboards don't move,that car drivers rolling on autopilot do not perceive the light rail as TRAFFIC to be avoided. That is, drivers see it, but their association neurons do NOT analyze it as a hazard.
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