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I wish the city had more money now :(
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M1EK would have loved the short lived conversation on KVET this morning about the red line and how much it sucks, how they know that no matter what CAPMETRO says or does it will never be used because it goes no where people want it to go, how no one is currently riding it (except maybe 10 people), and it costs too much to ride.... lol ;)
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Probably not, actually. Knowing KVET it was probably the Skaggs/Daugherty version of anti-all-rail-transit crap.
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I've written Jeff Ward's show a bunch of times to no avail - he is absolutely uninterested in nuance, unless you're willing to call in and wait in line indefinitely, which is kind of hard to do in the afternoon. |
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^Seconded.
I would not expect people who call to, listen to, or run the country music stations or KLBJ-AM, to be supportive of anything that helps with public transportation. They are of the segment of the population that "has their's" and everyone is SOL. |
901 boardings per average weekday in April, which included 2 days of the (higher) first paid week. That's 450-500 people per day using the service; likely trending down given what I saw at the stations.
viva el crackplog! And I'm sorry I had to leave SecretAgentMan out of the "where is your mea culpa" list; I couldn't quickly find anything where he predicted OK ridership for this piece of crap. Maybe one of you can do so. Notice he's been absent ever since ridership began to trickle out? |
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However, I think we have seen both anecdotal and empirical evidence that there is unmet demand for travel outside of typical commute times, with greater frequency and more reverse commute options. There are only two ways to remedy this. Cap Metro could restrict its freight traffic to allow some evening and weekend service. This seems unlikely as they finally turned a profit on their freight operations this past year. This still wouldn't allow very frequent service or much reverse commuting because of the lack of multiple tracked sections. The other option is to invest in double, or ideally, triple tracking much of the line and more vehicles to allow more frequent, two-way travel and extended service hours without compromising the ability to operate freight. |
People say all kinds of things when they don't have any skin in the game. There's ten people claiming that increased bus service would get them to leave their car at home for every one who actually does, when you increase said bus service.
The fact is that double-tracking this line and running trains all day makes it trivially more useful (it still doesn't run anywhere but to the dead corner of downtown and to a bunch of shuttle-buses) at the expense of all of our local (and probably federal) dollars its feasible to use for rail - meaning that double-tracking the Red Line kills urban rail dead. In other words, we could kill rail for 30,000 commuters/day so a couple hundred people can get to/from 6th street on Friday and Saturday nights. Yay. Tri-Rail already did this, and failed. One could learn from their mistake - it would be a lot less expensive than making it ourselves, and spending another decade or two not building rail that people will actually use in large numbers. |
Yeah, I would not see any sensibility in trying to double track this line, and I don't think any voters will. I mean, it's still a line from "not quite downtown" to "nowhere" that takes an incredibly long route and goes very slow.
It's great that some people from Leander want to take the train on Saturday to get to a festival downtown... heck, I'd do it if I lived there. But really, is it worth the $7m a year (which I think is an incredibly inaccurate low-ball estimate) to the taxpayers of Austin to give them this sort of entertainment shuttle? That's all it will be... I think we need to consider the other option: shut it down and use the money we save for a real transit option, whenever the opportunity comes again (and I realize that might be 10 years). Or maybe an airport line, which would at least be useful for many more Austinites. |
I should know this being from Austin, but is there a shuttle bus from the airport, into downtown Austin? I don't recall seeing any, but then again I wasn't looking. Always got the old ride from a friend.
The whole red line is pretty unfortunate as its a great concept being shed under bad light and poor design. If it sticks around, and ends up running more, it could be more popular in the future with all the new development along the way. Hopefully, any public ignorance or cynicism born out of this train won't reflect on future rail ballots. But it looks like it will if CapMetro doesn't get its act together and do something smart. |
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Basically you can take it from the airport and it will drop you off at 6th and Congress. I've taken the bus from Westlake to the airport a few times, I can take the 30 route to downtown and then pick up the flyer. Sometimes even Cap Metro isn't so bad (although the frequency/hours still are lacking). |
I'm always a fan of throwing a ton of money at a problem to try and "fix" it. What a joke.
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Commuter rail is a good concept if done right, that's all I meant.
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Any opinions on this new CEO? Does anyone know any details about the job she did in Corpus and Orlando?
http://www.statesman.com/news/local/...ef-754512.html |
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May ridership figures are out and they're even worse.
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