Quote:
Originally Posted by accord1999
Interesting opinion piece by Neil McKendrick on the business case for the Green Line. In it, he echoes a lot of the concerns raised in this thread about the Green Line and also provided a table with information that I hadn't seen in such detail before. The table provides a breakdown of 2019 bus ridership and service hours for the North, SE and SW and shows how hard it'll be for Stage 1 to achieve its projected ridership of 55K-65K even without COVID concerns.
https://everydaytourist.ca/city-planning-101/is-there-a-business-case-for-the-green-line |
That article perfectly describes my criticism of the Green Line. I don't expect any changes now though, it finally seems like we have a proposal that could get built. Not that this will be the end of the problems though, there will be more cost increases and "unforeseeable" scandals.
I think the SE portion of the Green Line will get built, by 2029 or so, languish for a good few years with low ridership but maybe get its buildout south, at which point it will have a hope of success. A new set of political leaders will be questioned on this, and they will rightly point the blame at the incompetence of the current leadership.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MalcolmTucker
That table is only east of Deerfoot.
And yeah - people with the worst transit access in the city are going to have poor ridership - their communities were literally designed for LRT and it will speed up access. Better service should help modify the base factors driving ridership instead of being a multiplier of the current transit number. You think of it - base factor is lumpy - change it and you get big changes. Think of university students driving to the NW - they are forced to pay for transit, but until the Greenline launches the travel time is just too high. The first stage will bring that down to still very long but better.
Now would it be better to get to at least McKenzie Lake? Yes! Further expansion would likely push that trip above from 90-100 minutes to sub an hour.
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Isn't conventional thinking that you build higher order transit where the ridership is, not where it isn't? It is true that the SE bus routes are poor, but (and I know we've discussed this before) IMO the correct response to that is to improve the bus routes. If we'd have gone down that road, we'd have those improved bus routes today and if they were well used, then it would justify LRT. And given the delays of the Green Line, that would have scarcely made a difference in the timeline for them getting LRT (if it was justified).