[Doady]

I said it the other thread and I'll say it again. I don't think Austin really has the ridership for rail yet. They need to invest in buses first.

Dallas made the mistake in investing in rail before buses, building the largest light rail system in the country, and it has worse transit ridership than Austin. It's only when it finally started investing in buses last year that now Dallas is finally seeing major ridership growth.

You need a highly-developed bus system to know where to build rail. You need lots of buses to feed riders into the rail lines. Austin is doing good job building its bus network and it needs to finish doing that. It shouldn't rush to build rail.

When ridership is too high, that's when you build rail. When ridership is too low, you have to invest in buses.

Las Vegas, Winnipeg, Quebec City, these are some bus-only systems that get 60-70 million boardings every year, twice as much as Austin's. Seattle was around 150 million boardings annually before it finally built light rail. And guess what? It is around 200 million today, not a drastic change.

Rail isn't built to create a transit culture, rail is built for an existing transit culture. Austin doesn't have that transit culture, yet.