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Originally Posted by TakeFive
The propaganda formula is otherwise the same and I find both irritating.
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Certainly echo chambers can be bad. But 1) I don't think Angie is the same as David, and 2) The Streetsblogs of the world aren't really there for convincing moderates. They're home base for true believers.
To make an analogy, sending an atheist to Sunday church would probably just piss the atheist off, but Christians enjoy church and find it useful. So home base is not itself so much the problem as people's increasing ability to close of outside voices. If you never leave church then you end up thinking a lot of socially unacceptable things. And if you never leave Streetsblog it's the same. Please note I am not calling urbanists a religion. It's an analogy.
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Originally Posted by TakeFive
if Park N Rides help to solve that critical first and last mile access, then they're important until the requisite, preferred density arrives.
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You're being too reductionist with the park-and-ride thing. Even most hard core urbanists agree that *some* park-and-rides make sense. Most end-line stations should be PnRs, as well as occasional stations where major highways come together. Any *big* PnR is probably OK.
The problem is the little ones.
The problem is putting a tiny PnR every half mile and thus making it harder for people to walk or for TOD to happen at all those stations, when drivers could just as easily drive to a single big PnR 2 miles away. Yeah, you want drivers to be able to get there, but you accomplish that at strategic locations rather than assuming it by default for all/most stations. And you *definitely* shouldn't decide the route of your entire line based on the assumption that every station should have a PnR (or if you do, you space the stations further apart and use diesel trains).
Yes, it's true that sometimes you can use a PnR as land bank until TOD is practical. But that's both wasteful and risky. The land would be used for TOD sooner if it didn't have the transit agency middle man, and oftentimes neighborhood politicians (or the DOT itself) won't let the PnR go once its there. They say "it's always full, you can't reduce parking!" But it's full because it's tiny, and meanwhile the gigantic PnR a mile away that takes 5 minutes longer to drive to has 1,000 empty spaces.
So Denver's problem isn't exactly that it has park-and-rides. It's that we built lines using a train type and station-spacing that's optimized for pedestrians, but put lines in locations and oriented the stations around driving. The result is a system that doesn't work particularly well for either drivers (it's too slow) or pedestrians (it's too hard to access). This is why I say we'd have used DMU and had fewer stops if we did it all over again.