Quote:
Originally Posted by babs
What's the story behind the fully built out but never used surface parking lot at the Sunset TC? Why would someone spend the money to build it but never open it.
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I'm going to suppose that it was either on the presumption that development around the station would include little parking, or--much as it beggars belief--that TriMet planners thought Sunset TC would be more or less a park-and-ride station, which like....Maybe, if downtown was actually that dense or parking-scarce, or 26 wasn't right there providing sometimes-as-fast access to downtown, and the MAX wasn't stupidly stuck up on the same surface streets as the cars and buses are once it gets downtown.
And that bridge over 26 isn't exactly to "nowhere", but almost. You can much more quickly access Sunset TC from the south side of 26 by using it, but it's only useful to the immediate neighborhoods, which are mostly single-family and cars-a-plenty, and again, the sidewalk on SW Butner ends less than a 1/4 mile from the bridge access (SW Park is better, at least).
The very basic bones of the MAX are pretty good, but so, so much of the execution of it and everything that'd feed into it--land use, density (the fact that that West Village plan mentions "community input" translating to 5-over-1s, not the taller building's they'd hoped for is just annoying), parking scarcity, job sprawl, transit service frequency, is so, so lacking.