Quote:
Originally Posted by oldmanshirt
And I may be off on this, but isn't car traffic slowing down the street car is one of the built-in negatives about a street car, a sacrifice you make for getting "cheaper" rail?
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You are.
There's various levels of need and throughput for every mode, so "cheaper" is a misnomer in this sense. Also, a lot (well, one or two people in particular) argue that, "well, streetcars are stuck in traffic and are slower, which means they're not a valid mode". The problem with that is two-fold:
1) Not all corridors maintain the same traffic level after a revision
2) Not all corridors are as busy as one would imagine.
It's not car traffic that slows down the streetcar, it's the traffic policy for that particular road. A streetcar is fixed route, therefore, its traffic rules are a no-brainer. It moves forward or backward on the same route in the same place day after day. Buses, on the other hand, are given to a flexibility that makes them part of the traffic policy. In other words, wherever the people are funneled, the bus goes there.
Unless you make a specific traffic rule toward buses, like a bus only lane, the bus is a fleeting nebulous thing. It's a gap-filler in larger cities, holding up two ends of the same string, being a conveyance for those without cars or access to faster modes and those who choose not to drive cars.
Streetcars are fixed, and as such, become part of the landscape and when the requirements are there, they can be upgraded to add a lane restriction to speed operations. Some would argue that it's impossible to take away a lane for cars. That's a lie. It's done all the time, upgrading roads to suit different policies. You go from having an idyllic boulevard to a limited-stop cross-town route so quickly nowadays. Or perhaps the lane is removed from cross-town flow to become a turning lane, serving a different crowd. That lane, in essence, has been removed from one group's usage (in this case, cross-town users) and has been given to another group (local users). This changes the traffic patterns. Perhaps with that change, the crosstown bus becomes two routes, some runs splitting off on that turn into the different destination?
San Antonio is one of the few cities I know that has the chutzpah to take a lane away from everyone, unlike most cities which will cut down use for populations through simple revision. Remember, Hardberger put in his main plaza changes before Bloomberg even coughed up his plans for Broadway in NYC.
As to throughput and need, downtown San Antonio has the absolute baseline need for what a Streetcar is capable of. Downtown visitors number in the 10-20mil range a year, whereas yearly usage and throughput for a streetcar is best utilized between 5 and 25mil yearly passengers before you need to upgrade the ROW and perhaps capacity. The implications for this are numerous, since it can create the justification on its own for a Downtown-only system but it opens up the notion that, now that a cross-downtown route has been essentially lightened of cars, what can go in through that particular route?
This all brings up the idea of a hub-and-spoke system for light rail that utilizes the Streetcar ROW (Skoda and Siemens trams can operate in the same electric structure, so long as the railbed is deep enough), or upzoning the termini of the streetcar to allow for UTSA-DT campus structures like dorms and improved facilities to allow for a non-commuter campus structure.
If the question is "which mode is best", LRT is not the answer. Buses are not the answer. Commuter rail is not the answer. Streetcars are not the answer. Cars are not the answer. Bikes are not the answer.
All modes work, especially in a city with a varied topography and excellent infrastructure potential like San Antonio. The question should not be "which mode is the best" but "which modes". Then the answer is all of the above.