Quote:
Originally Posted by alexjon
Then I'll say you have no practical experience, then. I find it surprising that you would compare the transit reality of austin with your transit fantasy of portland. I also find it hilarious that a suburbanite is telling urbanites how local transit should work. I think it would be like me going around telling New Yorkers how they should augment their subways.
Thinking more and more about it, I realize that no, a streetcar would NOT work in Austin: it's full of people like you, who think that car drivers are inherently stupid, traffic engineers can't get it right and rail transit should magically whoosh people to and from their inherently unwalkable "walkable" neighborhoods.
This is also why I think LRT wouldn't work in Austin-- considering a full or majority build-out can only muster about the same ridership as a severely diminished build-out in other cities. But keep taking your fairy dust, M1EK. You will have magical LRT and all that sprawl in Austin you pretend doesn't exist will magically turn into walkable dense neighborhoods!
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You're completely insane - the day one predictions for Austin's LRT line were higher than actual results seen in all recent LRT starts.
All I'm doing is being objective about streetcar rather than buying into hype. When streetcar vehicles run in reserved guideway, they're great - when they run in shared traffic, they have all the disadvantages of buses AND trains, at least for the riders (repeat that last part many times since you clearly don't understand: AT LEAST FOR THE RIDERS). This is simple logic - and the fact that you keep jumping off into this kind of nonsense ought to tell people you don't have any real answers here.
Nobody has EVER been able to show a direct comparison between streetcar and bus on the same route in current conditions (trying to attract existing car drivers) - because the streetcar they're comparing to is inevitably running on a different route with some reserved guideway (and hence looks better). And, no, I don't believe that buses running in reserved guideway can win the same ridership - because once you have a good runningway, the rest of the advantages of rail transit become much larger in comparison. (In other words, I believe that
reliability and speed are far more important than everything else when trying to attract people who aren't taking transit today. The fact that you think this is an illogical contention shows that you have no clue, whatsoever, about what it takes to attract choice commuters to transit.
I live 3/4 of a mile north of UT in a 1923 house in a very walkable neighborhood, BTW. Had my idiot company not opened their office in the 2% of Austin I can't easily reach by bus from there, I'd be busing it every day.
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