Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
I don't understand these analogies. If you own a car and never use it, yes, you're living a non-autocentric lifestyle. If a a city has a billion miles of transit and basically no ridership, yes, it's auto-oriented with no real transit.
The fact is that Dallas has essentially no transit ridership. So what does it matter how many miles of light rail, or how many bus routes? You could shut all Dallas transit down tomorrow, and it would barely register.
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In terms of the analogies you don't understand, I guess I would just ask you, if you knew someone who had a car they didn't use very often would you actually say "They don't have a car" or would you just say, "They're living a non-autocentric lifestyle?"
I suppose the main reasons I would say that "most people in a city are living an auto-centric lifestyle" rather than saying "the city doesn't have transit" is because if the transit is there for those who want it, that has implications for the minority who do want or need it. Plus, the presence of physical infrastructure and like electrified rail transit and institutional structures like a regional transit agency potentially gives an advantage to a city who does want to get serious about attracting ridership compared to one that actually has no transit.
But I agree it's functionally not a huge difference.
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