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Originally Posted by electricron
Were they really shortcuts?
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By shortcuts I really meant bad station locations in highway medians or crammed next to them rather than building elevated or subway stations at existing neighborhood centers.
Stuff like this:
Obviously, digging a subway tunnel to the Seattle Fish Guys intersection would be much more expensive than going with the u/c station in the highway median, but...it would also get much higher ridership and motivate hi-rise construction, if zoning permits.
If there are 20 examples of this in a system, and building a subway or elevated station in a neighborhood's natural focus gets 1,000 more daily riders per station (2,000 daily rides), then we're attracting 40,000 more rides and 20,000 more people per day. Right now the ridership on the existing Link network isn't spectacular thanks in large part to the lackluster MLK section and outer stations that are park-and-ride oriented.
Also, Sounder is very slow:
It also doesn't serve the airport and none of its stations serve traditional neighborhood centers. It's all park-and-ride.
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The citizens of that community, during the EIS, expressed their views on what they would accept. A street running light rail train on MLK is what they wanted, and that is exactly what they got.
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I understand that citizen comment is part of the required process, but it's a waste of time since they only get the opinions of the busy-body people who show up and dominate every community meeting. When I worked in local news we had nicknames for a few of the especially insufferable ones.