AUSTIN | Transportation Updates

[M1EK]

No, they won't. If commuter rail turns out to be a 'success' (carrying 2000 riders per day, let's say), the call will go out to build more commuter lines which still have the same fatal flaw (like the line to Elgin).

If commuter rail turns out to be a 'failure', it'll do what it did in South Florida: destroy momentum for rail here for a generation ("we tried it and it didn't work"). This isn't helped by the fact that the anonymous misleader electricron's buddies like Lyndon Henry keep trying to rebrand it as light rail.

The reason CM can't build light rail just to the crossing at Airport/Lamar is that it would only get the urban half of the ridership and still require transfers. You can't justify taking away a traffic lane each way on Lamar/Guadalupe for anything less than the 30-45,000 riders that the 2000 LRT would have brought with it; but you'd never get there with this unholy graft of light+commuter rail in a city where it's still so easy to drive.

Again, folks, what CM is doing is not, despite electicron's lies to the contrary, what Houston and Dallas and Portland and everybody else did. All of those cities found one good rail corridor that went directly to and by a bunch of major activity centers without requiring transfers and in each and every one of those cases, left the pre-existing rail ROW where necessary to run trains in streets to get to the final destination(s) without requiring shuttling (some of these cities built the entire LRT start in new street runningway, of course).

You can't convince choice commuters to leave their car behind for a three-seat ride (drive to park-and-ride, train, shuttle-bus). You CAN convince them for a two-seat or one-seat ride (drive to park-and-ride, ride LRT straight to office; or walk to LRT and take it to office).

The commuter rail plan has essentially nobody within a nice walk of its stations on the resdential end OR the office end.