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Originally Posted by eschaton
This may be true. But nearly everywhere with convenient access to East Liberty also has access to Downtown/Oakland which is nearly as convenient - particularly given the East Busway connects all of these areas together. At most East Liberty shaves perhaps 10 minutes off a potential transit-based commute.
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East Liberty to Smithfield and Sixth is 13 minutes. For anyone with a transfer, you would also have to add some additional minutes plus the cost of the transfer.
This is actually easily in the range where you can discourage a lot of potential transit riders. For example, when they did the Eastern Corridor Transit Study, they estimated the Spine Line to Wilkinsburg could reduce travel times from Wilkinsburg to Downtown by about 4 minutes, from 21 to 17 (this is via Oakland on the 61A, to make it a comparable route). That was sufficient in their models to increase daily ridership by 8900 (an increase of about 29% over the base estimate).
If you compare Wilkinsburg to East Liberty versus Smithfield and Sixth, you are going from 19 minutes to 6 minutes, a far larger reduction in time. Of course as of now, that is a being applied to a far smaller base, but that is the point--add more employers to East Liberty, and you should attract more riders to the East Busway from Wilkinsburg (and many other places) because they will suddenly have a far more competitive transit option.
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I think you're forgetting the P3 here. Yes, it dumps onto surface streets blocks too early in Oakland, but it allows all the communities which are on the East Busway's route to have quicker access to Oakland than surface routes would allow.
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Wilkinsburg to East Liberty on the P3 is 5 minutes. During rush hour, that goes up to 14 minutes for Fifth and Craig, 23 minutes for Fifth and Robinson. Again, these are very big differences in terms of the competitiveness of transit.
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By building office space outside of Downtown (and I'm including here "Greater Downtown" areas like the North Shore, Lower Strip, and Civic Arena site) you are by definition reducing demand somewhat for Downtown office space.
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That is not actually a definitional question, it is an empirical one. When an increase in supply of one thing reduces demand for another thing, economists would call those "substitutes". When instead an increase in supply of one thing increases demand for another thing, economists would call those "complements". It turns out there are in fact many complementary things in the world. Some are obvious--like an increase in supply of cars increases demand for car tires. Some are less obvious but no less significant, and a major such category is networked things. So, for example, an increase in supply of phones in one part of a network may increase demand for phones at other parts of that same network, because the value of being on that network is related to the number of other users of that network.
There is a growing literature suggesting a very large part of the value of cities is in fact within this category of network effects. And that in turn supports the proposition that an increase in supply of employers at one part of a city's core networks may well increase, not decrease, employer demand at other parts of that same network. So, one certainly cannot assume that more employers in one part of a city's network definitionaly means fewer employers at other parts of a city's network, any more than you can assume that if Verizon sells more phones in Cleveland, it must be selling fewer phones in Pittsburgh.
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I'll admit it's better than most. I think it's way better than say South Side Works - I think the office park element of it was very ill-founded. Certainly it's better than the suburbs. I still think East Liberty is better off as being a dense residential + retail locus rather than a major employment locus.
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But if there is going to be non-Downtown office development in the future--and there will be--then if you don't do some of that in East Liberty, you will likely do it in places like South Side Works, the suburbs, Charlotte, or China instead. That makes a "Downtown or nothing" strategy a net loser in terms of total local transit utilization.
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Yes. I think one of the biggest flaws in the TOD apartment complex was the decision not to reduce the parking minimums for the apartments. By providing every unit with parking, you effectively turn busway access into an added perk to a wide repertoire of other amenities, not an essential part of the package for car-free or "car-light" households.
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Even without parking minimums, some higher-income apartment dwellers in East Liberty are going to own cars and drive for their commute. That is because there are other reasons to live in East Liberty beside access to the East Busway. You can chip away at those percentages by increasing the cost and inconvenience of car ownership in East Liberty, but you are not going to completely eliminate them.
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From an urban planning perspective, walking and biking commutes are great. I bike to work myself much of the year. But from planning a transit system with high farebox recovery, they cause just as much of an issue with lost revenue as driving does.
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OK, but why should that be our goal? I am interested in what is sometimes called by economists total social welfare, or alternatively total net benefit. Transit oriented development can often contribute to that because there are a lot of benefits to increased transit usage, but walking and biking commutes also can contribute to that because there are also a lot of associated benefits, and in fact on average are likely more net beneficial per commuter than transit commutes. So maximizing transit use at the expense of walking and biking is not necessarily best overall. In an ideal world, in fact, probably no one would need to use a motorized vehicle to get to work.
Now that is not a realistic short term goal for various reasons, so we will likely want to continue to invest in transit and transit oriented development for the conceivable future. But not at the expense of walking and biking where possible, because those are generally even better.
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These areas have high transit utilization almost entirely due to their core areas, and to a lesser extent major satellite cities.
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Depending on how you define "core area" that may be true, but in that case I would suggest East Liberty is in Pittsburgh's "core area". Conversely that would not be true if you defined "core area" to include only the equivalent of Downtown Pittsburgh.
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But East Liberty is really only convenient to the East End, not all of Pittsburgh, meaning by definition it's drawing from a smaller pool.
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So again, there are actually large chunks of the transit network entirely outside of the City where access to East Liberty is as good or indeed much better than access to Downtown.
But yes, while East Liberty is a major node in the system, Downtown is the central node, so that makes Downtown on average more convenient for more people. But you could say the same thing about Manhattan versus Brooklyn, Downtown DC versus Rosslyn, or so on. No major city has all its jobs only at the central node, with no other concentration of jobs at other major nodes, because that is not feasible nor desirable. Pittsburgh is no different.
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