Quote:
Originally Posted by 5seconds
Genuine question for those in the industry: How do you prove ridership before you build something like this? Just running a bus service that mimics the proposed route will not give a good indication of ridership because the fully-mixed-traffic route will not encourage new users like the Transitway will.
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None of these resonate to me as legitimate. I can't put my finger on it, but it all feels disingenuous, and they seem like side arguments that do not fully explain the core of the opposition.
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Maybe I'm biased since I'm a transportation modeller, but one of the best ways to get a sense of the demand for ridership is running a transportation model to produce ridership forecasts. While a model can't necessarily capture all of the minute aspects of a transportation project, they can do a good job of assessing many of the sorts of improvements that this project will represent - faster ride time, frequent service and fewer transfers. Modelling tends to be more reliable when done for projects similar to those that already exist in an area - trying to produce a forecast for a high-quality transit service in Calgary is easier than for, say, Victoria, because here we already have a lot of information about how people will and won't use high-quality transit. Some potential benefits that are harder to represent in a model are reliability improvements, waiting at more pleasant stations, and the "status" or "permanence" effect of a transitway versus just bus service. Calgary - who (disclaimer) I have worked with in the past - have a good modelling group and have produced pretty accurate opening day forecasts of other major transit projects, including the West LRT.
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Stimulus project wishful thinking anyone?
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