Quote:
Originally Posted by bunt_q
For fun comparison:
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Shockingly when you spend 70 years designing everything around cars, building large mostly free-to-use road and parking networks, and adopting land use regulations that result in virtually everyone living in places where it's impractical to get around via any other means, yes highways do get a lot more users.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TakeFive
It puts to shame your theory that lines that run along freeways or freight corridors are 'bad' and lines that go through neighborhoods are 'good.'
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Oh jesus.
Everything revolves around land use. Those stations are getting decent ridership because they hit a sweet spot where there is 1) supportive land use and demographics within their catchment area, and 2) for some, their catchment area (ie the area they draw riders from) is very large, so there are many people for whom these are the most convenient stations.
They are not getting ridership *because* they're along the highway. They're getting ridership for other, unrelated reasons, that are strong enough ridership generators to overcome the inherent weaknessess of having a circumferential line along a highway.
Generally speaking the reason to not put stations along highways is that you get better land use fundamentals. That's not currently true for the middle-of-an-empty-field Aurora Metro Center station, but it's typically true.
It's OK for stations like Nine Mile, that draw from many miles away, to be park-and-ride oriented. This goes to what I've said before: Large park-and-ride stations are fine, it's the small ones that draw from a small area but are still car-oriented that are really lost opportunities.
Meanwhile, a line that had the same land use fundamentals but was 1) more integrated with that land use, and 2) went directly to downtown rather than going on a long loop around south, would surely have higher ridership than this current line. The fact that this is not the lowest ridership line does not mean it's as high as it could be given the land use. Of course this current line was easy to build, which matters too.
It's not that it's "bad." It's that in a perfect world you could do a lot better.
We have had this discussion before.