08-18-2020, 12:38 PM
(08-18-2020, 11:18 AM)danbrotherston Wrote: I think we actually need to go further, the regional transportation planners need to decide to no longer prioritize growth in VMT....every single long term planning document right now assumes climate failure as a precondition of every planning decision we are making. Every single policy document assumes VMT will continue to grow at the current rate....
This is key. We should be making a decision that increased motor vehicle traffic shall be carried by public transit. This means that the existing lanes are sufficient (subject to minor tweaks like how long turn lanes are, etc.), or even overbuilt (all those 4-lane roads with no turn lanes — remove the redundant lanes between intersections and rebuild the intersections with turn lanes); if space is needed to move more people it should be transit-only lanes.
The tricky bit is that transit needs to run on a much better schedule. Take the existing GRT network and run all of it every 10 minutes 18 hours a day, every 5 minutes during rush hour, and you would have a start. So initially we need to run a huge number of buses which aren’t really carrying very many people. Is the populace at large ready to understand that this is the way to go?