Downtown project directory

[ijmorlan]

Fewer crossings on the UW south campus? Which crossing do you think could reasonably have been left out?

(actually there is one but I’m interested to see if you even know enough about the situation there to identify it)

Also, while the LRT is a city-building project, not just a way of moving existing crowds, the only way it can function as a city-building project is if it moves people. People aren’t moving into condo towers next to the tracks because they like looking at railway tracks but because they anticipate making at least some of their trips by LRT. So this whole “it wasn’t built to move people” thing is just asinine. If cities want to build something that doesn’t actually do anything but puts the city on the map they don’t built a $1G LRT; they build an entrance archway or a giant statue of Paul Bunyan or whatever for a lot less.

I'm not sure which crossing you feel is superfluous, but what is clear is that the whole area is poorly designed...in many respects. The lack of a direct access to the east side of campus from the station is unforgiveable--but also entirely typical for our LRT.

This thread is definitely treading the line between projects and trains though. It's almost as if these things are inextricably linked.

I don’t want to give it away yet — I’m hoping nms will have a chance to figure it out themselves, although I don’t actually expect them to have enough local knowledge to even know what I’m talking about. I will say that it’s not so much that the crossing in question is entirely superfluous, but that a different solution could and should have been built instead.