12-01-2020, 10:34 PM
(12-01-2020, 10:26 PM)ac3r Wrote:(12-01-2020, 10:15 PM)ijmorlan Wrote: It is true that it is not built to carry existing demand, which is still well within the range that can be handled by buses.
It is definitely able to handle the demand. The thing is empty half of the time, even before SARS-CoV-2 disrupted everything. According to Keolis the LRT only carries 25'000 people per day on average. In terms of a rapid transit system (and specifically one that is serving a region of over 600'000+ people! - Nürnberg, Germany for example, is roughly the same size as us even even denser yet it has 3 subway lines, 5 streetcar/LRT lines, 4 S-bahn lines and a million bus routes) it's so far an absolute failure in terms of ridership. Even that number is quite ambiguous since they only announced that in a recent press release in regards to the ION winning a national award. Will ridership go up? I have no doubt, but it's reaching veeeeeeerrryyy far to paint the ION as an astounding success.
The LRT has been an unambiguous success in terms of ridership--before COVID--it was exceeding all ridership targets.
It not being full, does not make it a failure. Nurnberg Germany is a completely different city, it is entirely unfair to compare a city like that to our city which has just built it's first rapid transit line, that was operating only a year.
Saying it's a failure because 100,000 people didn't sell their cars the moment it was built is absurd, change takes time, but that change was happening far more rapidly as a result of the LRT than it was before, and more, it was happening faster than it was expected to as a result of the LRT.
(12-01-2020, 10:15 PM)ijmorlan Wrote: If that is social engineering, then so is building huge wide roads and expressways all over the place. The difference is that a public transit system can actually move everybody affordably, whereas a road system will have more trouble doing that.
This is incredibly on point. Anyone who thinks that building transit is a social experiment is missing the petri dish for the cars...mass motorization has been an enormous and incredibly harmful social experiement. Yet so many people see car dependency as the natural order of things and not an bizarre 70 year old abberation from a 7,000 year old normal.