MARTA Seeks Public Input As Red Line Expansion Moves Forward (Atlanta: home, cost of)

[bryantm3]

Originally Posted by MattCW

Well, if we constrain the development and transportation corridors, they won't really have a choice now will they?

i get what you're going for, but you're too late. metro atlanta is what it is; you can't just close a large portion of the metro area off from transit because it's not "urban enough". that will only increase sprawl and decrease the use of transit. we can discourage future development in the exurbs, but we can't shortchange the metro area because you don't like the suburbs.

[MattCW]

Originally Posted by bryantm3

i get what you're going for, but you're too late. metro atlanta is what it is; you can't just close a large portion of the metro area off from transit because it's not "urban enough". that will only increase sprawl and decrease the use of transit. we can discourage future development in the exurbs, but we can't shortchange the metro area because you don't like the suburbs.

Who said I don't like the suburbs? I was born and raised there and technically live in a suburb. Perhaps you shouldn't jump so quickly to conclusions next time. We aren't too late at all, the commuting style is still very much focused on suburb-to-city, it's why the spoke highways are backed up inbound in the mornings, and outbound in the evenings, all you have to do is look at a traffic map at these times to see this. No one's talking about cutting places off from transit, just the opposite, but the focus should be on core, high-capacity lines, not a whole spaghetti-mess of lines reaching 30 miles into the suburbs where the ridership per mile drops to unsustainable levels. People whine and moan about the streetcar having ridership of 1100 people per mile over it's 1.3 mile reach. How much whining (justified in this case) do you think a suburban line with a few hundred people per mile (if that) will have?

[bryantm3]

the fact of the matter is that atlanta has multiple centers of gravity, and that is not going to change anytime soon. you know perfectly well that a line from alpharetta to gwinnett would see a fantastic deal of ridership; you just don't like it because you feel like atlanta should be this linear spoke-and-hub archetype, when the reality does not fit that image.

[jsvh]

Originally Posted by bryantm3

...multiple centers of gravity...

I have to be a nerd for a moment: the nature of a "center of gravity" is that there is only one. For example a binary start system has a center of gravity somewhere between the two stars. Even though that spot may just be empty space, all the planets in that star system would orbit around that center of gravity. Taking that metaphor back to Atlanta metro, you have all these different "sources of mass" such as Downtown or Perimeter, but the "center of gravity" is probably somewhere around Buckhead like Peachtree Hills. So even a small neighborhood that has little going on could actually end up being the "center of gravity" for the metro region because they happen to be in the center of everything.

[cqholt]

Atlanta is a poly-nodal metro area, and ARC encouraged that. We have several large employment centers; downtown, midtown, buckhead, perimeter, north fulton, and cumberland. Most are and can be served by transit lines, but riders will have to transfer, the furthest out suburb-to-suburb line I can ever see is one along the top-end perimeter.

[bu2]

Originally Posted by bryantm3

the fact of the matter is that atlanta has multiple centers of gravity, and that is not going to change anytime soon. you know perfectly well that a line from alpharetta to gwinnett would see a fantastic deal of ridership; you just don't like it because you feel like atlanta should be this linear spoke-and-hub archetype, when the reality does not fit that image.

I don't think it would have much ridership at all and you could serve it a lot cheaper with roads.

The multiple centers of gravity are really ITP or on the Perimeter-Downtown, Midtown, Buckhead, Clifton, Perimeter Mall, Cumberland Mall. There should be some cross-town not going through downtown, but 285 is about as far out as it should go.

[bu2]

I'd be curious how much they have spent over time on their various studies with still no financing plan. Houston recently wrote off $104 million(!) of studies of two of their proposed lines that still have no funding source. For those trumping light rail over heavy rail for cost advantages, Houston's most recent light rail lines cost $158 million a mile and weren't in separate right of way. Seattle averaged about $180 million a mile, but their subway portion cost $600 million a mile.

Final cost numbers are $823 million for the 6.6-mile Southeast Purple line and $587 million for the 3.3-mile East Green line, for a staggering total of $1.4 billion dollars. To work that out on a per-mile basis, it has to be noted that both lines overlap about a mile downtown, so really only 8.9 miles of new track were created (not 9.9), which works out to a head-spinning $158 million per mile. Gattis: MetroRail - the good, the bad and the ugly - Houston Chronicle

High-Cost, Low-Capacity Transit Is The Wrong Choice for Cities | The Daily Caller

[jsvh]

bu2 - Those high estimates are still less per mile than the 400 / 285 interchange "improvments".

[Gulch]

Originally Posted by jsvh

bu2 - Those high estimates are still less per mile than the 400 / 285 interchange "improvments".

Because it's so easy for GDOT to fork over federal highway funding for a transit project to a separate agency and that doing nothing with that interchange is the smart way to go, right?

[toll_booth]

Originally Posted by jsvh

bu2 - Those high estimates are still less per mile than the 400 / 285 interchange "improvments".

And it's not gonna end there. GADOT wants to build managed lanes on 400 all the way to Forsyth.