Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Plenty of us don't understand the love affair with the automobile, whose care and upkeep requires more space and expense and subsidy than any form of public transportation. Highways cost $10 million per lane per mile, in terms of total capacity that costs more than light rail, let alone the less-expensive alternative of streetcars. And nobody seems to love buses, even those who advocate them only seem to do so because they're cheap, they just happen to be able to use the same infrastructure as automobiles. If you create dedicated lanes for buses and controlled-access stations and all that other jazz, suddenly the costs bounce into streetcar territory but people still don't like them.
PEOPLE'S PREFERENCE MATTERS! What people like matters, what they will consciously choose matters over what they don't want. It does not matter at all if you do not understand their choices--that represents a failure of comprehension on your part, not on the person doing the choosing. I hear people say over and over "People chose the automobile" and "People chose the suburbs," but when I point out that people choose the streetcar, suddenly consumer choice becomes unimportant!
3-4% use mass transit around the country except in a handful of very dense, geographically constrained cities like NY, Chicago and San Francisco.
Note that NY doesn't have street cars. Neither does Chicago. San Francisco has their cable cars and noone who lives there rides them. They choose buses because they are quicker, cheaper and take them where they want to go. The street cars are for the tourists. Now they do have their new F line which locals do use, but it has lower ridership than Houston's light rail which travels through a significantly less dense area.
When mass transit agencies do surveys about why people quit using mass transit, for most its because they could afford to buy a car. Yet urban planners are trying to force everyone out of cars to force their choices on other people.
Plenty of people ride park-n-ride buses around the country. Actually most suburban rail systems decrease service to the Central Business Districts. Park-n-ride often gives you parking lot to destination while rail does fewer stops. Now people don't like buses that are dirty and slow. I once tried to figure out if I could combine running with my commute to make better use of my time, riding a bus to work and then running the 7 miles home. I figured out that I could drive to work, back home and then back to work again before the bus would get there-and that was if I had zero wait time at the bus stop.
If its predominately grade separated rail or buses in HOV lanes it will get ridership. If its slow, its not much of an investment.
Note that NY doesn't have street cars. Neither does Chicago. San Francisco has their cable cars and noone who lives there rides them. They choose buses because they are quicker, cheaper and take them where they want to go. The street cars are for the tourists. Now they do have their new F line which locals do use, but it has lower ridership than Houston's light rail which travels through a significantly less dense area.
It's difficult to count the laughable things in this paragraph. New York doesn't have streetcars (anymore) but they certainly have plenty of subways--which, as fixed-rail transit requiring infrastructure investment, is a lot closer to streetcars than a bus is. And New York's buses aren't exactly legendary for being quick...
Chicago also had streetcars until recently--but also has subways and elevated trains and regional heavy rail, so it too has its own fixed-rail transit systems, in fact several of them, which are complemented by buses--the buses certainly don't replace rail-borne transit, nor could they!
While there probably aren't very many San Francisco natives riding cable cars, I'd suggest that the reason why is THERE IS NO ROOM! During tourist season (which is most of the year in SF) there are huge lines of tourists waiting to ride the San Francisco cable cars--even though they cost twice as much as other MUNI fares! (It's like that old Yogi Berra line--"nobody goes there, it's too crowded!") The fact that people will often drive long distances and then pay to ride cable cars (or railroad museum excursion lines of all sorts), not as transportation but merely for the fun of riding on them, is an important and under-appreciated fact that the transit-hostile fail to recognize. That attraction of tourist dollars is important, and again reflects the importance of consumer choice.
You're also wrong about San Francisco rail transit in other respects: the F-Line carries 25,000 people a day (compared to Houston's 30,000 a day), but MUNI Metro LRVs (which aren't much bigger than streetcars, but qualify as light rail because they can M-U) carry another 150,000 riders per day. And while plenty of people ride buses in San Francisco, a lot of those buses are trolleybuses--which require dedicated electric overhead, and thus dedicated route planning. And that's not counting BART or CALTRAIN.
Plenty of other cities DO use streetcars, subways and/or light rail--Boston, Philadelphia, Portland, San Diego--to good effect. Los Angeles is busily replacing the transit system they had before the highway lobby and a bus company mangled what had been the most complete public transit system on the continent (and a privately owned for-profit one at that!) Subways aren't necessarily practical for every city--streetcars find their own in the middle ground between the low, low densities where buses are more efficient (8 dua or less) and the high, high densities of cities that grew up as the hub of streetcar systems (100 dua or more.) For cities in that middle range that want to regenerate their downtowns, streetcars are the development tool they need to bring them back--while a car-centric system, with buses as the poverty transportation of choice, leaves them stuck at lower densities due to the overwhelming need to cater every urban design decision to the space-guzzling, money-gobbling, large-footprint needs of the automobile, and its unlovely, second-choice cousin, the bus.
Phillys Streetcar system carries 115,000 and Portland's Carries 20,000 both are in expansion modes. The Final Ridership of the Philly system will be around 300,000 when all the routes are restored and expanded , the final Ridership on the Portland system will be around 90,000. Minneapolis , Seattle , Montreal , Washington DC and Toronto are the only other cities in North American that plan on build or restoring a medium to large sized Streetcar network. Most cities are going to 2-3 lines to connect the CBD with other sections of the city.
3-4% use mass transit around the country except in a handful of very dense, geographically constrained cities like NY, Chicago and San Francisco.
Note that NY doesn't have street cars. Neither does Chicago. San Francisco has their cable cars and noone who lives there rides them. They choose buses because they are quicker, cheaper and take them where they want to go. The street cars are for the tourists. Now they do have their new F line which locals do use, but it has lower ridership than Houston's light rail which travels through a significantly less dense area.
When mass transit agencies do surveys about why people quit using mass transit, for most its because they could afford to buy a car. Yet urban planners are trying to force everyone out of cars to force their choices on other people.
Plenty of people ride park-n-ride buses around the country. Actually most suburban rail systems decrease service to the Central Business Districts. Park-n-ride often gives you parking lot to destination while rail does fewer stops. Now people don't like buses that are dirty and slow. I once tried to figure out if I could combine running with my commute to make better use of my time, riding a bus to work and then running the 7 miles home. I figured out that I could drive to work, back home and then back to work again before the bus would get there-and that was if I had zero wait time at the bus stop.
If its predominately grade separated rail or buses in HOV lanes it will get ridership. If its slow, its not much of an investment.
No one is being forced out , its a choice...you can still live a sprawly suburban car centric paradise or you can live in a Car-Free Dense Suburban or Urban Paradise.... Alot of people are moving towards the Car Free or Reduced Dense suburban or Urban lifestyle its been a trend for 15 years now... and with that Transit Ridership has been soaring....
No one is being forced out , its a choice...you can still live a sprawly suburban car centric paradise or you can live in a Car-Free Dense Suburban or Urban Paradise.... Alot of people are moving towards the Car Free or Reduced Dense suburban or Urban lifestyle its been a trend for 15 years now... and with that Transit Ridership has been soaring....
Exactly. We're not forcing it on you, but it's just as fair for us to pay taxes that support your (more expensive) infrastructure and oil company subsidies as it is for you to pay the taxes that fund our sidewalks and rail projects.
And yes, I know gas taxes are supposed to pay for every last cent of roads. They don't.
On that note, what is the general feel about TIF projects on this forum? I personally think that a development zone within a mile radius of any new transit corridor could implement a permanent 1% tax diversion (not rate increase as that would decrease desirability of space) on all NEW development since inception of a project in order to help fund it. Then, land values are rising and traffic is picking up, gross sales tax and property tax revenue are higher while STILL allowing room for extra funding to take the burden off of those who don't utilize said transit.
I could think streetcars would be good even for developed big cities anyway like NYC because thes subways and buses are both packed, it would add more capacity. Streetcars in certain areas would be good because they attract more ridership, they stir business development around them, and they can have more capacity than buses do.
When mass transit agencies do surveys about why people quit using mass transit, for most its because they could afford to buy a car. Yet urban planners are trying to force everyone out of cars to force their choices on other people.
I haven't seen the studies, and you didn't cite them, so I'll have to do some guess work here, but I suspect that such results are common in cities with inadequate transit options, but less common otherwise. I have a car, and I refuse to commute that way. When I drive to work, it can take up to twice as long as my usual rail based commute. Add in the irritation of interacting with other drivers, and I say no thanks.
I haven't seen the studies, and you didn't cite them, so I'll have to do some guess work here, but I suspect that such results are common in cities with inadequate transit options, but less common otherwise. I have a car, and I refuse to commute that way. When I drive to work, it can take up to twice as long as my usual rail based commute. Add in the irritation of interacting with other drivers, and I say no thanks.
Makes my point exactly. You have a faster option. People opt out of slow transit like street-cars and local buses when they have a choice.
Makes my point exactly. You have a faster option. People opt out of slow transit like street-cars and local buses when they have a choice.
In most of the US, public transportation is generally slower only because it is the poorly funded alternative to the car. It's not that buses and streetcars are inherently slower than the car. In most cases, public transportation is slower because of frequency. (does the bus/streetcar come every 10 minutes, half-hour, hour?) If public transportation was given similar priority to the car, (additional funding would allow greater frequency) I'm sure many more people would choose to use it.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
