Quote:
Originally Posted by Brandon716
Buffalo's system is least-known because Buffalo is treated like a bastard child that no one wants to touch, but having lived here I'm learning its not the city deserving of its reputation.
The Buffalo Metro (and its called a Metro despite being LRT) is 6.4 miles in length and covers the central urban area from downtown to UBNorth.
5.2 miles of the 6.4 mile line is underground, so over 80% is a subway for its entire length. No other city of 290,000 or metro of 1.25 million can make such a claim. It is certainly a unique system and at 23,000 riders a day it's not bad for a 6.4 mile stubway system.
What makes the C-Train so amazing is that it breaks stereotypical North American trends by proving that there is possibility of middle class people who will use transit if a city is built the right way. While Calgary has plenty'o'sprawl, its business district is a true business district, not an office park wonderland with most offices in the periphery. Even Portland has too much of that despite its status as America's new urban darling.
Why is a system like Buffalo underutilized - aside from being a stubway? Because downtown Buffalo only has 80,000 workers.
In order to have transit worth something, the buildings that people work in have to be located in the right places and in the right fashion as well. Its not just a transit thing, so encouraging office growth in TOD fashion is most important. Traditional downtowns and TOD centers along transit is the only way to make transit useful. |
Edmonton suffers from the de-centralization of office jobs too. There is about 70 000 workers in the Financial and Government Districts (both Downtown). Most of this is because we still have a large industrial base so many people work in industrial jobs which are of course not Downtown. I think Downtown has the most office/commercial jobs though. But there is a growing number of warehouses used for offices in South, Northwest, and Southeast Edmonton.
I think Edmonton can very easily compensate for this lower number of office workers (Calgary is well well over 100 000, being Canada's second largest CBD for office) with the University of Alberta, which holds 30 000 students. The NAIT LRT line will connect up the 2nd and 3rd largest educational institutions in the city - NAIT and MacEwan University (which realistically already is only 4 blocks from LRT). MacEwan has another 30 000 students and NAIT over 70 000.
Then you consider the West LRT line will connect light rail to the biggest tourist trap on the Prairies (many of which will likely take the option of visiting Downtown with a quick LRT route instead of skipping it), the West line will hook up the densest residential community in Alberta also and will directly go through 2 urban neighbourhoods beginning revitalization who could easily opt to take the train to Southgate or Kingsway instead of driving.
Then there's the SE/Mill Woods line which already gets high ridership from suburbanites bus commuting.
There is going to be a huge boost to LRT ridership in the city over the next 10-15 years. I always find it surprising that Edmonton has a higher ridership per capita than Portland. I think the main difference between the two systems is that the urban parts of Portland that have rail are extremely used extremely well but this thins out extremely in the suburban ends of Hillsboro and Gresham. Edmonton still has moderate usage in suburban stations like Belvedere and of course high usage in the brand new Century Park.
Anyways I made a list by looking on Wiki at transit stats to compare rail (not just LRT, but LRT is in bold)) in some (not all) North American cities, their km of track
New York City (subway) - 7,791,700/day | 369 km
Toronto (subway) - 942,600/day | 68.3 km
Boston - 481,300/day | 61 km
San Francisco - 358,500/day | 167 km
Vancouver - 344 796/day | 68.7 km
Toronto (streetcar) - 276,000/day | 75 km |
Calgary - 266,100/day | 48.8 km
Atlanta - 247,200/day | 76.6 km
New York City (PATH subway) - 244,300/day | 22.2 km
Los Angeles - 144,900/day |
Portland - 115,400/day | 84.7 km
San Diego - 107,000/day | 82.2 km
Edmonton - 74,440/day | 20.5 km
Saint Louis - 61,573/day | 74 km
Denver - 62,900/day | 56 km
Houston - 45,000/day | 12.1 km
Phoenix - 43,509/day | 32 km
Buffalo - 23,200/day | 10.3 km
Seattle/Tacoma - 20,200 | 27.8 km
Charlotte - 20,000/day | 15.45 km
Cleveland - 18,600/day | 31 km
What's really peculiar is how high the ridership Edmonton's system is for such a dinky little system. I mean look at the ones in the same area for ridership...they have 74, 56, 82.2 km of track and Edmonton's done it in 20km. Just 40 km/20km more, which is barely anything would boost Edmonton to 148K/day on it's way to the cities with 200k a day. I had no idea our numbers were so high for such a small system compared to other places (I knew they were high, but). It's very true then when I've heard some people say Edmonton could still be a great transit marvel like Calgary, Vancouver, Portland, San Diego, etc.
Another thing that's peculiar is why is Cleveland's system so unused? I mean Buffalo isn't that far and it does the same ridership in a third of the track. I've seen that the Cleveland goes to the Airport, Tower City/Downtown, Amtrak, and what looks like a ton of neighbourhoods. It seems adding more track here won't help.