Quote:
Originally Posted by jtown,man
I get the thinking but...
1. Austin doesn't have "plentiful remaining streets." I don't think outsiders understand this. Austins street network is not built for the city that it is today and that's honestly a good thing for people like us if the proper transit infrastructure can be built to mitigate this.
2. Congress is 6 lanes wide with parking on both sides. So maybe 8 lanes wide? There is no reason on Earth that should be a transit mall. It would look dead as hell. Now, I like the idea of making it "car-lite."
3. Eliminating cars in "specific parts of town", ok. Eliminating cars period? That is what I got from your statement, sorry.
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It sounds like access to downtown might be the issue, which means there should be plentiful capacity once one is downtown for surface reservations. Unless I misunderstood... Calgary, which seems to be a bigger downtown than Austin, does fine with just a surface reservation .
It looks like Austin has a very N-S orientation. Do many people commute past downtown in either direction? If so that might help justify a subway through downtown. Otherwise, unless the rest of the network is going to be grade separated, Austin would probably be better off making sure the LRT network is expansive enough to be useful rather than grade separating downtown to appease motorists or be slightly faster through downtown. The issue of course is that the LRT would have to have signal priority at intersections to not be super slow in a surface reservation, which would piss off motorists.