Light Rail Boom

[Metro-One]

Originally Posted by nei

Neat project. Any idea of Victoria might get light rail?

They have a plan, and have selected a route, but I have not heard anything / movements for over a year now.

[texcolo]

Originally Posted by Jasonhouse

So many of DARTs stations are in absolutely shit locations. I question the logic of the routing and integration of entire swaths of their light rail lines.

It's almost as if the lines were laid out by cynical assholes who were trying to make the first couple of lines fare so poorly that any further expansion would be crippled. Almost.

They really dropped the ball in several locations.

No 1: No station between City Place and freaking Mockingbird Lane. That's almost a 5 mile stretch.

No 2: The Park Lane station could be anymore disconnected from North Park Mall .

[You Need A Thneed]

The opening of Tuscany Station in Calgary ends a period of about 15 years in Calgary of constant LRT construction.

Unfortunately, our funding for such projects is pretty much at the mercy of the provincial and federal governments, and that money is dried up, for now. We desperately need the ability to fund larger projects like that without having to rely on others.

[initiald]

Transit geeks will like this: An interactive map discussing each station of the under-construction Lynx Blue Line extension in Charlotte: http://t.co/8aVJsE0svu

[initiald]

Charlotte Streetcar Update

The first 1.3 (2 km) mile segment of the Charlotte streetcar is scheduled to open Spring 2015. Last night city council approved the next segment of streetcar. It will extend the line in both directions a combined 2.3 miles (3.7 km) and will open in 2019. Source

The pink shows the segment that will open next Spring. The extension will go to the east to Central Avenue station, and to the west to Johnson C Smith University station:


On the first segment, the city is going to use the 3 legacy trolleys the city already owns. They were used where the light rail line was built at first, too.


The city has plans to purchase modern streetcars when the line is extended:


Under construction:


Getting completed:

[llamaorama]

No 1: No station between City Place and freaking Mockingbird Lane. That's almost a 5 mile stretch.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knox%E2...derson_Station

There is a "ghost station" there, an empty unfinished cavern. It was cancelled due to NIMBY opposition. Now the community pressure is the other direction; people really want a station there but DART said no.

[1lifealex]

Atlanta streetcar testing http://www.atlantaintownpaper.com/20...ting-set-week/

[Dr Nevergold]

Originally Posted by Jasonhouse

So many of DARTs stations are in absolutely shit locations. I question the logic of the routing and integration of entire swaths of their light rail lines.

It's almost as if the lines were laid out by cynical assholes who were trying to make the first couple of lines fare so poorly that any further expansion would be crippled. Almost.

I've never used Dallas' system, but base my experience on my daily use of Portland MAX and Pittsburgh T for a year each as my primary transport and experience with other systems, including Minneapolis-St Pauls' entire system a few weeks ago.

A factor that keeps Light Rail ridership low is speed. This largely relates to whether LRT is in-street and utilized as a local transit solution or if its in its own ROW and utilized as rapid transit. LRT cannot be "one size fits all" transit and does need to interconnect with other modes to be successful. For example, I rode the Green line in-street on University Ave between Minneapolis and St Paul twice (four times back and forth) a few weeks ago and it took about 50 minutes for each trip, and I didn't even hop on at the end points at the Target Arena. For only 9 miles roughly, that's slow by any account and will not attract ridership as much as a faster line. They are going to have to create an express bus service between the two cities or maybe commuter rail in the future to cut that down to 20 or 25 minutes. I support local transit, but that's a hell of an investment in terms of dollars to have it take 50 minutes.

Pittsburgh has two lines, they have the Overbook (Blue) and Dormont/South Hills (Red) lines. They parallel each other mostly, except the Blue line has its own ROW and the Red line is in-street local transit. The same distance from Castle Shannon - roughly 7 miles to downtown - takes barely 20 minutes on the Blue line, it takes 30-35 on the Red line as it begins to go in-street through Dormont and Beechview. That's the difference between rapid transit and local transit, you have to have both.

I have no idea how this applies to Dallas, but I can imagine Dallas having minimal walkable developments with enough employment and shopping and entertainment along with urban condo development being a factor. That can change in future decades. If a majority of DART LRT is in its own ROW and doesn't have in-street sections, over time it'll mature if the urban, walkable development increases pace significantly.

[fflint]

Originally Posted by Dr Nevergold

A factor that keeps Light Rail ridership low is speed. This largely relates to whether LRT is in-street and utilized as a local transit solution or if its in its own ROW and utilized as rapid transit. LRT cannot be "one size fits all" transit and does need to interconnect with other modes to be successful. For example, I rode the Green line in-street on University Ave between Minneapolis and St Paul twice (four times back and forth) a few weeks ago and it took about 50 minutes for each trip, and I didn't even hop on at the end points at the Target Arena. For only 9 miles roughly, that's slow by any account and will not attract ridership as much as a faster line. They are going to have to create an express bus service between the two cities or maybe commuter rail in the future to cut that down to 20 or 25 minutes. I support local transit, but that's a hell of an investment in terms of dollars to have it take 50 minutes.

I agree speed is an issue for street-running light rail--in Minneapolis-St. Paul and everywhere else, too--but it's certainly not the only issue when planning new transit lines. There's been some speculation that a faster-running alternate route down the middle of a freeway would have drawn more riders. Perhaps it would have. Yet it's entirely reasonable for government to invest in new transportation infrastructure that might run a little slower yet will spur significant new private sector investment in housing and commercial enterprises, which the Green Line has done and will continue to do. Speed is important, but it's not the only consideration.

I also agree those passengers who are traveling from one end of the Green Line all the way to the other end of the line would most likely prefer a faster train. I think it's fair to say the speed of a trip becomes a much bigger issue when covering longer expanses--but how many current and potential riders make end-to-end commutes?

Assuming most current and potential transit passengers live in the residential areas closer to the middle of the route, and commute to and from one of the two CBDs at either end, run times in and of themselves may not depress ridership.

[Dr Nevergold]

^I'm not a fan of it running on a freeway, maybe it'd be easier to build viaducts and do a monorail type design if the locations away from a freeway are too congested. Transit in a freeway location should be commuter rail type, I suppose you could use LRVs and LRT technology, but it seems weird to me.

I support the Green line, I'd rather have transit than to not have it. But they need an express service to compliment it given the speeds I experienced. Multi-modal isn't a bad thing and transit needs to compliment one another. I suppose running a few express buses wouldn't be too expensive to compliment this line.

The Hiawatha line by comparison is much faster. I was boarding and leaving at Government Plaza, and it only takes 30 minutes to go a longer 10 miles to Mall of America. Its a significant difference since its mostly in its own ROW.

[MSP]

The green line Is already getting 40,000+ ridership per day. That pretty good iMO. I agree it's not fast, but it's well used for a brand new line.

[Dr Nevergold]

If ridership is that high, a complimentary express service makes sense even more.

[miketoronto]

Originally Posted by MSP

The green line Is already getting 40,000+ ridership per day. That pretty good iMO. I agree it's not fast, but it's well used for a brand new line.

And how much of that ridership is old bus riders in the same corridor?

And for the length of the line, 40,000 is not high at all. A true rapid transit line of that length would be carrying 100,000 - 200,000 riders a day.

[ssiguy]

I agree.

The issue is not what the LRT ridership is but rather the entire transit ridership is. It maybe getting 40,000 a day {which isn't much} but if those riders are just people switching from the bus to the LRT than it means nothing.

[fflint]

According to Metro Transit, the 16 bus (which parallels the Green Line for over 7 miles) is still running, albeit with a truncated route along University Avenue between the University of Minnesota and downtown St. Paul.

According to the posted online schedule, an end-to-end trip at noon on the 16 bus would take 47 minutes. How long would it take the Green Line to make that same exact trip at noon? 28 minutes. So the train is actually significantly faster than the bus it has basically replaced, not slower.

Originally Posted by miketoronto

And for the length of the line, 40,000 is not high at all. A true rapid transit line of that length would be carrying 100,000 - 200,000 riders a day.

Ridiculous.

According to Metro Transit's fact sheet, the Green Line runs 11 miles, 9.8 of which are new (the rest was already used by, and is now shared, with the Blue Line). That isn't especially long for an American light rail line.

Meanwhile, if there is a single North American light rail line that carries 200,000 daily riders, I'm not aware of it. Indeed, only a handful of light rail systems on this continent carry that many riders per day. Why you would expect one brand new line in a medium-sized city to carry such an impossibly high number of riders is beyond me.

And considering the Green Line has only been open since the middle of June, its 40,000 daily riders is nothing to bemoan. Indeed, that was the projected ridership target for 2030. As more and more new housing and office/retail gets built along the line, ridership will almost certainly continue to grow as well--but it takes more than 3.5 months to transform a wide swathe of cityscape into an area that can provide tens of thousands of additional rail riders. Get real.

[Mikemike]

It's especially not impressive for a line that links two downtowns and a university. Compared to a single-destination line with similar ridership I bet this one feels empty.

I've also read that it doesn't get full priority at lights and there are more than a few locations where it ends up stopped for lights. That's a huge mistake, to build a billion-dollar piece of infrastructure and handicap it that way. Any rail line worth using should be faster than that.

[Dr Nevergold]

I'm not touching the issue of mode of transit since that's a lightning rod we've already discussed before, but it clearly isn't taking 28 minutes for a train to get from Minneapolis to St Paul. I rode the entire system not one time, but two consecutive days to see if I was actually just riding an anomaly and it took every bit of 45 minutes to go from Government Plaza in Minneapolis to the first stop in downtown St Paul. All 4 trips took about the same time, one was more.

I contribute the unreliable service to being Light Rail that runs in the street and must stop at intersections. The Green line has its own dedicated lanes, so its not in-traffic, but its folly is having to stop at every single stoplight a car does. They're going to have to do something about this aspect of the new line.

Regarding the ridership, I think for an American city that 40,000 is an impressive number, especially for a starter line that has been open a few months. It does show promise and growth in Minneapolis-St Paul as a region that at least has the zest for public transit. There's tremendous room for further development there.

[Chef]

A couple of things to keep in mind about the Green Line. Having a grade separated line down University Ave was never in the cards politically, it wouldn't have gotten through the federal government's cost benefit analysis and it wouldn't have gotten the support of suburban and rural representatives in the state legislature. The areas around the line currently don't have enough density for a tunnel or an elevated line. People from outside of the area seem to get hung up on the travel times from downtown to downtown because they as visitors want to use it for that, they don't understand that is not the point of the line. Nobody goes to downtown St Paul. Downtown St Paul is dead, it is a shell of a downtown and has been for a century. They use it in St Paul to go grocery shopping, go to Target, to get to service jobs along University and to go to the University.

I found some numbers for boardings by station as a percentage of overall ridership. They are from the end of June so they don't reflect trips to the U of M. I broke it down into the four broad segments of the line:

Downtown Minneapolis: 29.58%
University of Minnesota: 17.29%
St Paul University Ave: 35.21%
Downtown St Paul: 13.06%

http://blogs.mprnews.org/cities/2014...n-second-week/

If the intention of this line was to get people from one downtown to the other you would see a lot more boardings in Downtown St Paul. The main event on this line in St Paul is University Avenue, not downtown. University is an unglamorous commercial corridor for its entire length between the U and downtown St Paul, the type that poor and working class people use for their every day shopping, and frequently work on. If you pull the line away from University fewer people will ride it. I know mike has a study that says otherwise, but that study is from the early '90s which makes it a product of another era, with another era's paradigms, and is not relevant to today.

Once we have had a few decades of infill there will be enough density to go back and put the thing in a tunnel. Without building the line first, as is, that infill wouldn't be happening.

Originally Posted by miketoronto

And for the length of the line, 40,000 is not high at all. A true rapid transit line of that length would be carrying 100,000 - 200,000 riders a day.

Bear in mind that Metro Transit had 260,000 daily boardings for its entire bus and rail system in the second quarter. In that context 200,000 for a single line is an absurdly unrealistic expectation. You could build a heavy rail subway line and it wouldn't get close to it. The fabric to support it doesn't exist yet.

[initiald]

Charlotte streetcar construction:

• Video Link

[redblock]

Here is link to a German transit blogger's recent description of the Minneapolis/St. Paul light rail system. He is on a several weeks long tour through middle America to visit transit systems in several cities.

http://schwandl.blogspot.com/2014/09...ight-rail.html