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Originally Posted by Don't Be That Guy
Although it makes some sense to add a connection between 79 and the airport, with the decline in oil and gas jobs, Southpoint and developments that that southern Beltway are supposed to service are no longer the hotbeds of real estate development in the region. Logistics and warehousing around the airport, and tech/eds and meds/residential in the East End are the traditional, and currently hot, locations for development.
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Yeah, it never made much sense to pay billions to connect other greenfield areas to the airport when the airport itself still had plenty of developable areas right around it. And while the shale-related development provided a handy rhetorical excuse to continue with the project despite highly disappointing usage of the first segments, ironically the existing 79 to 376 made that a particularly low marginal value scenario.
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A much better way to spend $3 billion would be a dedicated transit right-of-way (heavy rail, light rail, BRT, anything really) that ran from Monroeville to the airport. That would remove a lot of traffic pressure from the parkways and incentivize denser development in areas with existing infrastructure.
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Easily one of the best-bang-for-the-buck transportation projects we could do would be to simply extend the East Busway to Monroeville. Combined with the current East Busway, that would get you halfway there, and then the existing West Busway covers another large chunk.
Completing the West Busway into Downtown would be pretty expensive as it would require a new bridge, and you would have to decide if you really needed to extend a bus-only ROW further to the airport. But the bottom line is that by leveraging the existing Busways you could do all that for way less than $3B. And in the end you would get WAY more east-west capacity (a busway lane has something like 15-20 times the peak capacity of a highway lane).
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The MFX has done nothing but made it faster to bypass the dying river towns it was supposed to help revitalize. It's an expensive boondoggle that was a bad idea when it was conceived 50 years ago and a worse idea today.
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Yep, but the political inertia is huge.