Quote:
Originally Posted by sammyg
That only counts where people live, not where they work. The loop is incredibly sparse. Would blue-collar workers who work in the industrial corridor take the ferries?
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I doubt it. Those blue-collar workers don't live downtown... they live in places like Little Village and Austin (if they live in the city at all) and taking a slow bus downtown and then a slow boat upriver is a far worse commute than either driving or taking two buses that
don't pass through downtown.
Besides, the river corridor on the North Branch is slowly de-industrializing. A better plan is to complete the riverwalk to allow for pedestrians and bikes to flow along the river corridor, and re-establish Clybourn and Elston bus lines. A few decades from now, if dense development takes hold along the river, it may become feasible to run waterbuses beyond the limits of downtown.
I suppose it's possible to run the existing water taxis up to North/Clybourn. It's a big shopping/entertainment district and a potential lure for tourists. Everything north of there is industrial or institutional.