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Old Posted Jan 9, 2022, 9:17 PM
ue ue is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Quixote View Post
LA needs a dense heavy rail system (think lines spaced 1-1.5 miles apart) traversing that geographic area. The problem with LA though is that while it has the population, the medium-high density isn’t enough to unequivocally warrant heavy rail. But at the same time, it’s too dense and congested for conventional at-grade LRT.
Do you have the stats for this? I'm not disputing you I just want to see at what thresholds HRT is necessary and where in LA that is. It seems like most cities are shifting to LRT, as it's much cheaper to build and, if you have long enough trains and frequent service, it can be not unlike HRT. The Paris Metro is known for being narrow, while the Calgary C-Train has higher ridership than a lot of American heavy rail.

Quote:
Politics. WeHo supported Measure R by 86% (more than any other municipality), and they want rail. The original plan however was for there to be HRT underneath SMB starting from Hollywood/Highland and then interlining with the Purple Line in Beverly Hills. That alternative wasn’t pursued because it was deemed not cost-effective enough to be competitive for federal New Starts funding. The Crenshaw northern extension was viewed as a separate project going straight up La Brea.
Well, yeah, of course. Cities are cash-trapped and transit has undergone decades of austerity, which has produced councils and planning departments that want to pursue gentrification as a means for getting more tax revenue. All this means is that there's a focus on big projects that serve affluent areas or areas primed to be gentrified and also there's a desire to have one project do 3 things with mediocrity rather than one thing well. This is a perfect example of that. Rather than continue Crenshaw right up Western or La Brea, there's proposals to do ridiculously inefficient zig-zags to hit West Hollywood. Having a Red Line spur go under SMB into WeHo and then meet up with the Purple Line makes more sense. And for north-south connectivity, add another LRT line under La Cienega would be more costly, sure, but would produce a more comprehensive rapid transit system for that part of the Westside, which would give riders far more options (because, especially in a polycentric city like LA, people aren't all going to the same place) and more efficient routing.

Public transit is a public service so I truly don't get why it's being run like a business. It's point isn't to run a profit from a combination of high ridership and appropriately priced fares, it's supposed to provide the public with good access to their city. We don't do this with police or the military, which eat billions upon billions of dollars every year. It's just ideology governing why cities like LA are pursuing mediocre one-size-fits-all approaches to transit.
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