Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
I'm a transit supporter, but why the hell would the U.S. spend $160 billion in San Diego of all places? The city will never be transit oriented. It's almost completely unwalkable except for short stretches, the downtown core has minimal employment share, and almost the entire region was built post-autotopia.
If SD and CA want to spend a couple of hundred billion on SD transit projects, that's fine, but no way should there be a major federal role. SD makes LA's transit potential look like the next Tokyo in comparison.
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Your city can be a sprawling sea of McMansions but as long as you have high Downtown employment share and lots of islands of TOD among the sea of sprawl, and frequent rail service you're still going to get awesome ridership.
Does San Diego fit the bill? Unfortunately, not quite. San Diego Downtown employment share is very low because the adjacent airport limits building height to 500 feet, limiting density. Furthermore, San Diego's economy really isn't attracting big corporations, unlike Seattle.
BUT while San Diego currently has very little TOD, things are changing. For a metro area of only 3.3 million, San Diego will build a shocking amount of TOD in the future. Whether this TOD will actually boost ridership remains to be seen. This TOD is mostly residential, and residential TOD just doesn't drive up ridership as much as office TOD does. And unfortunately, with California's high COL, taxes, and regulations, corporations aren't flocking to build mega campuses in San Diego anytime soon, thus driving down office TOD demand.
The bright side? In spite of a weak downtown and no airport rail service, San Diego Trolley 2019 ridership rivaled the Portland MAX.