I think a city deserves some credit for making the attempt to provide the service even if it isn't used as much as we'd like. It's also hard to correlate that with downtown office development since ostensibly it got most of the office towers it does have without high transit usage either. Unless when the towers were built in the 80s and 90s it had much higher ridership numbers then.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Dallas does have the largest light rail system, but the ridership is minimal.
Dallas metro transit ridership is about as close to 0 as you can get for a major metropolis. So, functionally, it basically has no transit. When you have like 1-2% transit share, you don't have transit.
|
Yeah... I mean I get the idea that transit usage rates make a decent proxy for transit quality but that just sounds a bit odd. I mean, we don't see to do that for other things. Like, "If you have a nice house but you're rarely home, you don't have a house". Or, "If you have a car but you don't drive much, you don't have a car".
The same way that someone who owns a car may live in a dense walkable area where it's very convenient to get around without a car may not drive nearly as much as someone in a low density suburb, the opposite could also be true. Someone with access to decent transit may not use it because of the abundance of automobile infrastructure combined with cultural factors such as a belief that transit is dangerous or lacking respectability.