Forest Park in St. Louis city. Its a revitalization of the old streetcar loop that is still called the Delmar loop here. Hopefully it succeeds, it opens I believe next year. But the Loop, which is a thriving business district, and Forest Park, the largest urban park in the United States, are both heavily visited, so hopefully ridership will reflect this.

Like the rest of the system - it works best when other transit elements connect to each other in a way that benefits users ...

The streetcar, by itself, would get little use ... But, as part of the overall system, it is ready to connect AND disconnect from it, using the buses and light rail MAX trains to get to and from home and destination.

Streetcars are slow ... We won't use them if we are in a hurry, but we do ride them if they go closely to our destination ....

I've lived in Portland for over ten years now - I decommissioned my vehicles, and only ride transit to work, play and household needs ... It helps that my employer pays my monthly transit fee ....

It works in concert with the bus system and their routes. Kind of neat. These lines run all over Dayton, Oakville, and Kettering.



BTW, I drive past this intersection every day on the way to and from work!!

It is an electric trolley bus like Boston and SF have. Still, it's pretty cool that a small city like Dayton has them.

Great ride. The first time that I visited SF I rode the 30 Stockton line and it felt like home.

For example, link the airport to downtown, preferably all the way to the airport, one seat. Not train to a bus or train to a monorail. That is often political because an effective system would eliminate some taxi and bus business but that should be a measure of success. Easier to get taxi riders, tourists and business travelers into mass transit than to convert the locals with cars.

Here in San Jose, only one bus line, the 22 to Palo Alto, runs all night. It has become the "Hotel 22".

http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_24433525/homeless-turn-overnight-california-bus-route

Vaginas, trains, education, solar energy, Mexicans, and the very idea of two people of the same sex rubbing their bits together all cause republicans to alternately shit themselves and wet their pants.

If Ted Cruz wants to come to Orange County, point at this thing and say it is stupid. I will be in total agreement with him:

Neither do I. It is a very big number.

If some spaced out venture capitalist wants to "disrupt" something with their largess that is their business.

The private sector is grossly incompetent, fails all the time, mismanages everything, has absurd bureaucracies, is massively wasteful, and yes spends trillions of taxpayer dollars every year. But we are obsessed with the rightwing narrative of incompetent wasteful government because some project went bad.

This freak show in Orange County is funded by Measure M, a sales tax intended to fund transportation improvements. And guess what, Orange County needs a whole lot of stuff. A Crystal Cathedral for street preachers and a fucking street car from there to Disneyland is not among them.

It was great that it was killed.

The problem is that mass transit is, by definition, only successful if it is practical. It has to go from where the people ARE to where the people WANT TO BE at a lower cost than driving and in a similar time period. Well planned mass transit systems, like the system in Portland, can do this. Unfortunatly there are a lot of clueless people lobbying for this kind of mass transit who think that you can throw a set of rails down any abandoned rail right of way or street median and have a successful system. "If you build it, they will come" does NOT apply to mass transit, and there are plenty of failed transit systems to prove it.

Sadly, this is also why many of us fought against the bullet train in California. For the amount of money we'll spend on that system, we could have installed regional rail throughout the state and pulled millions of cars off the road. Instead, by the states own estimate, we're getting a showcase system that is designed to compete with airlines and will pull only a negligible number of cars off the road. It's a "fun" way to travel for middle class tourists and business travellers, but it will have very little impact on the states pollution levels or traffic congestion. During the fight over the Altamont vs. Pacheco right of way, the board overseeing the project even admitted that it wasn't intended for commuters or traffic reduction.

Shiny toys get attention, even when more "practical and boring" solutions would provide better outcomes.

And with a changing of the guard at the municipal level came an onslaught of literal hipster new-grad urban planners who want this project used to "urbanize" what is basically a pre-war residential street. Their ideas are terrible and thankfully mostly impossible to implement. They come across as cartoon villains when discussing the parking and traffic implications of their plans and they regard the area's existing residents as stupid old geezers for failing to fully appreciate the genius of their plan.

Their genius is their mastery of the echo chamber, their ideas are terrible but they can seemingly successfully ostracize or otherwise alienate those who disagree with them and create a contrived consensus in favor of their vision/hallucination.

...if they didn't drain already limited funds away from competing projects that can actually provide major benefit to both residents and to the environment. These hipster new-grad urban planners can build whatever they want...AFTER we have comprehensive integrated mass transit systems that are easy accessible to those who need to use those systems the most. Fancy showcase projects that don't take the working class anywhere useful and that are too expensive for the poor to use are simply not beneficial to ANYONE, and when they prevent useful projects from being funded, they are actually harmful to society as a whole.

in urbanized areas with traffic and parking problems, mass transit is the key to having an alternative to traffic and parking problems.

sure, you could start tearing down houses and build more freeway lanes, but you have to start pulling down buildings downtown to have somewhere to put those cars once they get there.

Full of people and gets you where you need to go in the city. But trains! Scary.

such as train stations that look like they were designed by a televangelist or plopping down useless street cars everywhere.

Public transit itself is an essential service for many people and should be well funded and affordable.

MONORAIL!!!!!11111

$100,000,000 per mile to connect Disneyland to the Amtrak station. Yeah, we really, really need this.

Of course this cluster-fuck has already been built:



They couldn't afford to build it, now they can't afford to operate it and it wasn't needed in the first place.

People should be in jail for this. Maybe the OC Catholic Diocese will buy this crystal cathedral it too.

Like they fought the Sunrail extension to Disney World here in Orlando (would eat into their parking fees)?

There has been a shuttle bus from the Amtrak station to Disneyland as long as I can remember though. The businesses on Harbor Blvd sure don't seem keen though.

Consider visiting this site, spending time there, going back and reading the archived blogs. "Chaotic but smart" projects must replace "orderly but dumb" ones if we're to have a survivable future.

http://www.strongtowns.org

Last edited Wed Dec 16, 2015, 09:24 AM - Edit history (1)

That's how this reads to me. Very brief mention of success with a majority focused on the negative without providing real comparison for overall success or failure. It's the complete "welfare queen" argument. Some parts of a government funded project are bad, so it all bad.

This is an obvious hit piece.

Denver's first light rail was built in the 90's. Last year, they opened a new line that serves the west metro area, out to Golden.

Now there are several lines under construction: One to DIA, one to Wheat Ridge, another to Westminster (eventually to Boulder and Longmont), another to Thornton and the east side of Westminster.

I'd describe the commuter and light rail system here as pretty successful.

They are efficient, get people around and are always clean. When I first moved here I would spend the day riding them all over. Very cool and clean.

BS article.

Can anyone explain to me how streetcars/light rail are a better option than buses (electric buses, ideally)? The first two seem more expensive with the added infrastructure, and less flexible since they cannot go around obstacles or be pulled onto new routes (without more infrastructure)

Also, they can be cheaper over the long haul. They cost more up front, but can be cheaper to operate year to year. They can be made larger, and more comfortable, than buses in general.

Of course there are cons as well as pros. Which solution is better varies from city to city.

But down the pike the streetcar will need very expensive track replacement,