[wburg]

Originally Posted by ozone

Actually, if you'd glanced at my earlier replies would see that I fully understand why light-fail was built. Pretty much what you just said. I just suggested that w/o it some of those people probably wouldn't have stayed in the suburbs. You can't have it both ways. Admit it's just another form of suburban transport while touting it's supposed benefits to urban growth and health (w/o proof).

If you want some proof, please show me yours. You don't seem willing to put forth any facts, any numbers or any studies, just your opinions about how you think things should have turned out.

Light rail is a form of suburban transit, but that's not all it is useful for, and it is a fundamentally different sort of suburban transit than the automobile. Suburban sprawl isn't the fault of light rail, it's the fault of suburban developers who saw more profit in turning farmland into suburbs, using federal highways and other government-subsidized methods to promote greenfield growth. Suburban developers have no interest in public transit and site their new growth areas far from light rail right-of-way because there is no region effort to prevent them from doing so.

Am I against all light-rail systems? Not at all! But I think Sacramento's light-rail is a fiasco and I do not support throwing good money after bad. Until they increase the number of riders on the existing lines and we build a proper 'metro' system for the central city and inner suburbs I'm not supporting any expansion of LRT. BTW I'm not suggesting a specific form of transport so don't assume the word 'metro' means subway. A streetcar and/or special buses with dedicated lanes would be great. I don't see why it is so hard for people around here to grasp this concept.

Increasing ridership on a regional level requires reaching the areas where people already are--and in Sacramento, that means a bigger horizontal reach. A central city specific system like a streetcar line would not conflict with light rail--the two work together, as they do in Portland. Portland's light rail also runs out to their suburbs, but has three times the ridership because of Portland's efforts to limit suburban growth to an existing growth boundary, and land use policies designed to work with transit rather than to ignore it. What you call a failure of RT and Light Rail, I'd call a failure of Sacramento County's planning efforts to constrain suburban development--their policy since the 1950s has been "the more sprawl, the better" which works against the potential efficiencies of rail. Put blame where it's due!

For sure, in some communities it has made a difference but in others, clearly it has not. By what measures should we judge it's success? What percentage of our region's population rides light-rail? How many do so to get to work or to shop downtown? Let's look at the costs- to build and operate it and compare it to the number of riders and see just how successful it really is. What if say 1/4 of the riders are people just using it as an alternative to the bus -and not to get to work or spend any appreciable money downtown?

I'd judge the success of light rail by daily boardings and farebox recovery. Currently Light Rail gets about 50,000 boardings a day, which places it at #11 nationwide for Light Rail systems--not spectacular, but not bad, and we blow away some other similar metros like San Jose for transit use. Most of the busiest LRV lines are eastern/midwestern cities with more density. Our farebox recovery is about 25% (25 cents of each dollar in the budget comes from fares), again pretty good for a western city: MUNI in San Francisco has a 22% farebox recovery rate.

Another 50,000 a day use the bus. People don't use Light Rail as an alternative to the bus, because generally there aren't bus lines that run parallel to Light Rail lines--routes are designed to complement and feed into Light Rail lines. The fact that RT stopped issuing transfers hampers this mode switch, and that's a policy I'd advocate changing that would improve ridership.

Total transit ridership in the Sacramento region is low, but again, that's because there has been little regional effort to limit outward growth, and employment centers have left the central city. It's still a highly consolidated job center, with about 11% of regional jobs, and a significant percentage of downtown workers do ride Light Rail to get to their jobs downtown. Sure, people whose jobs aren't located near Light Rail lines are unlikely to take Light Rail to work, but that's not Light Rail's fault--it's the fault of the lack of regional planning that allows horizontal development away from transit lines.

Of course, I don't. You have even posted graphics that have shown just how much the population in the Central City has declined over the years. WBurg do you think the central city is even close reaching a saturation point in population growth? Do you think we shouldn't encourage more people to live in the central city? If you don't have higher expectations for the central city I'm a little concerned.

You already know what you just said is a bunch of malarkey, but I'll clarify since you obviously want it repeated. The central city could easily double its population within its own footprint by promoting infill and adaptive reuse, and through expansion of the CBD into nearby brownfield sites, triple. But that won't happen until greenfield suburban growth is halted or dramatically reduced--which means an end to suburban freeway expansion. Cordova Hills is a prime example--but the only reason Cordova Hills is in play is because of the Elk Grove Connector, a highway expansion.

Light rail isn't the enemy of streetcar and other rail-borne transit--they are natural partners, as they were when Sacramento had eleven locally operated streetcar lines and three electric interurban railroads with their own local streetcar lines. Highways are. They come from the same pool of transportation funds, but it is money spent on highway expansion, not money spent on light rail, that steals money from urban transit projects. The resulting suburban tract homes that result from new highways are the result of greenfield land policy.