Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
For U.S. standards, perhaps.
By intl standards, a metro of 7 million with total weekday metro ridership of around 200k is pretty bad, especially since this is essentially the region's commuter rail too.
But, yeah, compared to, say, Miami, it's pretty decent.
|
I agree with what your saying, but maybe what I meant to say is that the choice to build heavy rail was probably the best plausible alternative for transit in Atlanta. Sure, a more ideal outcome might have been to use heavy rail on the North-South line and instead of doing the east-west line have something else of any mode going to Emory and/or Marietta, but hindsight is 20/20.
In alternative-universe Atlanta, MARTA rail was voted down in the 1970's and it wasn't until the 1990s that they chose to build a cheap(not in price, but in approach LRT like Dallas, where instead of going underground through Downtown it ran on surface streets and instead of a Midtown subway(that possibly stimulated the development of the most impressive linear urban corridor in the south) it exclusively used rail ROW skirting the edge of the GT area. Chances are ridership would be lower, the usefulness would be garbage-tier
In Charlotte's case, maybe the more ambitious subway plan is actually the best because it actually penetrates the region's greatest concentration of jobs and residential density with intelligently located stations in areas which are actually walkable. Maybe if the trains were very fast and frequent because they zoomed through tunnels, unlike some light rail that has to crawl at 10 mph through road intersections while dinging its fakey electronic bell, it would be a joy to use as opposed to driving and parking in congested areas.