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Originally Posted by Liberty Wellsian
How about heavy tax breaks for developments that create new jobs/residential doors within 1,000 feet of a Trax/FrontRunner station. The goal would be to create dense urbanized mixed use centers around rail. Beyond 1000 feet is where most of the parking would end up. That's still under 2 blocks walk to the station. These developments would have a market incentive to also provide parking but beyond the 1000 foot tax incentive zone. The tax breaks could be easily justified by the savings to UDOT, let alone what it could do for air quality. Further UTA Park and ride lots adjacent to stations would become more valuable as real estate. They could sell them to help fund transit expansion.
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Much too logical, and far too effective. It will never work.
So my commute this morning took me to the Ballpark station, where I was able to see the chaos of the TRAX construction routing first-hand. Unforunantely I headed south after that, so I did not get to see that white whale known as the Black Line, but I still learned some interesting things.
First, the bus bridge between Ballpark and Courthouse is legit. There were 4 buses waiting to take people downtown, and all of them were empty. Instead, the platform was crowded with people waiting for the Blue line, despite the bus drivers standing at the fence across the tracks practically pleading for people to come over and try their buses. It was pretty comical. As I arrived, a Blue Line train consisting of 4 S70's arrived and, though already standing-room only, was just barely able to absorb the entire platform's worth of people, leaving none for the crestfallen bus drivers.
Similar to the oversupply of buses in the pick-up circle, UTA had an oversupply of friendly crowd control people on the platform. They went around from group to group giving personalized instructions on how to get where they wanted to go. They were perhaps a little too good at their job; I got approached at least 3 times, causing me to have to pause and 'rewind' my podcast. Then, when a Red or Green train pulled in, the UTA personalities erupted in much shouting and ballyhooing about bus bridges, the train terminating there, and where it would go next, etc. When the bus drivers joined in as well it meant that 5 or 6 UTA people were calling out separate instructions from 5 or 6 separate directions. It made the place seem much more chaotic and disorganized than it actually was. If anything, that is the best metaphor I have of UTA's operations in general: Well-intentioned, but self-deafeatingly clumsy.
Full disclosure: UTA rail transit operations used to be my employer during college. I often contrast this with another employer of mine just before college, the transportation department at Walt Disney World. They are in so many ways the original Mickey Mouse operation, but even they would never have put up with that sort of chaos. They would have spaced people out so they weren't yelling over each other, had signs that worked, and wouldn't have had contradicting destination markers.
I didn't even mention the signs yet, did I? The Electronic Message Boards on the platform scrolled the single message "Expect Delays Due To Construction" and were absolutely no help. On top of that, each of the TRAX lines had their own method of dealing with the disruption, each disagreeing with the other. The Green Line's method was the worst - flat out denial. Green trains entering Ballpark automatically announced that they were headed for "Downtown Salt Lake City and the Airport", to which the many UTA personalities on the platform responded by shouting over one another about how the announcement was wrong and that the train would not go to either of those places. The Red Line's method was to underpromise; all Red Line trains announced they were on their way to Central Pointe (a pre-recorded announcement and route for when Red Line trains need to go out of service). It took much reassuring from the UTA platform barkers to convince passengers that the train would proceed through Central Pointe and continue on to Daybreak. The Blue Line's monikers were honest but incomplete - they read "BLU - SLC", but made no mention of the airport - a point that the platform attendants made extra sure to loudly rectify.
In private moments I asked the platform attendants how things were going, and they were mostly non-committal. One was upset that trains were off their schedule and were as much as 10 minutes behind (I liked his honest disappointment at the delays) but the rest were far more fatalistic in their outlook ("trains come when they come."). Looking at the Transit Tracker app, it looked as though 6 of the 9 Blue Line trains on the map were trapped downtown, leaving the other 3 alone between ballpark and Draper (I can't imagine what that meant for headways - 25 minutes, perhaps?). Though one of the trains at Draper was displayed as 'Green' on the app, so perhaps it wasn't entirely trustworthy. I also noticed that all the trains on the University Line were marked as 'Red,' meaning if UTA was probably not using the Black Line as a route for scheduling purposes, only as a customer convenience and was therefore probably using pre-programmed destination markers (like Blu-SLC or RED - UNIVERSITY), and then solving any residual confusion with much shouting.
So, overall, I'm not impressed from a customer-relations standpoint. UTA certainly did not make itself any new friends today. For the extent of the work they are doing (reducing their busiest section of track down to single-track) I think they are handling it reasonably well, but perhaps next week they will do better. Most disappointing is that they seem unable to update their routing and scheduling on the fly, as demonstrated by the hack-job of routes and destination markers I saw today. It really shouldn't be that hard to load up a new route into the train cars' computer so that the routing doesn't have to be done manually and the directions don't have to be given by shouting. It isn't just a matter of slick customer-relations, it is a matter of operating efficiently (manual operations waste so much time).
I'm sticking with my previous judgement: Well-intentioned, but self-deafeatingly clumsy.
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No, I did not take this picture. I grabbed it from Reddit: 
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