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  #41  
Old Posted Jul 24, 2018, 12:51 PM
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Originally Posted by llamaorama View Post
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.
Charlotte's existing Blue Line is interesting because it is a surface line but is about 50% grade separated through downtown. A freight line occupied the position of one of the streets in the downtown grid, and that freight line was grade-separated with underpasses before the downtown got built up. The Blue Line gets the double benefit of A) getting to fly over several busy cross streets and B) running in an exclusive right-of-way downtown.

Other systems like Portland, Denver, Dallas, San Diego, etc all have to mix with traffic to a great extent downtown. Several systems ended up pedestrianizing the street they run on, or like Houston, at least carving out dedicated space.

The sheer cost of a subway makes me a little hesitant to recommend one for Charlotte, despite the obvious advantages. Charlotte is a big city in the American sense, but in terms of the extent of urban, walkable neighborhoods, it's not all that big... and comparable European cities usually don't have subways either.
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  #42  
Old Posted Jul 24, 2018, 3:25 PM
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Originally Posted by mousquet View Post
They don't have decent workers yet in China; they still have slaves.
It's true that China is not really comparable to the US in terms of labor, but the cost of labor doesn't fully explain why US infrastructure is so expensive. Western Europe, where labor is expensive too, is able to build trams and subways for much less money than the US.
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  #43  
Old Posted Jul 24, 2018, 4:08 PM
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  #44  
Old Posted Jul 24, 2018, 4:46 PM
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The interesting thing about Charlotte's transit is part of its reasoning to build it. Charlotte was and is interested in moving people from place to place, but it's also very interested in creating density and opening the gates to urban development. The Lynx Blue Line only recently made it north of Uptown all the way to UNC-Charlotte. Part of the impetus behind that expansion was being able to see what the train had done for Uptown and the South End, creating a solid corridor of dense, mixed-use (albeit architecturally dull) development all along the rail line.

Have other cities used transit to deliberately spark development, or have most cities been more concerned with relieving congestion?
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  #45  
Old Posted Jul 24, 2018, 5:04 PM
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Originally Posted by hauntedheadnc View Post
The interesting thing about Charlotte's transit is part of its reasoning to build it. Charlotte was and is interested in moving people from place to place, but it's also very interested in creating density and opening the gates to urban development. The Lynx Blue Line only recently made it north of Uptown all the way to UNC-Charlotte. Part of the impetus behind that expansion was being able to see what the train had done for Uptown and the South End, creating a solid corridor of dense, mixed-use (albeit architecturally dull) development all along the rail line.

Have other cities used transit to deliberately spark development, or have most cities been more concerned with relieving congestion?
Back in the olden days before the automobile, transit lines were built in greenfield areas to spark development.
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  #46  
Old Posted Jul 24, 2018, 5:07 PM
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Originally Posted by SIGSEGV View Post
Back in the olden days before the automobile, transit lines were built in greenfield areas to spark development.
A time when streetcars... ruled the earth! Now that you mention it, streetcars used to be a big selling point for new residential developments back around the turn of the 20th Century. But were systems like MARTA, BART, or the DC Metro designed with growth in mind, or were they developed to ease the crowding on the streets?
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  #47  
Old Posted Jul 24, 2018, 7:04 PM
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DC Metro was absolutely designed with growth in mind, albeit different than Charlotte. Here we were densifying what had been streetcar suburbs.

Ballston before:

Arlington County

Ballston after:
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  #48  
Old Posted Jul 24, 2018, 10:17 PM
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As a former resident of Tennessee, I can attest that people outside the Southeast don't understand that Nashville and Charlotte both anticipate growing into very large cities. Not as large as Atlanta (currently 6+ million), but definitely 3+ million by the 2030s. Each have learned by what Atlanta has done wrong.

Nashville implemented form-based code around 2010 which is motivating a ton of tear-downs and densification in what were formerly very low-density inner-ring suburbs. The light rail subway plan that failed at the polls earlier this year was big-time because Nashville needs a big-time solution. The traffic there is truly awful and its physical layout is incredibly complicated (much more complicated than it appears at first glance on Google Earth).

Charlotte lucked out by having the usable downtown rail corridor (perhaps the only city that lucked out to a greater extent was St. Louis). But an east-west corridor needs to be underground if it's going not just be an alternative to cars but something that truly forms a spine around which the city functions.

Nashville and Charlotte have ever intention of upzoning and encouraging midrise construction along their rail lines. They aren't going to let valuable land 1-2 miles from downtown be wasted by park & ride lots.
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  #49  
Old Posted Jul 25, 2018, 1:54 AM
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Originally Posted by jmecklenborg View Post
As a former resident of Tennessee, I can attest that people outside the Southeast don't understand that Nashville and Charlotte both anticipate growing into very large cities. Not as large as Atlanta (currently 6+ million), but definitely 3+ million by the 2030s. Each have learned by what Atlanta has done wrong.
Nashville is definitely a lot denser than most of the South and Charlotte seems to be building a new tower every time I come. There's definitely sufficient density for rail, especially in 10 years when projects that started planning today would likely be completed.
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  #50  
Old Posted Jul 25, 2018, 2:03 AM
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Originally Posted by jmecklenborg View Post
As a former resident of Tennessee, I can attest that people outside the Southeast don't understand that Nashville and Charlotte both anticipate growing into very large cities. Not as large as Atlanta (currently 6+ million), but definitely 3+ million by the 2030s. Each have learned by what Atlanta has done wrong.
You realize that this is all nonsense, right? Locals don't have some divine predictive powers of future MSA/CSA numbers.

If Nashville or Charlotte ever have 3 million people, it will be pretty sad. 98% sprawl metros adding another million people in endless sprawl. And it will probably mean Atlanta has 9-10 million people.
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  #51  
Old Posted Jul 25, 2018, 2:18 AM
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Nashville is definitely a lot denser than most of the South and Charlotte seems to be building a new tower every time I come. There's definitely sufficient density for rail, especially in 10 years when projects that started planning today would likely be completed.
Charlotte Walk Score: 26
Nashville Walk Score: 28
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  #52  
Old Posted Jul 25, 2018, 3:44 AM
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Originally Posted by SIGSEGV View Post
Charlotte Walk Score: 26
Nashville Walk Score: 28
The overall walk score of a region is irrelevant. Every city has large unpopulated or semi-populated areas. Dense areas are often caused by surrounding water, hills, or other items that cannot be built upon. And there is no reason why new walkable areas can't be built from scratch - and as I mentioned, Nashville has already aggressively upzoned many areas, even without rail.

And as I already mentioned, there is no way to build surface rail across downtown Nashville or on the contemplated alignment in Charlotte. In each case, a line needs to be underground.

The big difference between the two rail proposals are that Nashville was going to have two lines converge at either end of its proposed tunnel whereas so far we're only seeing a single line proposed for Charlotte.

The big void in Nashville's plan is that it was not going to serve the Vanderbilt area...but if you were paying attention you could see that the rail plan was set up to be augmented by a future subway under Broadway and West End/21st, intersecting the initial tunnel near the arena.
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  #53  
Old Posted Jul 25, 2018, 3:50 AM
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Originally Posted by Crawford View Post
You realize that this is all nonsense, right? Locals don't have some divine predictive powers of future MSA/CSA numbers.
The Nashville blue bloods are firing on all cylinders to make Nashville a major U.S. city. That is the complete opposite of what blue bloods do in most small and midsized cities -- where they actually act to retard growth so as to maintain their personal fiefdoms. Atlanta got big because its city fathers were willing to give up complete control of a small pie in exchange for a significant piece of a much bigger pie. Nashville and Charlotte are following that model. Cities like Birmingham and Cincinnati area not.

Last edited by jmecklenborg; Sep 4, 2018 at 1:37 AM.
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  #54  
Old Posted Sep 3, 2018, 1:46 PM
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Originally Posted by SIGSEGV View Post
Charlotte Walk Score: 26
Nashville Walk Score: 28

And Jacksonville is quite bigger than Miami.


So are you going to use statistics based on arbitrary city limits or can we discuss the actual cities knowing that Jacksonville isn’t really bigger than Miami and Charlotte isn’t really a 26....
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  #55  
Old Posted Sep 3, 2018, 10:47 PM
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No point investing in a form of transportation that only blacks and immigrants would use. Charlotte would be better off investing in highways instead.
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  #56  
Old Posted Sep 3, 2018, 11:12 PM
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Golden satire.

Hopefully.
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  #57  
Old Posted Sep 5, 2018, 2:43 PM
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Hey jmecklenborg, you do realize that by the time Atlanta was the size of Nashville or Charlotte it was building heavy rail subway, right? How have Nashville or Charlotte learned what Atlanta did wrong?
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  #58  
Old Posted Sep 5, 2018, 4:06 PM
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Originally Posted by Busy Bee View Post
^

Golden satire.

Hopefully.
I know exactly where this came from, after he got lectured on another thread that Toronto's high transit ridership was because of the high number of immigrants that live in the city.


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  #59  
Old Posted Nov 28, 2018, 6:04 PM
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Originally Posted by Eightball View Post
Walker style bus redesigns are normally a failure. ie Houston, the one Baltimore just did is a disaster etc

Then again transit in the US is just generally terrible. We have the worst efficacy per dollar spent of any rich country
How is redesigning bus networks to focus on frequency, speed, and directness -- and serving more destinations outside of downtown - a failure? Of course ridership will drop after the system is implemented but many of these systems are now doing very well, including Houston.
Columbus and Jacksonville are experiencing much higher boardings.

Its amazing to see what is happening in these cities with the same transit resources but different transit geography. I think these changes should happen in tandem with regional rail system expansion. These networks serve different purposes.
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  #60  
Old Posted Nov 28, 2018, 8:20 PM
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Originally Posted by tdawg View Post
Hey jmecklenborg, you do realize that by the time Atlanta was the size of Nashville or Charlotte it was building heavy rail subway, right? How have Nashville or Charlotte learned what Atlanta did wrong?
Light Rail technology as we know it didn't exist when MARTA was planned and built, so that's a moot point.
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