To College, by Interurban?
The following article from the Light Rail now folks has some valuable lessons for those advocating for the Vancouver to Chilliwack Interurban. The following universities and colleges would be potential destinations for students: BCIT, Simon Fraser University, Kwantlen College (Cloverdale and Langley campuses), Trinity Western University, and the University of the Fraser Valley (Chilliwack Campus). Students attending these places of higher education, alone, could support a 30 minute Vancouver to Chilliwack Interurban service. Something to think about Mr. Falcon!
University Station in Denver Colorado. The Valley Interurban stations would be much smaller in scale.
Light Rail Now! NewsLog
20 March 2009Salt Lake: One-third of campus travel via light rail
In Salt Lake City, detractors of public transportation almost always with the aim of disparaging the impact of rail transit like to contend that public transit ridership is basically irrelevant in urban areas. To argue this, they often compare the ridership of a relatively weak transit system, or a single rail system, with virtually all the street and highway traffic of a huge region, typically much of which is outside the transit service area.
In reality, public transit in major urban areas tends to be a true workhorse, carrying much of the traffic load into concentrated, highly congested areas.
An excellent case in point would seem to be one of Salt Lake City’s TRAX light rail transit (LRT) lines that serves the University of Utah. Although TRAX ridership has somewhat “leveled off” since motor fuel prices dropped from the $4.50-per-gallon levels of last fall, an article in the Salt Lake Tribune (2009/02/16) reports that approximately 45,000 travelers a week ride the LRT systemAi??Ai?? representing 33% of total travel to the campus.
That means that even with the cost of using a car lower, and ridership down fully one-third of trips to the campus are handled by the Utah Transit Authority’s light rail service. That’s a relatively huge number of trips that would otherwise mean more private motor vehicles clogging streets and highways, and contending with one another for scarce parking … and a lot less pressure on the university administration to devote valuable real estate to providing more parking facilities.
So much for the “irrelevance” of rail transit at least in Salt Lake City.
about Lakeshore GO; it serves mlosty Hatlon/Peel to Union and Scarborough/Durham to Union. Lakeshore GO is still a cross-region line though. By your definition, Yonge is not a crosstown line either; southbound trains in the AM peak empty out substantially at Bloor; more people get off (or on) than stay on travelling through Bloor from north to south. Yonge is still a crosstown line though.I think you’re focusing too much on downtown. Why should any city design its subway so that it is grossly impractical to travel anywhere but downtown? Bloor-Danforth avoids us having that problem with its current configuration.Bloor-Danforth was shorter and less expensive than the flying-U, but the expense associated with it did have relation to streetcar network impacts; they would have had to keep more of the streetcar network and incur a fair amount of track replacement costs on Bloor, which was near the end of its life at the time, in stark contrast to Queen, which didn’t need track replacement for quite a while yet back then. A lot of concern about how to effectively service the high demands between Greenwood and Ossington in the Bloor-Danforth corridor did factored into it, because obtaining streetcars was becoming increasingly closer to impossible while the fleet continued to age. The late-1950s report evaluating the two did not focus much attention on the functionality of the wye, so that was a very minor factor in deciding the alignment, although the TTC obviously had other reservations about some specifics of the wye to the point that Norman Wilson resigned in protest (this sounds like a StasCan story), as discussed previously.What I would put forward as a testament to the success of the Bloor-Danforth line, and confirming that it was the right choice and far from a mistake, is its off-peak ridership. The off-peak ridership of Bloor-Danforth is extremely healthy, and applies to weekends as well. I think you see more crosstown use outside of the peak periods, and that its success in off-peak performance would have been hampered with the flying-U.As for Transit City, I don’t know where you’ve been, but there’s been a lot of dissatisfaction among the Transit City boosters about the impacts of the piecemeal approach currently in play. I would have handled it differently but then, I would have changed a few other things about Transit City, too, as far too many problems have not been resolved.