WTOP Radio: Poll finds opposition to Vision Zero’s effectiveness
FTFY.
Regarding the earlier convo, you and I have gone back and forth on this numerous times. I doubt we'll ever change each other's opinions on it, but I do have to address your comments.
#1: it's in a city, where infrastructure is expensive to begin with. We just spent $400 million on the 11th St Bridge. Heck, just replacing the overpass on 16th St NW at Military Rd is running 8 digits.
#2 may have been the case back in the '50s, but not so anymore. It's well documented that modern streetcars and especially LRT trains have a higher passenger capacity than buses. To get that same level of capacity from buses requires running enough buses that the operating costs actually exceed that of the streetcar.
The PCC cars that dominated in Washington for the last several decades of streetcar operation were slightly shorter than those of most other cities because of constraints on parking them in the barns. But the cars that DDOT has purchased for H Street/Benning Road have more capacity because they are longer articulated units, not because of any particular improvement in the technology.
Those rebuilt or improved structures for highway traffic have (and will have) traffic volumes (
including transit bus patrons) to justify the costs of same.
You see #3 as a flaw. And in relation to #4, perhaps it is. But developers and residents tend to see it differently: as permanence. Hard to have "rail creep" in planning/executing a rail transit project the way it often happens with "BRT creep".
I see 3 as a flaw when a car on the line breaks down - or if the line is blocked for other reasons, including a crash involving one or more rubber-tire vehicles.
I reject the inflexibility of rail as some sort of an asset.
The apartment buildings along the 16th Street, N.W.; Connecticut Avenue, N.W.; Wisconsin Avenue, N.W.; and Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. corridors have thrived for many, many decades, with the only form of transit being the humble transit bus (16th Street never had streetcar service; the line along Connecticut Avenue was converted to bus in the 1930's (and supplanted to a large extent by Metrorail in the 1980's); streetcars on Wisconsin Avenue were converted to bus in the late 1950's; and Massachusetts Avenue had some streetcar service in the early days of electric street railways in D.C., but it was abandoned as far back as the 1920's or 1930's).
BRT is a rather different mode of transport from (most) electric street railway lines.
#4 may or may not be true, depending on how many stops the transit line has. As a general rule, streetcars tend to be faster than buses (parked cars in the way notwithstanding) because they generally make fewer stops than the bus does. The only way the bus could counter this would be to cut the number of stops it makes, or having more limited-stop service (like the S9 or X9). But local residents and even businesses tend to not like having "their stop" cut, even if it makes operational sense to do so.
Streetcars can usually accelerate away from a stop faster than a vehicle with an internal-combustion engine, but they generally have to follow the same posted speed limits as nearby rubber-tire traffic.
In D.C. most of the electric street railway system was also impacted by recurring (and sometimes severe) traffic congestion (notable exceptions being parts of the 10 and 12 (east of the Anacostia River) to Benning and Seat Pleasant respectively, the 20 line to Glen Echo, west of Georgetown University; the 82 to from Mount Rainier to Branchville in College Park; and the 30 along Pennsylvania Avenue, S.E. from Second Street to Barney Circle and along much of Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.from the U.S. Capitol complex to the White House and beyond to the narrow streets of Georgetown).
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Topic: District of Columbia (Read 331694 times)