Sunday, August 31, 2008

Daily Herald Editorial Aritcle

Northbound I-15 makes a steep descent from  th...Image via Wikipedia Critics say FrontRunner cost outweighs benefit

Well it looks like a certain anti-transit guy has crawled out from under the rock he has been under for awhile.

Of course his like usually use gross generalizations to try to make his point. Of course he mentions all trips along Interstate 15 but that includes both private and commercial vehicles plus vehicles traveling through the area.

What they don't say and never will is the percentage of traffic that rail is capturing in the corridor it specifically runs.

Also the highways are already an large integrated network, that rail has yet to achieve.


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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Critics like to point out how rail lines only remove a small proportion of road trips from the highway. Why do they expect rail networks to solve road problems? The road problem is itself unsolvable. We can never build out of congestion because one, there isn’t enough room, and two, increased road capacity fosters additional demand. A rail to roads direct comparison is a flawed analogy.

The truth is, the road problem is only a part of the overall transportation problem. And transportation is less about moving cars as it is about moving people. A system wide problem is going to require system wide solutions. We need roads, we need buses, we need bicycles, we need rail, and we need airplanes. It is foolish to assume just one of these modes of transportation is superior and can entirely serve the diverse needs of a community.

The Daily Herald article mentions the potential experiment to compare the effects of Frontrunner vs Legacy Highway on I-15. What about the underlying experiment of a “roads only” metropolitan transportation network? That experiment has already been conducted. We can look to the city of Los Angeles to view the results.