From Christof in Houston:
Notice a pattern? Passengers don’t want to transfer to a circulator service to get to work, even a high-quality circulator like Denver’s. And serving suburban employment densities with rail transit is just about futile: 80% of Houston’s bus routes have higher ridership than Denver’s suburb to suburb rail line.
Trains aren’t vacuum cleaners. You don’t just put them next to a freeway and hope they suck people out of their cars. People will ride transit if it gets them where they want to go conveniently. If we want to maximize the number of people who will take transit (which should be the goal) we need to find places where transit will serve as many people as possible as conveniently as possible. That means serving density, particularly employment density, directly.
Note that, as Christof further backed up in the forum, Denver’s circulator is far superior to the one we’ll be delivering here in Austin – it actually has some reserved right-of-way (which even our future maybe streetcar line won’t have). In Austin, just about every daily commuter on the commuter rail line will have to transfer to a shuttle bus to get to their office. Not a shuttle bus which has some segments of reserved right-of-way, like in Denver, but a shuttle bus which is stuck in the same traffic the train was supposed to bypass.
That’s why Tri-Rail in South Florida failed. Some credulous fools here think we’re radically different from everybody else – but if we were so different in the “people with real jobs dislike uncomfortable, jerky, slow bus rides” department, we wouldn’t need to build rail in the first place.
