http://kinetic.seattle.wa.us/getonboard.html More on Why Trains Dont Relieve Congestion and why there is a better way! ...
" ... Put simply, trains don't go where enough people want to go, when they want to go. Put another way: Transportation is a market like anything else, and trains are not the product the market is demanding. And yet when the market demands alternatives, the answer that has come back is "let's put in some trains". The line of reasoning seems to be trains are what other cities have; the world's great cities have Tubes, Metros and Subways, and WE are a great city, right? An analogy: Suppose you go out to a restaurant and order a juicy, rare steak with fries. But when the waiter returns he's carrying a plate with a hot, sizzling... soy loaf with non-dairy coleslaw on the side. "This is not what I ordered," you tell the waiter. "But it's food," he replies. "It may not have the taste you wanted, but you won't starve. Get used to it." So the question is: How hungry are you?
Most people would rather go to another restaurant. In Seattle, despite a bus system with rush hour express routes that emulate train service, roads are crowded and the rush "hour" just keeps getting longer. Clearly, even buses are not a close enough substitute to the car. So what has been put forward by Sound Transit, the agency charged with giving the region a new mass transit system? A train system. Specifically, light rail. Sound Transit won't consider a technology like Personal Rapid Transit , and it is also resisting the popular monorail alternative. This is hardly surprising, as Sound Transit has invested millions of dollars and countless hours in planning and fighting for light rail. They are invested in it financially and emotionally. To return to the restaurant analogy, soy loaf is the only thing the chef knows how to make. In fact, the chef is telling you it's not worth his time to learn to cook anything else.
But would a menu boasting Monorail Cordon Bleu stand a better chance at actually relieving our traffic problems? I would submit that the answer is a resounding No. A monorail is just another type of train , with the same service characteristics as light rail. People would NOT choose to ride monorail for the same reasons they choose NOT to ride the bus and WOULD NOT choose to ride light rail. At this time monorail has a capital cost advantage over light rail, and that is all.
Personal Rapid Transit , a technology designed in response to the way people actually use transportation, is the common-sense alternative to trains, offering the best hope of a mass transit that people will really use AND therefore ease traffic congestion.
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In Part I we found that conventional transit doesn't go where you want, when you want, as fast as you want. The root reason is that conventional transit only goes back and forth along a corridor, and it only stops at stations that have a fair amount of distance between them. And it can't really be any different: today it is too expensive to have very many train corridors within a metropolitan area, the construction cost is too high, the right of ways and stations claim too much land. And then comes the clincher: The people who are supposed to use the system do not all live in those corridors, and nor are all the destinations to which they wish to travel. Dr. Martin Lowson, designer of the British ULTra personal rapid transit system, characterizes modern urban transportation patterns this way:
"...demand in a modern city is anywhere to anywhere. It would be almost impossible to devise a conventional collective transport system to meet these very diverse needs." Source
From anywhere, to anywhere. No wonder transit restricted to corridors lacks appeal, and no wonder they make little or no impact on traffic congestion. A corridor simply cannot serve a city that spreads out north, south, east and west. This is especially true in the low density, spread-out cities of the western United States.
...The chasm between what people want and what transit planners are offering is key to any public debate on selecting a rapid transit technology. A system may be capable of carrying enough people to relieve traffic congestion, but actually getting them to use it is an entirely different matter. Given the expense of conventional rail and monorail, and the poor performance of recent light rail systems, is any kind of train system a fiscally responsible choice? Now are you ready to..."
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