03-15-2016, 03:29 PM
(03-14-2016, 08:09 AM)MidTowner Wrote:(03-14-2016, 06:02 AM)ijmorlan Wrote: I have long thought that they should have started a mini service with just a single vehicle shuttling back and forth between UW campus and Uptown on a single track. I think that would have cut the legs out from under a lot of the nonsense that was spewed about LRT — there can still be differences of opinion, some of them even legitimate, but a lot of the outright incorrect facts wouldn’t have been tenable. Of course I’m aware the overhead costs for a single-vehicle service are rather large.
That routing, in particular, would be extremely student-heavy (I know our entire transit system is). Almost no non-students would ride it, and the LRT naysayers would quickly label it a "student shuttle" and, no matter how successful it would be, they would claim that people who can afford to buy cars just won't take transit.
That’s actually a very good point I hadn’t considered. I guess the whole discussion is moot now that a full system is under construction, but you’re right that the ridership demographic of my pilot project idea would have been a political challenge. It would still show people how LRT really works physically, but it wouldn’t give the right idea of how it would fit into the city.