10-31-2021, 08:42 PM
(10-31-2021, 04:44 PM)plam Wrote:(10-31-2021, 12:59 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: For Block Line, I absolutely agree, it seems like an absolute no brainer, the system would have been much faster much more efficient.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by the "top" of Charles, are you suggesting it should be underground north of Downtown? Why would the LRT need to be buried there?
You folks probably know I strongly disagree with grade separating the LRT. Block line I support because the topology of the area makes it natural to be grade separated. But the rest of the locations, I see grade separation as an expensive (and unnecessary) investment to make more room for cars.
Here's the question I'd ask you folks who think the LRT should be buried. Would you still believe the LRT should be buried if the downtown (or uptown) cores were car free? I.e., if there were no cars permitted in the area you want the LRT buried, would you still think it should be buried? What benefits would there be to burying it there? Because as always, there are disadvantages--and not just cost but accessibility.
(huh, someone ate my post, let's try again)
I don't think LRT should be buried, but nevertheless: I have a suspicion that cores should be car-lite not car-free. That is, it should be really slow and inconvenient and expensive to bring your car into the core, but it shouldn't be impossible. There's the question of why there were car-free experiments in the 70s that didn't work so great, and I still don't have a great understanding of that.
Car-lite vs. car-free I don't think makes a huge difference, most of our "car-free" places are "car-lite" anyway. Like city parks...they're car free right? I'd call them car-lite, there are service vehicles, drivers who think they should be there for like, weddings or picnics, lost idiots, assholes from time to time. Same with places like the uptown square, the UW campus.
Car-lite might be a spectrum, a place where residents are permitted cars is a lot less car-lite. I wouldn't call the parking lot of a complex car-lite. But clearly there is a grey area.
I am not sure why the 70s experiments didn't work. City Beautiful I think had a video about it with some speculation. I hope that part of it is just the timing. But some of it might also be the context, I think it was often seen as a solution to struggling downtowns, without fixing the real structural issues Even today, if you just close downtown to cars, without making other means of getting there, and without removing free easy parking at the outlying areas, and without having more people living/working downtown, and without giving the few people who do live in a depressed downtown the resources to spend anything, well, it's gonna be a bad result. We have fixed some, but not all of those issues. We have many more people living downtown, downtown is in many ways thriving, it is relatively easy to travel downtown without a car for the vast majority of the population. So I think that is part of it. Whether the result would be different, I have no idea.