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Cunninghams_right t1_j9wirtp wrote

all of our transit, then and now with the red line, is "boomer transit" designed to connect suburbs to a city, which just takes at face value the argument that everyone should live in suburbs and work in cities. the result of that attitude is why our city, like many in the US, has a problem with livability. we have county people choking traffic in the city with their daily commutes and somehow we keep kowtowing to the needs of non-city residents to the detriment of city residents.

transit should connect adequately within a city before it reaches out to the suburbs. our light rail is 30mi long. it would be far better to have 6 separate 5mi long lines blanketing the city, with bus routes feeding people into those light rail lines.

or more importantly, we have to reassess whether light rail even makes sense in the US. grade separation is the difference between functional and dysfunctional transit. you can look at every light rail line in the US and rank them best-to-worst and you'll find that the better they are, the more time they spend grade-separated. at-grade light rail is always shit in every US city because the US gives cars (often from the county) priority over everything else. a light rail could work well if we did like other countries do and have the lights automatically synch perfectly with the light rail (well, AND if transit agencies like MTA could hire and retain train drivers)

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Xanny t1_j9z2z3o wrote

Its an endless cycle. Transit sucks, only poors take transit, nobody with influence wants to build transit, transit sucks.

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S-Kunst t1_j9zonlv wrote

As a boomer, I agree , urban planners only looks at the needs in one way. The idea that the city needs to be the center of attention is wrong, was wrong 100 yrs ago. Back then, the car and trolley was making inroads on the city's need for being of central importance. Cities should have expanded their service base and made city offices more even spread through out its boundaries. This would have encouraged compliance with things like zoning and permits, as people would not have to run the evil gauntlet of getting through downtown traffic and competing for parking with the workers.

Additionally, our cities lost their purpose when the fed & state governments usurped city infrastructure and made them available to the suburbs.

Unlike Europe and northern cities, Southern cities never made investments in the suburbs, including rail travel, so bedroom communities like those found on the Philly "Main Line" were not built. In those areas, people 20-30 miles outside of a city have no problem using train travel to get to work.

Lastly I think forming new "towns" or settlements, in the surrounding counties, are easier to insert good public transit than trying to re-fit extant urbanized areas, though it needs to be planned and not left to the developers to ignore, as we have seen in the formation of Crofton, and currently in Middle River & Belcampe.

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Cunninghams_right t1_j9zqy3b wrote

>The idea that the city needs to be the center of attention is wrong

spoken like a true boomer. if you look around the world at the locations where the planning is optimal, they focus on the city center first. this is not disputable, but for some reason boomers can't understand that things like density, or location of services, matter when it comes to transit.

>Lastly I think forming new "towns" or settlements, in the surrounding counties, are easier to insert good public transit than trying to re-fit extant urbanized areas

not even remotely true. if you're talking purely about building the transit line, then sure. but if you're talking about the number of people served by the line per dollar, then you're not even close to correct. moreover, your claim would only be true if tax/subsidy structure was such that new development was forced to either be along existing lines or to build new connections and not be spread-out mono-zoning.

you couldn't be further from correct on all measures. your way of thinking is why transit in the US is broken and why cities are not livable and are choked with car traffic.

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