The great thing about bringing in additional residents is that you get additional taxes to help fund any needed infrastructure improvements, the existence of which you can use to issue bonds now to complete those projects ahead of time.

There is no need to do anything about traffic for a commuter rail station there. Build lots of housing in the area within walking distance, a grade separated cycling/PEV path network linking the greater downtown, improve general walkability, and include a nice drop-off/pickup loop and dedicated lanes for local buses. Don't build any car parking; the train is for people that aren't driving. If a park-and-ride option is desired, use an infill station next to the Pheasant Lane Mall, it's not like they're using the space these days.

There aren't any physical or financial limits preventing Nashua from making the downtown a much better place to live. They simply choose not to do so to benefit cars, like most cities and towns in the country.

The area has been blighted forever and the obvious fix, converting it into high-density housing surrounding a functioning train station, always seems to be opposed by NIMBYs worried about bridge traffic.

Cars are the entire reason Manchester is a shithole.

Cars only support low density housing due to their space inefficiency and create a constituency with a strong incentive to protect unearned subsidies (free or below market parking, free use of road capacity, pollution, etc.). This drives up home prices, locks people into the most expensive transit mode, creates social issues like homelessness, and blocks most attempts to address any of it.

Manchester needs a dramatic reduction in parking and road space for cars to make other modes of travel safe and effective. Walking, cycling, and personal electric vehicles like scooters are the obvious best-in-class options in a city that lacks the population to support real public transit, but they're severely underused because cars are given priority on literally all roads, making them hostile places for anything else.

Increasing density is not going to increase the tax rate. Denser housing is more efficient and results in lower taxes per person.

Building more housing isn't going to make housing more expensive. Boston is expensive because lots of people want to live there relative to the supply of housing that allows them to do that.

Not the trails. The parking lot, surrounding parking lots, empty lots, and low density buildings like the Family Dollar.

Dover has a rail and bus connected riverfront downtown close to all kinds of desirable destinations that few people can actually live in because half the space is dedicated to storing cars. It could easily be the premier walkable city in the state.

Or take the obvious and sensible option of simply allowing our already built spaces to increase in density. NH is full of urban areas that could easily add huge amounts of new housing by simply removing the regulations that prevent it and de-prioritizing car infrastructure.

The sprawl is being driven by the fact that it's the only viable option to add housing in most of the state. Developers fell an acre of trees to drop in a shitty looking car dependent house because just building an extra floor and some stairs anywhere is illegal.

Downtown Dover has an Amtrak station that's surrounded by ten acres of wasted space that would be much more valuable to redevelop into housing than this.

It's crazy how little development occurs in any of NH's walkable downtown areas. Old photos often make it look like they swapped the horses out for cars while leaving everything else the same.

In addition to the other response by SgtToastie, this STILL doesn't take into consideration the costs of pollution, congestion, or condemning valuable land to uneconomic parking.

Every single person that complains about the cost of the train is a driver that loses their minds at the idea of actually paying for the full cost of their car.

Drivers don't pay for it, so clearly someone else does. Not the negative externalities of the pollution they're responsible for, not the wear and tear on the roads and infrastructure (beyond a laughable token amount), not the cost of parking for free on public land, etc.

If we want to make driving profitable, we need to massively raise the gas tax for the pollution, implement an annual fee based on miles traveled and weight to cover all road and auto infrastructure costs (including those currently paid for by the Federal Government), use congestion pricing, deploy automated traffic enforcement cameras, and ensure that all vehicles parked on public property pay the prevailing market price for that footprint of land.

I always get a chuckle out of the lack of self-awareness when people talk about a rail option not paying for itself. Even if the ticket price is a loss, moving someone from a car to the train is a net gain because driving is a much larger loss.

Driving is the most heavily subsidized mode of transportation. Logically it needs to be the first to go.

There is no mode of transportation that this applies more to than the personal automobile. The rail link will be profitable once we cut the dead weight by banning cars.

If we're getting rid of things that don't directly pay for themselves, driving is first on the chopping block by a very wide margin.