beautyfromashes wrote:The Main Street bridge is open but it only appears to be one lane each way with the streetcar sharing this lane. I assumed the streetcar would have its own, dedicated lane. Won't this make the streetcar especially slow with cars getting in its way?
The streetcar will operate in mixed traffic along the entire route.
EDIT: Perhaps with the exception of the leg between 20th & Union Station?
beautyfromashes wrote:The Main Street bridge is open but it only appears to be one lane each way with the streetcar sharing this lane. I assumed the streetcar would have its own, dedicated lane. Won't this make the streetcar especially slow with cars getting in its way?
You haven't read the FAQ on the website? It covers your questions.
mean wrote:...because that's what a streetcar is, and that's what a streetcar does?
Honestly, I can't think of many cities that I've been to that have streetcars vs. light rail, but SF and NO have dedicated lanes. So, basically, it's going to be really, really slowwwwww, right?
In my opinion, in an increasingly efficient society, it needs to either save me time, or money. I love that they made it free, but it needs to be a door to destination time saver for it to be an overwhelming success. I worry that it will be a great designated driver or hotel transport but not a true daily use vehicle.
beautyfromashes wrote:In my opinion, in an increasingly efficient society, it needs to either save me time, or money. I love that they made it free, but it needs to be a door to destination time saver for it to be an overwhelming success. I worry that it will be a great designated driver or hotel transport but not a true daily use vehicle.
in an increasingly efficient society this time gain is invaluable. and I'd argue less people will find this true with phase 1 than when additional phases are added on.
one's can use of the time spent getting to work. a streetcar is crazy smooth and one would be able to not watch the road constantly but instead do some work from the train or read a magazine. if you work on the opposite end of downtown you could get 45 minutes of book reading in each day.
how about weather time savings? a lot of people downtown are in surface lots. in summer your car isn't 120 degrees and in winter imagine not dealing with snow and ice, both scraping it off or driving in it.
These are great points! I'm just wanting a situation where people leave their house/apartment door and it's actually slower to get to their job downtown if the get in their car. I know this might be a pipe dream. But, dedicated lanes with timed lights would be a great start.
Is there any city in the country where transit is faster than driving? Even the NYC Subway is only time-competitive with a bicycle, and a year or so ago when I had a tight connection to make between Union Station and O'Hare I definitely asked a friend to drive me rather than hopping on the CTA Blue Line (we got stuck in heavy traffic but still beat the L there handily). Only extraordinary gridlock ever tips time considerations in favor of transit, even in these cities. Transit isn't successful because it gets people from point A to point B faster than they could with a car, it's successful because it doesn't require people to have a car in the first place. This obviously plays better in dense (and expensive) cities than it does in car-centric places like KC, but if you want to change that car-centric model you have to start somewhere. Expecting any transit system to outrun a private car seems unrealistic to me, but transit is more about cost and convenience (obviously a car is convenient in its own ways, but also incredibly inconvenient in many others) than speed anyway.
NYC subway can be pretty competitive with driving, even in light traffic, if you're not going crosstown and you catch the right train at the right time. But yeah, generally not so much.
Alright. I've been a big proponent of the streetcar (and light rail before). I think it is vital to the city as an encourager of development, tourism attraction and attracting a young talented workforce. But, now that tracks are being laid, I'm working through how I will personally use it. I definitely could see my wife and I using it to go out to dinner or get drinks with friends, shopping on the Plaza, etc. But, I'm trying to decide if I could make the jump to using it everyday. For it to expand, it has to be drawing more riders than the standard bus does already and I'm not sure if will.
When I lived in NYC, I would take the subway instead of the bus when I needed to get somewhere faster. The only time it's a pain is very late at night when the trains don't run as frequently, then I would take a bus because there was little traffic anyway.
Expected travel time between river market and union station is 13 minutes. If you think you can *legally* walk, jog, bike, or drive faster please post the data to back it up. Intermediary trips will always be faster in a car, but not every time if accounting for parking and walking from car to destination.
Yes, an occasional asshat will block the tracks and they will be towed. Where do you think the light rail trains were going to go? We have no other choices downtown.
Living in NYC right now, I can say the subway is most definitely not faster than driving (under ordinary traffic conditions, not necessarily when special events shut down avenues). To Fang's point, the subway is clearly much faster than a bus, but a bus is not a private car or taxi. It takes an hour (on an express 4/5 with no transfers) to get from my place in Manhattan to my friend's place in Brooklyn -- I've never driven that particular route before, but Google Maps puts the drive at about 25 minutes (biking it takes a little more than an hour, I've walked it a few times in about three hours). Possibly over short distances (eg Union Square to Grand Central, which is nonstop on an express) the subway can beat a car from stop to stop, although unless Union Square is actually your origin and GCT your final destination, I'm still not sure it'll beat a car from door to door. And it's certainly not always possible to make your journey without any transfers anyway -- especially if you're starting and/or finishing somewhere outside of Manhattan.
I mean this is not particularly relevant to the streetcar anyway, except insofar as it shows that it's unrealistic (and unnecessary) for the streetcar to beat a car.
DaveKCMO wrote:
Yes, an occasional asshat will block the tracks and they will be towed. Where do you think the light rail trains were going to go? We have no other choices downtown.
We still have parking on Main St. From DT to the Plaza. I find that ridiculous. Those should be streetcar lanes. And, it's not going to be an occasional slowdown and that's why I brought up the new Main St. Bridge. It's one lane each way with cars and streetcar sharing the same lane. That's going to be a disaster, especially during rush hour. But, as Fang said... It's already been discussed. Still glad it's going in.
DaveKCMO wrote:Expected travel time between river market and union station is 13 minutes. If you think you can *legally* walk, jog, bike, or drive faster please post the data to back it up. Intermediary trips will always be faster in a car, but not every time if accounting for parking and walking from car to destination.
without street lights I'd take that argument. but with them, no.
on an uninterrupted 2 miles a bike or car not stopping every other block could win
the Main St bridge closing didn't take tracks to south or North of Truman (not that it had to)
this will of course mean closing each intersection again.
This time hopefully there's a marked detour for Truman Road from the west and on Baltimore and Walnut. With the hotel looking likely this will make one detour route many people used last time painful (Baltimore). I hit Baltimore the first few days of the bridge closing and it was a nasty mess of people coming off Truman
another thing worth doing is to get a temp redo of street lights or to even convert them to temp stop signs. like Walnut doesn't have a dedicated left turn cycle southbound onto Truman which blocks traffic
