City's Low Density Means Buses are Better Form of Transit

See the article on the website for the Reason Foundation that "produces rigorous, peer reviewed research and directly engages the policy process..."

The following excerpt describes a similar condition to that of the Seattle/Bellevue/Eastside area- we do not have the density of Paris, Hong Kong or Barcelona that is necessary to draw enough ridership to justify the staggering cost of light rail in our region filled with lakes, hills, protected wetland areas, glacial till and fault zones. We have single family homes and suburbs.

Light Rail will not serve our communities in a cost-efficient way and will not provide enough congestion relief to justify the cost.

"The lower a city's density, the harder it is for rail transit to be successful. And you won't find many major metro areas that are more spread out than Atlanta," said Robert Poole, co-author of the policy brief and director of transportation studies at Reason Foundation.

"Places with well-developed, highly-used rail transit systems – places like London, Paris, and Hong Kong – have radically higher densities than Atlanta and have city centers that are the center of the region’s business and retail activity. Most people in the region do not work or shop in downtown Atlanta."

"Instead of trying to copy European or Asian rail systems that can't be recreated in Atlanta, officials should be looking at the transit system most suited to their reality: buses.

Atlanta should look to bus rapid transit and express toll lane busways that could provide the time-savings and efficiency that might actually lure people out of their cars."

I recently rode the 550 bus to jury duty in Downtown Seattle. It was fast, clean, comfortable, efficient and dropped me off 1 block away from my destination. We concur.

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- John Stossel, ABC's 20/20

Comments

[BenSchiendelman]

Wait, so we're comparing the density of cities that have had transit for a hundred years to the density of cities that haven't? How does that make sense? We've been building highways here, which decrease density, but not transit, which leads to an increase. New York City hasn't built any new highways, but has built transit. This isn't hard to understand.