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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19601342
this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2024
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Pittsburgh is making great strides in this. They've been tearing down parking garages and building condos, forcing everyone to take public transportation. The light rail is even totally free, making it easy for everyone to get there.
I gotta say, we could do a hell of a lot better with that.
Edit: Switched to better map
Those tiny red and blue lines is all we have for a city of 300k people, and only just to those few neighborhoods. We could easily have way more, but we just don't.
Does the light rail even make it to the Amtrak station? Last time I was in Pittsburgh I had to walk almost a mile down Grant to catch it. This map seems more aspirational than existent.
I think you're talking about the Penn Station, to which the answer is yes, its the end of the dark blue line on the right side.
Yeah, it's dog shit. Part of that is because it's kind of a pointless task to map the rail system, because there basically is none. Google used to have a good display for it, but it looks like they took it out.
Here is a better one, though it doesn't show the shear mass of area that isn't covered:
I thought it was called Union Station. The closest light rail station is in Steel Plaza. Apparently there used to be a light rail station near Union Station, and the light rail station was called Penn Station, but it closed like five years ago.
Actually, yeah you're correct and I was wrong.
Yeah, that figures.
What’s light blue?
Connection to an airport is usually a good idea, so hopefully the red Is coming soon
The light blue is a bus line, but the busses are never on time or consistent. So it's a gamble if it gets you to your destination on time.
If the busses/train had dedicated roads for them, it'd be a different story.
Where I live, they’ve gone through to create dedicated bus lanes for the major downtown bus routes. As a sometime car driver, I really hate the extra delays when I have to drive, but as a transit user when given the choice I can see how it makes a big difference in predictability and reliability.
Actually, “funny” story …. Boston has always had inadequate transit to the airport. A decade or two back they created a new transit line for a newly redeveloped section of the city and to improve transit to the airport. However the budget compromise ended up being Bus Rapid Transit, stuck in the same tunnel traffic as all the cars. We spent however many billions of dollars building dedicated bus roads to the new hotels and convention center (yea capitalism), but “improved” airport access is to be stuck in traffic
Yeah, it always sucks because whenever there is some project in the works to fix the problem, it's always some half step like a bus trapped on a normal road, so we're back to square one after having blown millions of dollars.
Even worse, the city used to own a lot of riverfront area with rail infrastructure, but sold it off. That land has now since been developed into other stuff. So even if we wanted to rebuild what we used to have, we'd have to eminent domain and bulldoze a bunch of shit, making it way more expensive than it would be if the city just kept the land.
Gotta force people to use the existing ones first, otherwise when planning more people will complain that no one will use it.
Kinda hard to force people to use it when the T only serves like 3 neighborhoods in a city of 300k, with ~40 neighborhoods.
Damn, kinda wish my city had free public transit. It also does not make much sense to make transit paid given most roads are free to use.