Red Tape: Why the Red Line Stopped Short (and terminated at Alewife)

Ok, I'm not sure where the jump to landfill comes from and how it relates to the comment that "prosperity can exist in a green way when it was literally built on land created in an eco-adverse way!". I've haven't made any claim about the environmental benefits/degradation of our transportation network - and I'm not sure what bicycle riders have to do with anything vis-a-vis environmentalism. Bikes are just a better mode, quicker, easier to park, easy to maneuver in a very dense urban environment - and they require less space for both on-road and off-road infra (that's not to say switch roads for cars to bike-only, it's to say to incorporate the two on the same public way, which isn't as hard as we make it to be), so it's allows for areas to move more people than they would otherwise (i.e. without bike infra). It's just optimization, not environmentalism.

Public transit actually works less well for today's lifestyles than in the 1960s when people spent their entire career working for one employer. One could count on a static home and work location and route between.

Well that's not true either. Heavy-rail transit usage (i.e. subways + commuter subways like BART/DC Metro) in the US has doubled from 1.8 billion to 3.7 billion since 1960, and that's not just a function of population increase - trip per capita has also increased by 20%. Back in the 60s/70s there were only 11 such systems in the US, now there only 15 so it's not a function of increased access either. That same calculus hold true for CR, Light Rail - the only area where there's been a marked decrease over the last 50 years in usage per cap has been bus service. Jobs are are relocating to city centers, relocating to areas where there's transit connection - people might move jobs more often than they used to, but that, if anything, only increases the utility of transit. Closer an employment center is to a T stop, the greater access they have to both potential employees and greater options those employees have themselves to avoid car ownership costs if they so wish.

No one would argue that driving is more convenient for people in the suburbs, but it's convenience is not the only factor at play. There's a finite amount of space available for road infrastructure, at some point cities need to start allocating their space to more beneficial uses. The Red Line, for example, carries about the same amount of people per day as the Central Artery - and it does so with much more economical use of land. Roads just aren't ever going to earn money for cities the way transit and buildings do, so convenience is great and all - and cities absolutely need to have well-designed road infra - but in aggregate it's just not possible for cities to accommodate automobiles to the extent they'll be used. You need the alternative, and it has nothing to so with "green", it's a just a question of moving the most amount of people possible.

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