I thought this article from Toronto might offer some guidance for Cleveland as we build the Silver Line, and debate the next big transit project(s) for the city (and for other Ohio cities considering rail)...

 

KJP

______________________

 

Rapid transit? Not on Spadina

A close look at the popular streetcar suggests it's not the success many believe it to be

STEPHEN WICKENS

7 May 2005

The Globe and Mail

 

..........

This is only vaguely related but one thing I wondered about the BRT project is that it claims that the signals at intesections will be timed accommodate for the transit vehicles.  They sense a vehicle coming and give priority to them.  What confuses be is that there appear to be stops at nearly all the intersections along the route anyway... So - if the line is as popular at it needs to be to be a success, doesn't that imply that the bus will have to stop at every intersection anyway?  Or will there be some express services that will be able to take advantage of the signal priority?  If so I can definitely see how travel time could be cut in a big way but..  I'm dubious but I hope it works.

Columns like this are irrelevant in the absence of a transportation free market. Get rid of all the subsidies to all modes of transportation, to their supportive land uses and to the fuels they use, then we can see what people actually can afford and prefer to use. The widespread scale with which we subsidize car use is simply not understood (or even considered) by all but a few researchers who cannot convey that scale in a matter of a sound bite or two. For most of us, we cannot see all the things around us that encourage driving at the expense of alternatives, including sound land use planning. In that regard, we're like fish who don't contemplate the water.

 

Until we have a transportation free market, such contentions like those in this column are impossible say are true or false. The presence of such massive government interference into reducing the costs of driving (subsidizing oil consumption, having governments serve as "bankers" by holding capital investment trust funds for highways, local governments requiring a minimum number of parking spaces at businesses, the widespread practice of free or underpriced parking, huge subsidies for massive storm sewer projects that benefit auto-dependent sprawl, etc etc).

 

Perhaps if we better understood these costs and had motorists pay them, I suspect many of us wouldn't be living in sprawlville, driving our cars, or have to subsidize transit anymore. I say, privitize everything transportation related, then let the chips fall where they may. And this Globe & Mail columnist can say what the free market is really telling us.