Q Line "Constructive Criticism"

[Junjie]

I was thinking the same. Dallas is Exhibit A in light rail failures. They spent megabillions, have one of the largest systems in North America, and ridership is pathetic and lower than when they just had buses [[and when Dallas metro population was less than it is today).

The mindset that cities should [[or even can) build transit which will instantly generate huge ridership really has it backwards. In places that did not grow up around transit and haven't maintained transit-friendly density and land use [[e.g. everywhere except the east coast and Chicago), high-quality transit will only pay off on decades-long timespans. It is literally impossible for the Dallas suburbs - or the Detroit metro area - to generate high transit ridership, even if you were able to build 150 miles of subway overnight and run the trains every 2 minutes. The land use patterns, commuting patterns, and behavioral patterns take a long time to shift.

When I-75 opened in 1970, it carried half the traffic in Oakland County that it carries today. But we've spent the last 45 years orienting around the freeways, and now traffic on it has doubled despite no growth in the regional population. People spent those 45 years making different decisions about where to live, where to locate a business, where to work, and where to shop based on the existence of the freeway. The oldest line in the Dallas system was finished in 2002 and the newest only opened in 2012. Its "pathetic" ridership [[100,000+ daily) is already greater than the entire ridership of the DDOT bus system. Check back in 2047 if you want to evaluate its success on a comparable time scale.

The QLine cannot and will not generate high ridership as built, because it is slow, infrequent, and serves a tiny area with a small total population. It's really too bad that it was built on the curb, and the service level needs to be improved - trains every 10 minutes, reliably. But as people continue to move into downtown, Brush Park, midtown, and New Center, ridership will grow. As new buildings are built specifically to take advantage of locations near stops, ridership will grow. And in my view center-running extensions and additional lines would still be worthy investment, if the goal is to re-develop a transit oriented city core over the next 25-50 years.