Q Line "Constructive Criticism"

[professorscott]

I feel that the Q-Line was designed to be a failure from the start. It was a bad idea to run it curbside where cars or any other obstacle could shut down the ride for minutes while the police wait for the owner of the vehicle to come out and remove it off the track. Someone from GM must had designed it so that it would fail.

I was one of the people who designed it, and none of us worked for GM at the time. Since then, I don't know. The curb-side configuration was the result of a lot of discussion and looking at other systems worldwide.

The lack of a dedicated lane is simpler: we couldn't get one. MDOT was not willing to give up an automobile lane over the entire length of the run. [[The DDOT "DTOGS" plan showing otherwise was an unbuildable fantasy.)

It was not "designed to fail"; it was designed to encourage redevelopment, as it has. If we had built it in 2006 when we started planning it, ridership would have been positively anemic, as not much was then going on in New Center. As others have remarked, as the population in the surrounding neighborhoods increases, ridership will organically increase, and if it linked to other, better modes of transit than what we are all used to, ridership will also increase. It will be interesting, a year or two from now, to see how many people are connecting from the new SMART "FAST" service to QLine.

[emu steve]

I was one of the people who designed it, and none of us worked for GM at the time. Since then, I don't know. The curb-side configuration was the result of a lot of discussion and looking at other systems worldwide.

The lack of a dedicated lane is simpler: we couldn't get one. MDOT was not willing to give up an automobile lane over the entire length of the run. [[The DDOT "DTOGS" plan showing otherwise was an unbuildable fantasy.)

It was not "designed to fail"; it was designed to encourage redevelopment, as it has. If we had built it in 2006 when we started planning it, ridership would have been positively anemic, as not much was then going on in New Center. As others have remarked, as the population in the surrounding neighborhoods increases, ridership will organically increase, and if it linked to other, better modes of transit than what we are all used to, ridership will also increase. It will be interesting, a year or two from now, to see how many people are connecting from the new SMART "FAST" service to QLine.

Yep. And I was one of the ones who suggested that it was designed to encourage organically its own market, if you will, of those folks who now or will live along the route.

There is still plenty of room for population growth in the next 5 years along the route.