Exactly! The car transition wasn’t overnight because it can be done piecemeal and still work fine. Connecting to a road network is really easy. My parents live at a lakehouse in a neighborhood with 100 houses that popped up in the middle of bumbfuck nowhere by laying down gravel next to a little county road running to a power plant that uses the lake for cooling.
My old office complex when I worked in Houston poured roads on both sides of the parking lot and dedicated them to the Citybas part of the platting process, and the city had a new alternate route they didn’t even have to pay for.
Rail doesn’t have that flexibility. If a developer dedicates an easement for rail as part of a development, it still isn’t useful until every landowner along the route has done that, which will probably take centuries.
This shit is what I do for a living. All through college we all loved the TOD dreams, but when you actually work in municipal and regional transportation and development, you quickly learn how incredibly difficult it is to achieve even before the political process gets in the way.
Exactly! The car transition wasn’t overnight because it can be done piecemeal and still work fine. Connecting to a road network is really easy. My parents live at a lakehouse in a neighborhood with 100 houses that popped up in the middle of bumbfuck nowhere by laying down gravel next to a little county road running to a power plant that uses the lake for cooling.
My old office complex when I worked in Houston poured roads on both sides of the parking lot and dedicated them to the Citybas part of the platting process, and the city had a new alternate route they didn’t even have to pay for.
Rail doesn’t have that flexibility. If a developer dedicates an easement for rail as part of a development, it still isn’t useful until every landowner along the route has done that, which will probably take centuries.
This shit is what I do for a living. All through college we all loved the TOD dreams, but when you actually work in municipal and regional transportation and development, you quickly learn how incredibly difficult it is to achieve even before the political process gets in the way.