addxb2 wrote:Krewson was slow. Second only to Slay. Jones was quicker (not fast) but made the wrong trade-off in an effort to reduce cost by eliminating Downtown from the 2017 route. I'm not sure why they decided to remove Downtown but I do know that the talented consultants/professionals supporting the City (and Bi-State) explicitly recommended they not. That advice was obviously ignored in 2022.
Money and commuting patterns/jobs not being concentrated downtown the way you want to pretend they are. Reality is Clayton+CWE+Midtown all have more jobs and job growth and their Metrolink stations probably generate more rirdership than downtown's stations (like in 2018) and it makes little sense to send someone who wants to get to their job or class in one of those areas the opposite way downtown (duplicating already existing bus service). Splitting the difference with a more centralized line not only gives more service to the west side of downtown and east side of Midtown, both of which are deserts, it also makes these commutes much more competitive.
For example, commuting from Chippewa and Broadway to CWE is scheduled as a 31 minute bus ride on the #8, and to get to Clayton is that 31 min bus ride + let's say another 15 mins on the Metro for wait and ride time, totaling for a scheduled 46 minutes. From that same intersection, you can take both the #11 and #73 downtown in give or take 15 minutes for each. Additionally, the #30 and #10 also cross the planned BRT en route to downtown. It takes the #11 about 8 minutes to get from that intersection to where the infill station was supposed to be, and then we can say 20 minutes to get to Clayton from there. So in theory, with a N-S LRT on Jefferson would have a negligible impact on ride time from our example intersection to downtown while it would cut ride time to Clayton from a scheduled 46 minutes to a scheduled 28 minutes.
Obviously we can assume many of these bus lines will be cut when they re-develop the bus map. It would be insane to keep 4 different buses going downtown from this region when youre dumping $500M into a "rapid" bus, so I assume resources will be saved there. But this does not significantly improve the ride experience going anywhere except downtown, which we all know is not exactly driving the city's job growth and we know thousands of students are not commuting to everyday.
This stuff was all explained back in 2022 or 2023 when they re-aligned the Green Line to save hundreds of millions of dollars while not actually losing too many potential riders the way you think. Obviously the BRT is going to basically just be combining ridership from a bunch of pre-existing lines that all funneled downtown, so it'll have a fake pretend estimated ridership, just like Indianapolis' BRT had.
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