Chickens and Eggs

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Brian notes that the Seattle Streetcar ridership is up, especially during peak travel times. Still, there are no doubt plenty of off-peak runs that are empty or nearly empty. But if you read Krugman today, that’s not necessarily a bad thing:

Public transit, in particular, faces a chicken-and-egg problem: it’s hard to justify transit systems unless there’s sufficient population density, yet it’s hard to persuade people to live in denser neighborhoods unless they come with the advantage of transit access.

Atrios comments:

Obviously it makes sense to focus spare mass transit dollars on population centers, but it also makes sense to change the way we think about mass transit and not have those dollars be so sparse. Development corridors could incorporate mass transit from the beginning, at the very least with right of ways preserved and zoning around planned station locations in anticipation of what is to come.

The Seattle Streetcar, for all its faults, is the rare public transit investment that anticipates future growth by trying to do exactly that. Of course, spurring infill redevelopment is not the same as opening up new land for development out in the hinterlands. But it achieves a similar goal.

[Central Link is similar, but mostly along MLK. When you take into account the full, envisioned Link to Northgate and the Eastside, it’s more about serving existing communities than trying to spur redevelopment.]

PS: I like Krugman’s column title, “Stranded in Suburbia.” People tend to associate auto-dependent lifestyles as somehow more “free” than transit-oriented ones. But that’s obviously only true as long as you can afford to keep filling the tank. Otherwise you’re… stranded.