This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
Last week, John Niles, oft-quoted rail critic, tweeted:
With more rail & TOD, higher fuel prices, & more climate awareness, why can’t PSRC write 2040 Plan to double transit market share?
Good question! Fortunately, the plan Niles is talking about does exactly that… where it counts.
Niles is referring to this chart (PDF):
The transit share of “all trips” increases from 2.9% to 5.2% under Alternative 5 . But the share of “work trips” shoots from 10.4% to 19%. That’s pretty close to doubling, and significantly more than the baseline scenario.
As I commented on the Cascadia Prospectus site (where they’re equally confounded by the plan), the reason that this is important is that it’s the work trips that cost us all the money. If someone needs to run out for milk in Issaquah at 10pm, sure, that counts as a “trip,” but it’s not really an expensive trip from a peak capacity perspective, because the roads of Issaquah aren’t clogged at 10pm.
The trips that are expensive to add capacity are the peak, “work” trips. And for those trips, additional transit service and right-of-way is the only realistic way to add enough capacity.
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