Naqiy90

Awesome! Lakeland is really an underrated city, I hope they get a Brightline stop if it ever makes it to Tampa. The Amtrak station is right in the middle of their cute little historical downtown, but alas gets only 2 trains a day.

Glad Downtown is getting another grocery store but wish it wasn't so close to Publix and was closer to Uptown/Creative village, although it's near the Orange Lymmo so it'd be a cinch for students to hop on and off with groceries.

Was under impression the Thorton was only .5 miles from the CBD but looking it up it's about a mile which surprised me, I guess I enjoy walking through downtown and Lake Eola so much the walk just flies by. You're right that would be the optimal length for scooters, although idk if drunken fools riding around downtown on scooters is safe for them or pedestrians lol. Grapefruit is an option going east, but the west loop is too inconvenient for traveling back downtown from Thorton. I think they should just run back and forth on Central instead of the extranous loop; it would simplify things, make it more useful and likely make the bus more frequent without adding any additional service. Loop circulators are bad! If not only operate on Central, at least stay on Church and run buses in both directions instead of just one way, the trip along South Street is high unnecessary.,I always try to catch it go to the West Art District but it always eludes me lol, poor design for a promising route imo.

Orange Ave is just not pedestrian friendly no matter how many mixed used apartments go up, it's never gonna be a walkable urban destination with Orange being so congested with cars. My wish for Orange ave is for bike and bus lanes . Visiting Pulse, my old stomping grounds, every month or so is the only time I ever go to Sodo. There's 4 buses along Orange so it's an easy trip from downtime but they're always packed like sardines and maddeningly slow stuck in traffic, and the lack of bike lanes means being confined to the sidewalk which is not optimal. If Orlando wants the area to be truly urban there needs to a serious discussion about increasing the multi-modal options down there.

Great area but the pedestrian experience is horrible however, I wish they would remove the on street parking on Orange and put in a shared bike/walk path, the sidewalks are so small and unwelcoming for such a vibrant district . There's not even a sidewalk along the stretch of Orange next to the Yard. The added traffic with the Yard and Lake House will make it even more unwelcoming for pedestrians and cyclists. The path along Gaston Edwards Park is nice but not very helpful for shoppers browsing the eclectic mix of retail in the area.

That's MetroPlans priority list, not necessarily LYNX's priority list . If Orange County passed the transit sales tax next year, presumably they could start working on BRT on 50, Semoran, OIA to Convention Center, and expanding LYMMO immediately. My issue is all these projects are mostly frequent buses in mixed traffic with amenity upgrades ; I wish the region had the foresight for bus lanes on all major corridors, that's the only way these BRT-lite projects would be true Rapid Transit. I've ridden on real BRT in LA and it works as well as Light Rail, but what gets passed off as BRT here in Florida like the Metro Rapid in Tampa or the First Coast Flyer in Jacksonville are barely an upgrade on regular bus service.

I found a short presentation about it here https://slideplayer.com/slide/4363772/ or you can view the cached expired site http://lynxsr50.com at Wayback Machine. Key details would be 10 minutes peak/15 minute off peak frequency, Transit Signal Priority, off-board ticketing and all door boarding, with the first phase 13 stations between Powers and GoldenRod for initial capital costs of $36M. However it would be in mixed traffic so idk how much of an upgrade it would be, I think bus lanes would be essential for it to be truly effective since 50 is such a congested corridor. I personally don't think projects should be called BRT if it is not in an exclusive Right of Way. Last I saw it mentioned in board meeting documents is LYNX was scouting out station locations.

LYNX approved BRT for SR50 in 2015 but don't have the funding currently, but work on the project is progressing slowly. Presumably if the transit tax was passed it would be the first project to develop, Idk how much shorter the travel time will be, but demand is definitely there, there are 6 LYNX routes along 50 which have high ridership and are always crowded. I traveled from Metrowest to UCF for years and the buses were always jammed packed, I started taking an Uber to the Rosen campus and talking the shuttle to avoid the buses. Although with the UCF Downtown campus opening, there will be express shuttles between the two campuses so maybe LYNX won't be as focused as serving UCF with future plans now.

One advantage Lakeland has over Deland is it's much bigger and the station is in the heart of downtown, while the Deland station would have been been several miles outside of downtown. I still think Volusia should do it along with a station in Orange City, but there doesn't seem to the political will on Volusia's behalf. The Debary station still has the 4th highest ridership after Church Street, LynxCentral and Winter Park and has lots of development planned around the station, so Volusia is definitely benefiting from it.

Lake definitely needs to be part of LYNX, the money they spend on running their own system is more than Osceloa and Seminole's contribution to LYNX, so likely they would save money by joining and have a much better system as well. I made this comment at a county commissioner meeting one time and one commissioner said he was more interested in disbanding LakeXpress and subsidizing Uber instead -_-. I think Commuter Rail would be great to Lake too, Mount Dora would be a big tourist attraction. Also in regards to the comment you made about US192 BRT, was a grant ever submitted for that project, because I haven't seen anything about it in a while, It would be a great project for that corridor.

Was the tax actually planned to be used for transit, because I got the impression it was only going to be used for road improvements which is why many people opposed it.

Thanks for that mention of the Bob Newhart show, just watched the opening and it has some beautiful shots of vintage downtown Chicago and Metra rolling stock! The Marina City towers are so distinctive, wish Orlando had skyscrapers half as unique and aesthetically appealing as they are.

Quotes from the City manager in the article made me mad, "No, we don’t want too many apartments in Winter Garden,"... "We don’t believe we should have a lot of multi-family because some communities way overbuild multi-family (developments), which brings down the price. We’re also comfortable that these are very high-end and high-quality apartment ". Really saying the quiet part loud, basically they don't want too many low income people living in Winter Garden. NIMBY's like him are why I think planning decisions need to be made on the regional level. Sad because downtown Winter Garden is very nice and should be developed into a dense walkable community for all income levels, not follow in the footsteps of Winter Park as an exclusive city for the wealthy, but c'est la vie.

What's the point of having the SunRail station right there if they're not even gonna try to use it :/ The cost of this parking garage could probably fund late night and weekend SunRail for years.

That doesn’t make sense, why would you go south of 50 when you and your work are both north of 50? Unless I got my neighborhoods wrong I thought Colonialtown North was north of 50 and Colonialtown South was south of 50

I think it has a better chance of being profitable than Lyft or Uber, but yes real estate is the real opportunity for profit. I think bonds are a better form of financing than an IPO in this instance so it won't be subject to the whims of activist investors or to a hostile takeover. Also debt financing is better for tax purposes as well. Perhaps they canceled the IPO because they found bond buyers and the IPO was only as a last resort. Impossible to say really, regardless the project is moving forward and we should all be grateful!

I think a Trader Joe’s would make a killing at Church Street station, seems like the perfect amount of space for them since their stores are relatively small. If not at church street, a Trader Joe’s somewhere downtown would be great

Good! But even that seems below market value. I personally just want to get rid of parking minimums and let the market decide, I think there is a market for people who want to live car-free and pay cheaper rents or mortgage payments in the process.

Parking requirements are the biggest subsidy to automobiles. Parking minimums are baked into the cost of housing even if someone, like myself, doesn't drive. I can't go buy a condo with no parking because the law doesn't allow it, so I would have to pay an estimated 20%-30% more than a unit without parking even through I would never use the parking spot. The High Cost of Free Parking is a good book that addresses this issue directly and is very interesting for anyone interested in walkable urban places. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking. I'm not an Urban Planner, just an amateur hobbyist, so I would not feel qualified to address the issue in depth. In addition to parking requirements, @Aent gave a good summary of how heavily subsidized the road system is. I didn't mean automobiles themselves are subsidized, but rather automobile infrastructure, which I should have clarified in my original post.

Rail can't compete in the USA because automobile use is so heavily subsidized, until we end all subsidies for cars it's unfair to expect transit to be for-profit, it can't compete with the affordability of driving because the true cost of driving hidden behind government subsidies.

I've been to pretty much every major city in the US, and yes most cities are not overall walkable and are car dominated. but still have much better transit than Orlando. San Jose, Dallas, and Pittsburgh all have rapid rail transit . DART in Dallas is the biggest Light rail system in the country! Bridgeport might not have good local transit, but it has a direct train line into the best city in the world! Atlanta and Portland all have very good transit for the urban core, although not necessary the entire region. MAX and MARTA are great, i've ridden them many times. It is a national issue but also Orlando is falling behind in transit investment to cities much smaller, we don't even have BRT like many smaller cities such as Richmond, Kansas City, Jacksonville have, except for the downtown LYMMO which is mostly useless because it's so short Tampa just passed their transit funding, so their transit is about to improve dramatically, plus they have the short streetcar which is technically rail. San Antonio has a much better bus system than Orlando, i've ridden it! And Nashville just had a failing transit funding vote which was poisoned by the Mayor having to resign for sleeping with her bodyguard lol, since she was the biggest promoter of the bill. Also Nashville has infrequent commuter rail too, called the Music City Star!

Charlotte has light rail that they're expanding however, which could have been Orlando if we didn't blow it in 1999. My argument wasn't that professionals use transit heavily, but rather that large corporations prefer to locate in cities with good transit, which is something executives usually mention as a deciding factor for locating somewhere.

I do believe there is a direct correlation between Transit and median income because big Fortune 500 companies want to move to regions with good transit like Amazon recently for example. Large companies bring higher paying professional jobs that raise median wage overall. While Orlando is not unique among cities with subpar transit, no other metropolitan area in the USA gets as many visitors as the Orlando region, and other cities are working to improve their transit service while Orlando is basically doing nothing, our infrequent commuter rail being basically useless except for higher income professionals working downtown for conventional 9-5 shifts. As far as my statement about Orlando's median income ranking, it was just something I recall reading, but doing a Google search I came across a recent ranking of median household income by the Census Bureau that had Orlando 23 out of 25, with Tampa and Miami ranking lower. Of the top 25 metros, only Riverside, Orlando, San Antonio , Tampa, and Detroit have no rapid transit. and all 5 metros are at the bottom for median household income. I know correlation is not causation but regardless, the correlation of rapid transit to higher median incomes seems pretty clear. https://www.orlandoweekly.com/Blogs/archives/2017/09/22/orlando-ranks-among-nations-worst-for-income-says-recent-census-survey

Idk what economy you’re living in, but people can’t just move to a different city whenever they feel like it, especially low income folks that are the largest users of transit. Wealthy professionals that prefer transit do move to other cities which is why Orlando ranks 50 out of 50 for median income. The only cities with good transit are too expensive to live in for most people, which is a real catch-22 for low income people who rely on transit. The fact that cities like NYC or Boston are so expensive just shows the demand for walkable cities with good transit is not being met by supply.

The Downtown Dunkins seem to be geared more towards the professionals working downtown considering their locations, I honestly always forget they're even there, there needs to be a Dunkin' in South Eola where all the residents live!