trillhaslam

You are not "losing" money by operating transit - you are spending it as you would funding any public service. I appreciate neither that premise nor your other which implies that funding transit is irresponsible. That aside, I see the answer to your first inquiry to be ideological. If it were up to only me, I'd want transit to be fully funded by subsidy, but it isn't, so I leave that to the democratic process. I'm not opposed to BRT, at the beginning or ever, and feel like I made that clear. What I'm opposed to is an assertion that it is the highest mode appropriate for Nashville. Cities like Minneapolis, Portland, Denver, and Salt Lake City make it clear that light rail works in urban forms similar in scale to Nashville. We don't have to search long to find examples that have been successful for years. You make your ideology clear with respect to transit. Ultimately that is at the heart of whether investments like these come to fruition. I don't think we'll see eye-to-eye on this. I'm for light rail because I've come to learn how impactful it is from my work, my study, and my personal experience. It is all too convenient to look at the price tag of a capital project or at a transit agency's budget, not truly understanding what transformative impact good transit has on people and cities, and write it off as a "boondoggle".

I think a good-faith conversation about building transit, at least within the scope of projects in this country, cannot begin under the prerequisite that we must judge our options by how profitable they are. Transit projects (and for that matter, most road projects) are not built to make money and rarely approach breaking even. They are heavily subsidized, and we expect that of them. In addition to my MPA, I have a master's in planning, and we consider these projects far more holistically: Are we connecting communities? Are we bringing people to jobs? Are we providing a safe and reliable transportation alternative to those who cannot drive? That is not to say that transit projects should not be or are not extensively analyzed quantitatively. A mountain of possible projects could be wasteful if implemented in Nashville, but we should come to our conclusion after consideration of a variety of factors far beyond whether a profit is generated. I really don't disagree with your assertion that BRT has a place in Nashville. Most corridors don't have the densities of population nor jobs to reasonably support light rail. That said, I don't think it makes sense to choose BRT instead in every instance because it's cheaper, as light rail as a mode carries inherent benefits. The distinction is very especially pronounced when BRT is built to substandard conditions, which is the American norm. I would be quite fearful that that would happen in Nashville.

Under 2 million? That would exclude many cities that currently have well-utilized light rail. Besides that, there's no reason to have an arbitrary population cutoff point to determine if rapid transit is feasible or really involve that metric much at all. It's far more nuanced. The populations of Detroit, Portland, and Boston, for example, are quite similar. Does it make them all similar candidates for transit success? Certainly not.

Agreed. That would likely be the best Bellevue location. Alternatively, there's plenty of open space northwest where the rail crosses Sawyer Brown Rd. I think it would be a blunder to place a station in Pegram or Kingston Springs at the expense of one in Bellevue; it would be an exponential difference in ridership.

You make a good point, but I do want to note that Green Hills is about 4.3 miles straight-line from downtown and about 4.6 miles using a direct route (21st Ave S). The center of Buckhead is about 6.3 miles straight-line from downtown Atlanta and about 7.8 miles using a direct route (Peachtree Rd). I think this supports what you said about Green Hills being much more like a neighborhood than Buckhead.

I saw this comment and thought no way this could be true, but it is. OKC Streetcar was $135m and Kansas City Streetcar was $102m. A Broadway streetcar makes so much sense and would easily match or exceed many of its peers

We visited Kyiv at the exact same time in 2019 - what a coincidence! Great experience for me. I was especially impressed by their transit infrastructure and underground commercial spaces.

I got the data from the Census Bureau at https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/popest/2020s-total-metro-and-micro-statistical-areas.html. These are the 2021 estimates. I used population estimates for metropolitan areas (MSAs) from the Census Bureau. The DFW metro area does indeed include Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington, and of course a variety of other cities.

Hi all. Not sure if this fits here, but I wanted to share a bit of analysis I did on total skyline heights. I initially started doing this to compare Nashville's combined building heights to those of its peer cities like Charlotte, Austin, etc. and also with my current home, Salt Lake City, but I ended up expanding my analysis to 48 of the top 50 US metro areas by population. To clarify, I have excluded Washington, D.C. as building heights there are restricted to the point where there would be very little eligible data for this analysis and the Inland Empire (Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA MSA) as it's way too polycentric for good data and there are very few tall buildings in any of its constituent cities regardless. To populate my analysis, I utilized the "existing buildings" lists for each city from Emporis and included buildings at or above 164 feet (50 meters) with the presumption that buildings shorter than this height both 1. do not contribute significantly to the skyline and 2. are unlikely to have equally reliable data available across every city being measured. I've included four tables with the same data that have been sorted four ways: total combined building height (decreasing from top), total metro area population (decreasing from top), metro population divided by combined building height (increasing from top, smallest value indicates highest height per capita), and average age of buildings included (decreasing from top). I hope this is interesting! This took quite a while to complete due to having to copy and paste from the Emporis lists. There are quite a few curiosities I perceived in this data. I'd love to hear any thoughts on this information.

West End or Charlotte corridor to downtown to Murfreesboro corridor to serve the airport?

There are a few exceptions. Honolulu and Pittsburgh have 3 and Las Vegas has 4.

Just FYI, I believe you are using figures for the Nashville CSA instead of the MSA. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistical_areas our MSA pop for 2018 is 1,930,961 with an 8-year growth rate of 15.56%.

That seems reasonable. I had just inferred, from comparing the new look of the central walkway cover in the updated rendering video above to the images attached, that there had been made a point to change the official design in accordance with the plans moving forward. I certainly do hope they'll be leaving room for the possibility of rail integration in the future.

It appears that the rails and platforms for the light rail connection we've been hearing about recently have been removed, as compared to past renderings.

Looks to be a 436-unit apartment project by the name of Novel Charlotte (from the Development Map).