As Portland-area "planners" and politicians push for ever-expanded light rail lines, claiming that it will reduce traffic congestion by "encouraging more people to leave their cars", a new study indicates that what many of us have long asserted is, in fact, the case:
Growing rail shares in the light rail corridors have mainly come from buses and the evidence for light rail reducing car use is less clear. This latter finding is of particular significance, given that a major justification for investment in light rail rather than bus schemes is their presumed ability to bring about major modal shift by attracting substantial numbers of car users.
All told, the researchers had a hard time concluding that the light rail systems, taken together, produced much of a shift away from car commuting. In some corridors car share declined, but it didn't always decline as much as the control areas — pointing to a general trend in the region. In the case of Midland, car commute share actually increased 5 percent into the city center, a figure that exceeded the increase in its control area.
Clearly, they're going to need to come up with another way to pee away billions of dollars that taxpayers don't have, because people simply aren't giving up their cars to ride trains - despite the prognostications advanced by regressive "planners" and politicians. All they're doing is throwing buses under the train.
