Why Build A Streetcar in Jacksonville?

[CS Foltz]

$kyway in its present form is nothing but a drain on resources. I believe in an intermodal system of mass transit, of which the Skyway could be one part of, but the balance appears to be more and more roads! Not to mention bus's, without shelters mind you, and the next phase of bus's appears to be "BRT" in its splendor! Lets pollute more if we possibly can, so I have to ask.............where is the rail? If like you say tufsu you "value a comprehensive regional mobility system" then why hasn't rail been discussed or planned for to this date? I want more bang for my tax dollar and more roads ain't it! We have too many roads ill planned as they are, at this point in time! So many studies and committee's and consulting firms have been used to today and we have nothing to show for it yet...............kinda like the One Billion plus that has been spent on downtown over the last 20 year.............have nothing to show for that either do we?

[tufsu1]

Common sense tells me that a shared mode of transit (i.e. mass transit) should, for most any distance, be the most efficient and beneficial system to use.  

I agree...which is why the Skyway isn't such a bad deal after all 

[tufsu1]

I believe in an intermodal system of mass transit, of which the Skyway could be one part of, but the balance appears to be more and more roads! Not to mention bus's, without shelters mind you, and the next phase of bus's appears to be "BRT" in its splendor! Lets pollute more if we possibly can, so I have to ask.............where is the rail? If like you say tufsu you "value a comprehensive regional mobility system" then why hasn't rail been discussed or planned for to this date?

HOLY CRAP!..rail hasn't been discussed?  

Just what do you think this forum has been doing for almost 5 years?  What do you think is included in the North Florida TPO LRTP?  What about the JTA Commuter Rail and Streetcar Feasibility studies?

btw...please don't criticize buses without shelters...you refuse to endorse the conept of allowing advertising so more shelters can be built!

[tufsu1]

kinda like the One Billion plus that has been spent on downtown over the last 20 year.............have nothing to show for that either do we?

btw...I think the folks who frequent the new library, arena, and baeball stadium would disagree!

[stjr]

Common sense tells me that a shared mode of transit (i.e. mass transit) should, for most any distance, be the most efficient and beneficial system to use. 

I agree...which is why the Skyway isn't such a bad deal after all 

Yep, the Skyway may be better than cars.  However, that is not where my beef with it is.  It is with how it fails to compare with other MASS TRANSIT modes for usefulness and cost effectiveness.  Once again, Tufsu, any mass transit money we spend should be "anywhere but" for this reason.

[Ocklawaha]

Monday at 5-6 pm on the "unused?" Skyway:















ANY QUESTIONS?


OCKLAWAHA

[stjr]

Ock, I am just "overwhelmed"    If I didn't know better, I would think this was a big city transit system - not!  Most people I counted in anyone picture was maybe 16 people.  Wow!  A Skyway record?

At the last reported 1,700 passengers a day, if most of the traffic fell around morning and evening "rush" hours and a few at lunch time, you would be looking at about 300 riders during such hours.  If the Skyway train came by 8 times an hour, that would be about 37 riders (I am giving you 100+% extra credit here versus the pictures) per train which is about the max capacity for the Skyway trains as currently configured.  Given you were at the "Central" station, per your pictures, and the way the Skyway routes work, nearly all Skyway riders must go through this one station.  This all adds up to the "crowded" (a term I find debatable for this purpose) look in your pictures.

If the Skyway is "crowded" with these few passengers, you are just supporting my point that the platforms  and system are unlikely to handle much more if people really did want to use it in any numbers.  (Imagine these pictures with triple the number of people pictured or about 50 on the platform?  Or six times the people, about 100? This is what I estimated at the Jazz Fest conclusion and it was pushing the limits.  6 times 1,700 would represent a little over 10,000 daily riders, or 1/3 of the projections for the existing system.)

By the way, I wonder what the other "non-Central" stations looked like?

I suggest you send these pix to JTA for use in their next Skyway funding request.  I am sure others will be as "overwhelmed" as I am.

[SightseerLounge]

Monday at 5-6 pm on the "unused?" Skyway:

ANY QUESTIONS?

Yes, how do you find this stuff. I like seeing it come to life?

Can we get a Disney style monorail in the suburbs!? (Billions, upon Billions, of dollars! Just Playing!)
At least, can we get the 3, 4, or 6 car model that the UM III was built to handle!

Will the streetcar be needed if the skyway were built to Riverside, the Stadium, etc.? (Will the city justify another thousand years of no other transit but bus!?)

Bonus: (Personal stab at the Jaguars) If the Jaguars can, I don't know, win a game, would that finally get the city to build either a streetcar, or skyway down to the stadium!

Talleyrand?

A "test" commuter system should have been put in during the Super Bowl and Jacksonville would have some interesting numbers on how to deal with all of this!

sjtr would you suggest to "tear the sucker down," or convert it to light rail!?

[Keith-N-Jax]

Way to go OCK,prove em wrong,, I'm havin fun.

[fsujax]

Good pictures Ock....some people will continue to whine....pictures of people using the system will not shut them up. It's too many, it's too few, the alarm is too loud...blah, blah, blah....it will always be something.

[fieldafm]

The blonde girl in the third pic is hot... Ock, did you happen to get her number for me?

[fieldafm]

If the Skyway is "crowded" with these few passengers, you are just supporting my point that the platforms  and system are unlikely to handle much more if people really did want to use it in any numbers.  (Imagine these pictures with triple the number of people pictured or about 50 on the platform?  Or six times the people, about 100? This is what I estimated at the Jazz Fest conclusion and it was pushing the limits.  6 times 1,700 would represent a little over 10,000 daily riders, or 1/3 of the projections for the existing system.)

The skyway had huge ridership during the Super Bowl, so it has been shown to handle much more than the present ridership numbers.

[AaroniusLives]

Good pictures Ock....some people will continue to whine....pictures of people using the system will not shut them up. It's too many, it's too few, the alarm is too loud...blah, blah, blah....it will always be something.

If anything, the pictures Ocklawaha posted prove that stjr is entirely correct in his or her belief that the Skyway doesn't attract enough riders and is a huge white elephant. I mean, that's rush hour. Being generous, there are, at most, 60 people combined on the train and at the station (and that's being really, really, absurdly generous.)  At rush hour.

APTA's most recent report pegs the ridership at 1,200 daily boardings. That's pathetic. Hysterically, the photo op demonstrates just how pathetic it all is.

Having said that, the Skyway is there. You built it, you bought it. The question remains how to make the SKyway a part of a viable, multi-modal transit system. The challenge remains how to convince a city/county/clustermuck of drivers, in a city/county/clustermuck of drivers to have the vision and the political will to implement this viable, multi-modal transit system. Finally, the challenge is to develop high-density, pedestrian-friendly, ecologically sustainable communities at each mode of this multi-modal transit system. Because if you tear down the train that goes nowhere, and replace it with a streetcar that goes nowhere, you still have a pathetic transit system that nobody uses.

This extends to the overall transit system itself: if the whole damned metro area is geared towards cars, and you build a transit system, while not changing the car-centric development of the metro area, you now have a failed transit system.

I'm totally a transit advocate. I don't own a car, and purposefully moved to a place where I don't need a car to lead a 1st-class life as an American citizen. But I'm also a former resident of FloriDUHhhhh, specifically Miami. And despite the population densities, the endless traffic and the rest, it's gonna take a lot of convincing to convince FloriDUHhhhhians in South Florida and the rest of the state to get out of their cars. We, the people, will plug them in, run them on pig feces...ANYTHING to continue to drive-in and drive on. The only way to at least create an alternative is to be sure that the transit system and the building codes are in sync...and that the transit goes from somewhere to somewhere else...and at both ends, you don't need to deal with a car. Period.

[fsujax]

Well, Nashville's commuter rail train averages less than 800 riders a day! just sayin....it could be worse for the Skyway. At least people are using it. Until we have a COMPLETED system, the Skyway will remain under utilized.

[AaroniusLives]

Well, Nashville's commuter rail train averages less than 800 riders a day! just sayin....it could be worse for the Skyway. At least people are using it. Until we have a COMPLETED system, the Skyway will remain under utilized.

That's an apples to oranges comparison. Nashville's line required minimal investment, using existing tracks and "used trains." The Skyway required entirely new tracks (twice now), and new technology investment in APM. That's a much higher investment in cost. The Skyway is older, with declining ridership. The Nashville line is new, with increasing ridership. Finally, one is a downtown circulator and the other is a commuter train.

Perhaps a more apt comparison would be with the Detroit People Mover. Both systems have comparable technologies and investments, both are near the same length (2.5-2.9 miles,) both operate in the same environments (downtowns) and both are attempting to serve the same purpose (CBD circulation.)

Mind you, the Detroit People Mover's numbers are still pathetic: 6100 people. This from a system that was initially projected to handle nearly 68,000 riders per day. That's still way, way more than the Skyway.

Closer to home, you have the Miami Metromover. While I think it has far too many stations, it still has some use in Downtown Miami, Brickell and Omni. To be fair, Miami's APM has 4.4 miles of track, so it's a much more comprehensive system that the Skyway. It's connected to the Metrorail. It's also completely free, which has to goose usage up. Nonetheless, it has 30,250 daily riders. You could divide the numbers in half to approximate the track length of the Skyway and you still have more than 15,000 riders on the Miami Metromover. (Oh, and both the Metrorail and the Metromover are massive failures, nowhere near meeting their initial ridership projections.)

The Skyway is a huge failure. Massive. Stinking. Pile of failure. Because of the automated people moving technology associated with it, it's also a costly failure.

However, any other cheaper, more proven technology used in place of the Skyway will still fail without a comprehensive mass transit system to compliment it. If the Skyway were a streetcar, busway, light rail or whatever,  it would have been cheaper to build and operate, but it wouldn't have the ridership because there's no mass transit system to support it. Moreover, without dense development around the nodes of this mass transit system, ridership will still be low, because it's easier to get around a car utopia with a damned car.