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Future of Mass Transit in Greenville


Spartan

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This was in the Greenville news today incase you missed it. Its not really antything exciting, however if you are interested in seeing mass transit in Greenville then its worth reading. Its an interesting comparison to Charlotte too. I left it in its entirety becasue I found the whole thing interesting.

Mass transit dreams ride on parking our auto habit

Posted Wednesday, January 19, 2005 - 8:48 pm

By Ashley Fletcher | The Greenville News

Imagine an out-of-car experience in which you're commuting to work on a light-rail train or in a really nice bus.

You are reading or preparing for the 9 a.m. meeting while shaving valuable minutes from your travel time. Even as growth continues, traffic congestion has eased. We're all breathing cleaner air.

With fewer than 2,500 people riding the bus each day in Greenville, this isn't an easy dream. The roads aren't jammed enough and the parking lots aren't full enough to drive us from our cars.

But the people who dreamed mass transit as part of Vision 2025 are looking 20 years down the road. By then, the traffic figures to be heavier, the commute more miserable.

Still, even if the planners come up with the money to build it

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"Somebody once said that solving your traffic problems by building more lanes is like solving obesity by buying bigger clothes," he said.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

What a great quotation!

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

"When you operate the type of service that we operate

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I just don't think many southern cities are ready for the whole LRT or subway system yet. I'd be really surprised to see if it takes off in Charlotte honestly. It's growing but I don't think it has the density yet? But I guess that's why they are preparing for the future, fair enough I guess? By comparison other cities with much larger populations and densities than Charlotte are now just implementing LRT (Houston, Minneapolis), even if these cities lack the density needed they make up for it in sheer population numbers alone! The south is still a very heavy automobile dependent region, and will be for quite awhile. I can't see any real progress made unless they did something drastic and limited the number of cars on the road (which of course would never happen, or started implementing clean burnig cars as the standard, which probablly won't happen as long as there is money too be made from oil/gasoline, or stacking people on top of each other like the northeast). There is a movement of urban core living in southern cities now but it's being done more so becasue it's envouge, not because it's practical? I think if living in the core was done to be practical the prices of all these new townhomes & condos wouldn't be soo expensive? JMO anyway.

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True. Greenville doesn't have the density at all. One way to get people onto busses and mass trasit is to not expand a roads capacity. People will get frustrated with the traffic and consider mass transit. But then you have to measure the impacts on the communtiy. If traffic was too bad then maybe nobody would want to live there? Just some food for thought.

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