Trains to Neighborhoods

Speaking of transit, Mike Rosenberg reports for the Ovoville Mercury-Register regarding the Valley Transportation Authority’s poor success record with its light rail system:

But there was no grand celebration this month as Silicon Valley marked 25 years of light rail.

The near-empty trolleys that often shuttle by at barely faster than jogging speeds serve as a constant reminder that the car is still king in Silicon Valley – and that the Valley Transportation Authority’s trains are among the least successful in the nation by any metric. Today, fewer than 1 percent of the county’s residents ride the trains daily, while it costs the rest of the region – taxpayers at large – about $10 to subsidize every rider’s round trip.

As Jeff Speck tweets:

More evidence that transit without neighborhoods is like trains without wheels

Transit only works well when connecting two walkable places - two neighborhoods. A transit system designed to be a parallel transportation system to an auto-centric region is sadly doomed to irrelevance at best and failure at worst.