Postby alexschief » December 3rd, 2018, 12:18 pm
I'll be extremely interesting to see how this line becomes used. There are a number of different potential populations that it could serve, but also reasons to doubt about how well it will serve each.
Downtown Workers/Commuters: A lot of money and land is going into Park and Ride facilities. There's a pretty clear expectation that white collar workers from the southwest suburbs will take the train to work downtown, modeling the commuter lifestyle their peers in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, or DC might expect, and that this demographic is likely to be familiar with. But for many users, the train will be a slower ride than the existing commuter bus service.
Suburban Workers/Reverse Commuters: The proposed alignment makes a slightly tortuous tour of southwest metro employment centers, and could really become popular with reverse commuters who have suburban jobs but want the lifestyle amenities of the city. It successfully hits some big job locations, but the station locations are really less than ideal. In several situations, the stations are located on the far end of vast parking lots from the actual office buildings. Can these office complexes be convinced to invest on their own in better station areas and pathways? Will there be big seasonal shifts in how people use these stations, based on their uncomfortable-to-reach locations?
Future Residents: There has never really been a reason to build residential along the railroad right-of-way as opposed to any other location. So there's a lot of vacant or underutilized land in the station areas, especially along the middle stretch between the West Lake to Shady Oak stations. The Met Council obviously would love to see these station areas transformed like the current development alongside the Prospect Park Station, which would allow people to live on the train and the bikeway and commute either way, while perhaps enjoying the suburban amenities of Hopkins and SLP. But this is a model that hasn't really had a ton of success elsewhere, and places like Denver which staked the success of their entire system on this kind of development have seen it not emerge as quickly as they would like.
So I guess when the line opens, and in the five to ten years afterwards, it will be fascinating to see how the line manages to attract riders from these three groups. In the best case scenario, it attracts all three and incremental improvements are made (like better station to office connections) that improve its utility. In the worst case scenario, the line is a jack of all trades but master of none, and doesn't really draw any one group especially well.