Festival ‘Sparks’ Ridership Boom on Skyway

[Ocklawaha]

And I disagree with Ock that in transit-sparse cities/towns a transfer is very easy to make quick and seamless.

This is not what I said. I said in a future system (or upgrade of the current one) transfers should be seamless. This is much easier in a city like Jax where it is less likely that your connection would be late. For example 3 inbound AM commuter RDC/DMU trains rolling in from St. Augustine, as they stop at San Marco @ Atlantic and the door opens, you'd have a 20' foot, sheltered platform to walk across and enter an awaiting Skyway train at the same level. By the time the Commuter run is heading north for Jacksonville Terminal, the Skyway train is rolling over it to Kings Avenue Station. Arrival at the current so-called San Marco Station leaves you with a simple Skywalk to get into Baptist Medical Center. With ATC, Automatic Train Control or PTC Positive Train Control, there is no reason why this wouldn't be as normal as sipping water. This doesn't mean that in transit sparse cities/towns a transfer is very easy to make quick and seamless. It means there is no reason, properly planned and built, that it can't be easy. 

Jacksonville during the City Coach era had a system of bus transfers and they were quite normal and popular even though headways were not what they were with our streetcar system. JTA had a better idea. Get on a bus and pay, change buses and pay, ride 3 buses to you destination and pay 3 times for the same trip each way... ridership crashed. DUH!

[Ocklawaha]

^ Ock, would you say a simple solution to the southbank would be some sort of jitney that just ran between Wolfson/baptist/aetna to wyndham/king ave? I think any pedestrian bridge over 95/fec might be overly expensive.

95 is already bridged for pedestrians at the hospital and Nemours, a Skywalk-Bridge would be a relatively simple project running from the second level of the current San Marco station over the Acosta Freeway and the FEC RY. I would continue it on to the parking garage and split it half going into the hospital and the other into Aetna. Such a project would possibly come in around the low 2-3 millions $$.

Here is a link to my story on the same: http://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2013-mar-skybridge-jacksonville

[simms3]

True enough Lake, The Skyway will never live up to it's potential if we never finish it.

Can we hear from Lake if he believes we should invest more in the Skyway to "finish it" or if he believes we should just move on to a different system altogether (not saying tear down the Skyway and pay back the Feds here)?  I think you speak as if Lake is 110% on board with finishing the Skyway, when I don't think he's made that clear.

However saying that confuses people, most don't understand it was planned to go to the sports district, UF, Brooklyn and San Marco from the start, I wouldn't take it an inch farther.

Ok, so we spend hundreds of millions more (perhaps north of a Billy?) on the Skyway to do that and we have your "complete system".  How do we treat line duplication when we want to string something more practical along a further route?  Like light rail from well north of Shands (which you call UF) down to Shands along the same route, through downtown, over to San Marco and points beyond?  Well, the river crossing is always going to be a major obstacle there (damnit, we have the fucking Skyway along the most practical river crossing route already!!!!!!!!)...

Had those lines been built with the monorail beams in 2002, we'd be running 6 car trains today.

I know the Skyway is way-over-engineered for the current trains, but are you positive that both the station and the concrete support structure can support 6-car standard-gauge equivalent size trains?  Station design is very important - 6 cars will have to be safely supported, capacity wise, at each station along the route.  Additionally, 6 car trains have obviously different weight and different lateral forces on turns.  Are you 100% sure we won't have to rebuilt the fuckin thing to support cars 3-6x the length (do you consider current cars one car or two car?) and 3-6x the weight and lateral forces?

To those that say the Skyway can never handle capacity, this is simply not true. New trains of the current type alone could easily increase capacity 3-4 times over.  Going with a modern monorail train such as the Innovia could give it a light-rail capacity for about the same cost per mile as light-rail (not streetcar).

And nevermind the questions surrounding the structural and capacity support of the concrete and stations in place, what pray-tell do these cars cost??

The new system in Sao Paulo will have many times the capacity of light-rail and in fact will be a 'heavy-rail equal'.

So now we're going to compare what we can do in Sao Paolo, one of the world's largest cities and most crowded, to what we should do in Jacksonville?  WTF  We're going to put heavy rail capacity on what's currently a 2.5 mile system in total, and what might be able to be expanded to ~4 miles?  L oh fucking L....we wouldn't even come close to mentioning building a 4 mile HRT system and you know that, so why do you even bring this up?

But as we've all said, we have much bigger problems with the Skyway then just simple expansion or new equipment. The little system gets within a block of 9,000 employees on the Southbank that have virtually no way to get to the train thanks to a freeway and railroad.  The fact that we never included a pedestrian bridge/skywalk  is just inexcusable.

This is true, except people in Jacksonville probably wouldn't really ride it much more than they do now even if it were put in their lap.  Let's be honest.  People in other cities brave these same kind of obstacles every day of their lives.  Yes, and you know it.  Typically, a city will try to make things easier with a pedestrian walkway, but that is not always the case.

The fact that we never included a pedestrian bridge/skywalk  is just inexcusable.
If it's raining, one can't even get from Central Station into the Everbank Building, or the Omni. It's almost as if we built stations at random then built walls around them.

Oh, boo hoo.  I know you're thinking of a couple of different buildings in Miami where the people mover there goes directly to the garage/lobby, and yes, we're short-sighted here.  But you just echoed a point of mine.  Do we expect a Jaxson to wait in inclement weather for transit?  Hell fucking no!!  I wait at bus stops with my umbrella in the rain all the time...I have no choice.  I know when to bring a change of clothes...lol  If I were in Jax, I'd choose my car every time over waiting in heat, rain, etc.

As to the transit ridership in Miami, I agree with you having lived in the area, one can't really get to anything using Tri-Rail except a bus stop... If you get to Metrorail you can go to the Airport or downtown but that's about it. The work-a-day element is completely lacking from the South Florida system.

I thought the Tri-Rail System was every bit as connected, perhaps even moreso (since it ties directly to Metrorail) than Caltrains, which sees exponentially higher ridership (literally squished standing room only during rush hour).  I find its ridership inexcusable, as well.  But my perspective is apparently flawed and it's 100% the system to blame and not car culture in S FL.

LA also has a certain transit spirit you won't find anywhere else.

This I can agree with.  I find western cities in general tend to be more "rail and transit" friendly than their counterparts elsewhere.  But this also goes to my earlier point that you drop the same people that live and run Miami in LA, and what's happening in LA now and the ridership they get falls through the roof.  Conversely, as I said earlier, you drop the people that live in SF now into Miami with the system it has in place, and I guarantee you that ridership skyrockets through the roof.  Granted, over time, the switcharoo could be such that SF people living in Miami will eventually be conditioned onto the car and Miami people living in SF will switch to transit (much more quickly than SF people will switch to car, bc getting around SF in a car is a biatch).

[simms3]

Jacksonville during the City Coach era had a system of bus transfers and they were quite normal and popular even though headways were not what they were with our streetcar system. JTA had a better idea. Get on a bus and pay, change buses and pay, ride 3 buses to you destination and pay 3 times for the same trip each way... ridership crashed. DUH!

Hmmm, well as a bus rider, I pay every time I board (I choose to buy # tix rather than monthly pass because of a FSA account I need to drain).  This is not that uncommon...

[thelakelander]

Yes, South Florida like every Sunbelt community is heavily car dependent and will remain so for the foreseeable future.  However, there's still opportunity to become more multimodal friendly via better transit planning, implementation and land use integration. They seem to be on the right path.  Locally, we've talked the game but when it comes to putting our money where our mouths are, our talk is being proven to be nothing more than hot air.

This is kind of my point though with both transfers and with planning for Jax transit.  People used to relying on transit are willing to put up with a whole lot more.  People in autocentric sunbelt cities will need baby steps.  I don't think Jax is an environment where we can expect young professionals to ditch cars they can well afford and are highly convenient to drive to use complex multi-modal transit systems that require lots of transfers and walking.  Boston and Miami share similar density.  One is a transit city, the other is not.  Simple as that.  Jax is less of a transit city than Miami, so make it super simple and really "spell it out".  See my comment about transfers below...

It's not as simple as that. Boston was the first city to have a subway in America.  It's been continuously operating since 1897. That's 117 years of continuous land development and building of density around a pedestrian oriented transportation investment.  Metrorail in Miami opened 29 years ago. Not counting streetcars, Boston has an 88-year jump start on land development around transit lines than Miami does.  Yes, Boston is going to be a "transit" city moreso than Miami. Give Miami another 88 years to grow and expand it's system and things will probably be much different than how they appear today.

Overall, if I'm Jax, I'd worry less about a Boston or Miami and instead spend time on developing the type of transportation network that best facilitates whatever local vision this community wants.  I'm not sure if worrying about whether a certain segment of choice riders will want to transfer or not should be a major priority at this point. Even if we build nothing but subways, transfers are simply unavoidable for any decent sized mass transit network serving different neighborhoods and areas of town with different types of density and development concerns.

You'll never have a transit system where some sort of transferring doesn't have to happen...depending on your length and direction of trip. What San Francisco has going for it that most sunbelt cities have not is it has grown up with transit being a part of the local environment for over a century. Most sunbelt cities eliminated mass transit over 50 years ago and then spent those next five decades becoming totally auto dependent.  It will take decades to reverse the negative impacts from WWII era mobility and land use decisions.  As those decades pass (ex. in DC, they've been at it for 40 years now, San Diego is 30 years in), new dense environments will grow around transit investments and then you'll reach a point where a higher population won't have to transfer because the growth pattern will become dependent around the transportation infrastructure network that feeds it.

Transfers are a reality for people who want to rely on transit.  But in Jax it's going to be very difficult to get both captured riders and choice riders to fully rely on transit.  Downtown isn't super centralized in terms of destinations or a major employment center for captured riders, and even the captured riders in the city are pretty spread out (look at bus ridership - very low in Jax).  Choice riders likely won't be big weekend or nighttime riders on any starter system and it will be a century of concentrated growth in the city before we get to a density where you really have a mix of uses everywhere and you can really ditch the car altogether.

I wouldn't plan on trying to get people out of cars and relying on transit.  It would be great when that eventually happens at a larger scale but from an economic and sustainability standpoint, the important thing is having viable multimodal mobility choices.  One thing I like about Boston is you can have a lifestyle that does not have you relying on transit for day-to-day mobility needs. The level of mixed use and human scale walkability is at a point where walking is just as effective mode of transportation as anything else for day to day needs of a larger segment of the core area's population.

Charlotte's line is used for yuppies living along it in new TODs who do the AM/PM commute to Uptown for work and for special events.  It has no transfers and is door to door service, essentially...like Houston's line as well.  Uptown Charlotte's also a predominant bar area, so they take it in and cab back down.  Which begs another question - how late do you have a starter system running in Jax?  Jax hasn't even developed a cab culture yet - people literally drink and drive every time they go out and there really aren't any cabs.  That's how long we have to climb before we get to a level.

You're only looking at one small segment of ridership (ex. that line also connects the inner city residents with suburban big box retail/suburban park & ride to Uptown, etc.) yet it still shows what happens over time around transportation infrastructure investment.

What you're seeing in Charlotte is the beginning stages of what happened in Boston over a century ago and Miami over the last 15 years.  An investment in a permanent transit corridor is helping alter the land development form around that particular corridor. Nevertheless, the majority of people in that city do not live along the route and never will. Thus, transferring is still required for everything not within a 1/4-mile walking distance of the 9 mile LRT line.  Charlotte also has the Sprinter (BRT-lite) and a proposed streetcar line that will run perpendicular to LRT.  If those yuppies in South End want to use mass transit to get from that district to the airport, it requires a transfer from LRT to the Sprinter.

[simms3]

I actually think we're saying the same thing in so many words.  I also raised the point of walkability several times...it won't be until you can walk to most places you need to go for stuff that the city will become a good "carless" city.  Having walkabilty/mix of uses is correlated both with transit and with density.  Who wants to take 3 different bus lines to run one errand, another 2 for your next, 2 to get back, etc etc.  It all needs to come together concurrently.

However, when you say transfers are inevitable - they need to be *seamless* and totally hassle free for choice riders in a sunbelt transit-naive city and they need to work efficiently for captured riders, as well.  My whole point is when we can't even get people to take cabs after drinking in this town, we need to think about transit in baby steps (i.e. transfers out of the picture).  Also to your point choice/options for growth, maybe Jax people want the Detroit model, where Ortega becomes that super old going nowhere "old money" lakefront neighborhood to the north of downtown, the rest of the city starts to turn to shit and goes bankrupt, and SJC becomes absolute paradise like W Bloomfield for those who like that.  No transit will be necessary then at all

But if business leaders, city leaders, and enough of the public does want to follow the transit, then we need to be *very careful* about our first step.  The Skyway was a horrible failed first step.  For real transit - is it a streetcar serving Avondale/Riverside?  Is it S-Line commuter rail?  Is it FEC commuter rail from Avenues or St. Augustine?  Is it a N-S light rail line?  Is it BRT to the beach down Atlantic?  If we want a transit future, we can't fuck up our only shot and screw it up in the public's mind.

I'm pretty doubtful about all of those except for maybe 1-2 choices.  Point A to Point B with stops along the way and sites for TOD development.  That's the only thing I really see working "relatively" successfully, like Charlotte's LYNX.

[Ocklawaha]

True enough Lake, The Skyway will never live up to it's potential if we never finish it.

Can we hear from Lake if he believes we should invest more in the Skyway to "finish it" or if he believes we should just move on to a different system altogether (not saying tear down the Skyway and pay back the Feds here)?  I think you speak as if Lake is 110% on board with finishing the Skyway, when I don't think he's made that clear.

I can't answer for Lake, but I believe he is M/L on the fence. IF we could do the Skyway to the original destinations for a price and performance parallel to light-rail, he'd probably go for it, if not, no.

However saying that confuses people, most don't understand it was planned to go to the sports district, UF, Brooklyn and San Marco from the start, I wouldn't take it an inch farther.

Ok, so we spend hundreds of millions more (perhaps north of a Billy?) on the Skyway to do that and we have your "complete system".  How do we treat line duplication when we want to string something more practical along a further route?  Like light rail from well north of Shands (which you call UF) down to Shands along the same route, through downtown, over to San Marco and points beyond?  Well, the river crossing is always going to be a major obstacle there (damnit, we have the fucking Skyway along the most practical river crossing route already!!!!!!!!)...

The buildout of the original system would be somewhere in the $100 million - $150 million range. The most expensive parts of the actual system, river crossing, train control and operations/maintenance center are already built and would not have to be repeated. This means (if we could get JTA away from the stupid overbuilt track bed) a simple monorail beam system would be well within the price range and capacity of Charlotte like Light-Rail.

Beyond UF (I call it that as they officially changed their name a year or two ago) you have existing right-of-way and/or railroad track that could be rebuilt into light-rail purposes. On the Southbank you want to stay with monorail and BRT (except for the Florida East Coast as a potential limited service commuter line) as any form of light-rail would have to cross the FEC RY. Such crossings at grade would eat the budget due to insurance requirements and red tape.

I was the original protestor about the Skyway project, (see: http://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2011-aug-mass-transit-30-years-later-special-report ) I never supported the people mover, not then or now and led a fight to stop the city from going over that cliff.  I realize however what we've already spent on ½ of a transit system and believe it nearly criminal to walk away from that investment, not even considering the refunds we'd have to issue Uncle Sam. We've got lemons and we need to find a way to make lemonade.

Had those lines been built with the monorail beams in 2002, we'd be running 6 car trains today.

I know the Skyway is way-over-engineered for the current trains, but are you positive that both the station and the concrete support structure can support 6-car standard-gauge equivalent size trains?  Station design is very important - 6 cars will have to be safely supported, capacity wise, at each station along the route.  Additionally, 6 car trains have obviously different weight and different lateral forces on turns.  Are you 100% sure we won't have to rebuilt the fuckin thing to support cars 3-6x the length (do you consider current cars one car or two car?) and 3-6x the weight and lateral forces?

A walk-through train takes care of the length issues provided you don't have to walk 4 cars back from the door you boarded at, but 4 to 6 cars should be doable. As to weight, yes, the current system is designed to WAY MORE then support the weight of larger trains, in fact it was engineered to light-rail standards. A study would have to be done to see if a conversion to light-rail would make any sense, my gut feeling is it would be too radical of a change from what we have making it cheaper and faster just to upgrade and extend as TRUE MONO-rail.

To those that say the Skyway can never handle capacity, this is simply not true. New trains of the current type alone could easily increase capacity 3-4 times over.  Going with a modern monorail train such as the Innovia could give it a light-rail capacity for about the same cost per mile as light-rail (not streetcar).

And nevermind the questions surrounding the structural and capacity support of the concrete and stations in place, what pray-tell do these cars cost??

The 4 car Las Vegas trains ran $3.5 million per train, this would have to be adjusted upward, but it appears to be similar to light-rail cars.

The new system in Sao Paulo will have many times the capacity of light-rail and in fact will be a 'heavy-rail equal'.

So now we're going to compare what we can do in Sao Paolo, one of the world's largest cities and most crowded, to what we should do in Jacksonville?  WTF  We're going to put heavy rail capacity on what's currently a 2.5 mile system in total, and what might be able to be expanded to ~4 miles?  L oh fucking L....we wouldn't even come close to mentioning building a 4 mile HRT system and you know that, so why do you even bring this up?

You brought up capacity questions, and I used this to demonstrate that capacity per train needn't be what we have today. You spoke of ½ the stadium wanting to board in an hour and by Sao Paulo numbers it could be done, however stupid it would be to try this in Jacksonville. Folks that are not savvy to Brazil, lets just say that by Sao Paulo standards, New York City is Palatka! LOL. 

But as we've all said, we have much bigger problems with the Skyway then just simple expansion or new equipment. The little system gets within a block of 9,000 employees on the Southbank that have virtually no way to get to the train thanks to a freeway and railroad.  The fact that we never included a pedestrian bridge/skywalk  is just inexcusable.

This is true, except people in Jacksonville probably wouldn't really ride it much more than they do now even if it were put in their lap.  Let's be honest.  People in other cities brave these same kind of obstacles every day of their lives.  Yes, and you know it.  Typically, a city will try to make things easier with a pedestrian walkway, but that is not always the case.

Connectivity is our single biggest failure, on the Skyway, the River Taxi's, the buses. JTA is selling both the federals and the locals a 'BRT Miracle' that isn't even BRT by accepted international standards, and are thus setting us up for a new saga: "SKYWAY II, THE NIGHTMARE CONTINUES!" Which will be followed by ugly press convincing and again paralyzing the politico from doing anything right with transit because 'everyone knows JAX hates transit...' And no F---ing wonder when we have the likes of JTA's track record as the only transit many of these folks have ever met.

The fact that we never included a pedestrian bridge/skywalk  is just inexcusable.
If it's raining, one can't even get from Central Station into the Everbank Building, or the Omni. It's almost as if we built stations at random then built walls around them.

Oh, boo hoo.  I know you're thinking of a couple of different buildings in Miami where the people mover there goes directly to the garage/lobby, and yes, we're short-sighted here.  But you just echoed a point of mine.  Do we expect a Jaxson to wait in inclement weather for transit?  Hell fucking no!!  I wait at bus stops with my umbrella in the rain all the time...I have no choice.  I know when to bring a change of clothes...lol  If I were in Jax, I'd choose my car every time over waiting in heat, rain, etc.

It is a winnable situation, on my return from Medellin I no longer wanted to park downtown, and though I live in the Mac... out in World Golf Village, I drive to the nearest Skyway Station and ride.

As to the transit ridership in Miami, I agree with you having lived in the area, one can't really get to anything using Tri-Rail except a bus stop... If you get to Metrorail you can go to the Airport or downtown but that's about it. The work-a-day element is completely lacking from the South Florida system.

I thought the Tri-Rail System was every bit as connected, perhaps even moreso (since it ties directly to Metrorail) than Caltrains, which sees exponentially higher ridership (literally squished standing room only during rush hour).  I find its ridership inexcusable, as well.  But my perspective is apparently flawed and it's 100% the system to blame and not car culture in S FL.

HEAVY RAIL. Where the system failed was that Tri-Rail (like Metrolink in LA) was just a temporary measure during freeway construction (or in LA's case, earthquake remediation). As such they really were not looking at long-term use and as Florida East Coast Railway was under the direction of Ed Ball and fiercely anti-passenger or public, they went to what is today the CSX route. That line didn't enter Miami until 1927, and West Palm Beach not much before that. So the entire system is WAY out of town to the west of everything. Metrorail was built as a sister to the Baltimore system, same cars, same plans, same orders, but Maryland kept improving and Miami did nothing until recently.

Here you go: The Baltimore Metro vehicles were built in the same contract as that of the Miami, Florida rapid rail transit system. Both Miami and Baltimore cars are identical except for the paint design. The Baltimore Subway car is the Budd Universal Rapid Transit Car (BURT). It is 75 feet long, 10 feet 2.5 inches wide, 12 feet high, 3 feet 6.5 inches floor height, weighs 76,000 lbs., has 76 seats, has 275 passenger crush load, uses 700 VDC electric power, has a maximum speed of 70 MPH, with minimum horizontal radius of 250 feet, with chopper control, and air conditioning.

Baltimore then added or connected it all with MARC, Amtrak Corridor trains, bus, and then overlaid the entire metro with a comprehensive Light-Rail system.

[ProjectMaximus]

The SkyWay wouldn't be the soul mode of transportation, Lake. It's merely a means for people who WANT to stay after the event is over to easily get into the core without dealing with a traffic nightmare. And then for those who don't want to park close to the stadium to have the option of going somewhere else. 150,000 people could be attending simultaneous activities at the arena, basbeball grounds, fair grounds and stadium... If only 10-15% of those people decided to ride the SkyWay from the facility parking lots and back to, stay in the downtown area for extra drinks, food, etc for a couple hours every weekend it would justify the expansion.

Spoken like someone who has never taken transit to a game...also, that's really not a bad walk, LoL.  I walk a mile to AT&T park for Giants games all the time in business attire.  But getting Jacksons to walk is about as difficult as getting Jaxsons to take transit.  Easy to say "yes I will", but will you in practice?  Also, using transit to go to one time events on rare occasions is one thing.  Relying on transit to actually get around is another.  Again, an area that despite "the traveled folks in Jacksonville's knowledge and experiences of such things" in real life (which I highly doubt no matter how many times on this urban-minded board with a very "above average" travel IQ compared to the average Jaxson people want to tell me I'm the idiot peon) is not going to happen when it comes down to it.

So will there be too many or too few riders? 

[ProjectMaximus]

With Everbank Field, the desire being mentioned revolves around serving people in the sports district.  If that's the case, such transit investment should be able to handle that job.  If it can't but some other alternative can more effectively for a cheaper price to the taxpayer, why make the investment?

This has been your stance for years, and I find it the most rational and elegant argument.

[JayBird]

^ Ock, would you say a simple solution to the southbank would be some sort of jitney that just ran between Wolfson/baptist/aetna to wyndham/king ave? I think any pedestrian bridge over 95/fec might be overly expensive.

95 is already bridged for pedestrians at the hospital and Nemours, a Skywalk-Bridge would be a relatively simple project running from the second level of the current San Marco station over the Acosta Freeway and the FEC RY. I would continue it on to the parking garage and split it half going into the hospital and the other into Aetna. Such a project would possibly come in around the low 2-3 millions $$.

Here is a link to my story on the same: http://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2013-mar-skybridge-jacksonville

Thanks Ock, and that is actually a great idea. It just makes plain sense.

[simms3]

The SkyWay wouldn't be the soul mode of transportation, Lake. It's merely a means for people who WANT to stay after the event is over to easily get into the core without dealing with a traffic nightmare. And then for those who don't want to park close to the stadium to have the option of going somewhere else. 150,000 people could be attending simultaneous activities at the arena, basbeball grounds, fair grounds and stadium... If only 10-15% of those people decided to ride the SkyWay from the facility parking lots and back to, stay in the downtown area for extra drinks, food, etc for a couple hours every weekend it would justify the expansion.

Spoken like someone who has never taken transit to a game...also, that's really not a bad walk, LoL.  I walk a mile to AT&T park for Giants games all the time in business attire.  But getting Jacksons to walk is about as difficult as getting Jaxsons to take transit.  Easy to say "yes I will", but will you in practice?  Also, using transit to go to one time events on rare occasions is one thing.  Relying on transit to actually get around is another.  Again, an area that despite "the traveled folks in Jacksonville's knowledge and experiences of such things" in real life (which I highly doubt no matter how many times on this urban-minded board with a very "above average" travel IQ compared to the average Jaxson people want to tell me I'm the idiot peon) is not going to happen when it comes down to it.

So will there be too many or too few riders? 

Both.  In my mind, day to day, too few riders to justify spending more on the system, though Ock brings up good points (I do question train length vs station length as a non-issue though as here due to safety concerns/regulations, there has to be a considerably longer station than train length - people are already griping the new Central Subway project stations are designed for 2-car trains only).

For events, the system might be "filled with riders", but unless we do what Ock brings up (which may or may not be feasible and also in my mind isn't nearly worth it) and expand the capacity to light rail or even heavy rail capacity, "filled with riders" for an hour here and there for events doesn't do much for overall ridership, and still doesn't put a dent in crowds.

I've been to big events in SF, Chicago, NYC, and Atlanta where heavy rail couldn't really even do the job.  In Atlanta it's routine to have a convention, normal rush hour traffic, a Thursday night Falcons game, a Braves game (5 Points shuttle transfer), and other stuff going on (former Thrashers, Hawks, concert at Phillips, etc).  In these cases, MARTA heavy rail fails to a large degree at effectively moving all of the crowds.  I was at an event in SF last year where BART + MUNI could not do the job...I ended up walking 3-4 miles at 3 AM with a crowd the entire way and spending $321 on an Uber SUV for my friends and I the next day (that's extreme surge pricing for you and literally nothing else was available).

You get a Jags game, a Celine Dion concert at the arena, a Suns game, and an outdoor Paul McCartney concert at MetroPark (I saw him in Piedmont Park in Atlanta - crowd of 60,000, and Golden Gate Park in SF as part of a music festival with God knows how many people), and you try to throw in the Skyway as a viable alternative of clearing the area, and you're bound for problems you can't even fathom.  Pure desperation will set in with some people...Skyway will throw a kink in crowd management, and I bet it will be a safety concern on top of it all.

[simms3]

True enough Lake, The Skyway will never live up to it's potential if we never finish it.

Can we hear from Lake if he believes we should invest more in the Skyway to "finish it" or if he believes we should just move on to a different system altogether (not saying tear down the Skyway and pay back the Feds here)?  I think you speak as if Lake is 110% on board with finishing the Skyway, when I don't think he's made that clear.

I can't answer for Lake, but I believe he is M/L on the fence. IF we could do the Skyway to the original destinations for a price and performance parallel to light-rail, he'd probably go for it, if not, no.

However saying that confuses people, most don't understand it was planned to go to the sports district, UF, Brooklyn and San Marco from the start, I wouldn't take it an inch farther.

Ok, so we spend hundreds of millions more (perhaps north of a Billy?) on the Skyway to do that and we have your "complete system".  How do we treat line duplication when we want to string something more practical along a further route?  Like light rail from well north of Shands (which you call UF) down to Shands along the same route, through downtown, over to San Marco and points beyond?  Well, the river crossing is always going to be a major obstacle there (damnit, we have the fucking Skyway along the most practical river crossing route already!!!!!!!!)...

The buildout of the original system would be somewhere in the $100 million - $150 million range. The most expensive parts of the actual system, river crossing, train control and operations/maintenance center are already built and would not have to be repeated. This means (if we could get JTA away from the stupid overbuilt track bed) a simple monorail beam system would be well within the price range and capacity of Charlotte like Light-Rail.

Beyond UF (I call it that as they officially changed their name a year or two ago) you have existing right-of-way and/or railroad track that could be rebuilt into light-rail purposes. On the Southbank you want to stay with monorail and BRT (except for the Florida East Coast as a potential limited service commuter line) as any form of light-rail would have to cross the FEC RY. Such crossings at grade would eat the budget due to insurance requirements and red tape.

I was the original protestor about the Skyway project, (see: http://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2011-aug-mass-transit-30-years-later-special-report ) I never supported the people mover, not then or now and led a fight to stop the city from going over that cliff.  I realize however what we've already spent on ½ of a transit system and believe it nearly criminal to walk away from that investment, not even considering the refunds we'd have to issue Uncle Sam. We've got lemons and we need to find a way to make lemonade.

Had those lines been built with the monorail beams in 2002, we'd be running 6 car trains today.

I know the Skyway is way-over-engineered for the current trains, but are you positive that both the station and the concrete support structure can support 6-car standard-gauge equivalent size trains?  Station design is very important - 6 cars will have to be safely supported, capacity wise, at each station along the route.  Additionally, 6 car trains have obviously different weight and different lateral forces on turns.  Are you 100% sure we won't have to rebuilt the fuckin thing to support cars 3-6x the length (do you consider current cars one car or two car?) and 3-6x the weight and lateral forces?

A walk-through train takes care of the length issues provided you don't have to walk 4 cars back from the door you boarded at, but 4 to 6 cars should be doable. As to weight, yes, the current system is designed to WAY MORE then support the weight of larger trains, in fact it was engineered to light-rail standards. A study would have to be done to see if a conversion to light-rail would make any sense, my gut feeling is it would be too radical of a change from what we have making it cheaper and faster just to upgrade and extend as TRUE MONO-rail.

To those that say the Skyway can never handle capacity, this is simply not true. New trains of the current type alone could easily increase capacity 3-4 times over.  Going with a modern monorail train such as the Innovia could give it a light-rail capacity for about the same cost per mile as light-rail (not streetcar).

And nevermind the questions surrounding the structural and capacity support of the concrete and stations in place, what pray-tell do these cars cost??

The 4 car Las Vegas trains ran $3.5 million per train, this would have to be adjusted upward, but it appears to be similar to light-rail cars.

The new system in Sao Paulo will have many times the capacity of light-rail and in fact will be a 'heavy-rail equal'.

So now we're going to compare what we can do in Sao Paolo, one of the world's largest cities and most crowded, to what we should do in Jacksonville?  WTF  We're going to put heavy rail capacity on what's currently a 2.5 mile system in total, and what might be able to be expanded to ~4 miles?  L oh fucking L....we wouldn't even come close to mentioning building a 4 mile HRT system and you know that, so why do you even bring this up?

You brought up capacity questions, and I used this to demonstrate that capacity per train needn't be what we have today. You spoke of ½ the stadium wanting to board in an hour and by Sao Paulo numbers it could be done, however stupid it would be to try this in Jacksonville. Folks that are not savvy to Brazil, lets just say that by Sao Paulo standards, New York City is Palatka! LOL. 

But as we've all said, we have much bigger problems with the Skyway then just simple expansion or new equipment. The little system gets within a block of 9,000 employees on the Southbank that have virtually no way to get to the train thanks to a freeway and railroad.  The fact that we never included a pedestrian bridge/skywalk  is just inexcusable.

This is true, except people in Jacksonville probably wouldn't really ride it much more than they do now even if it were put in their lap.  Let's be honest.  People in other cities brave these same kind of obstacles every day of their lives.  Yes, and you know it.  Typically, a city will try to make things easier with a pedestrian walkway, but that is not always the case.

Connectivity is our single biggest failure, on the Skyway, the River Taxi's, the buses. JTA is selling both the federals and the locals a 'BRT Miracle' that isn't even BRT by accepted international standards, and are thus setting us up for a new saga: "SKYWAY II, THE NIGHTMARE CONTINUES!" Which will be followed by ugly press convincing and again paralyzing the politico from doing anything right with transit because 'everyone knows JAX hates transit...' And no F---ing wonder when we have the likes of JTA's track record as the only transit many of these folks have ever met.

The fact that we never included a pedestrian bridge/skywalk  is just inexcusable.
If it's raining, one can't even get from Central Station into the Everbank Building, or the Omni. It's almost as if we built stations at random then built walls around them.

Oh, boo hoo.  I know you're thinking of a couple of different buildings in Miami where the people mover there goes directly to the garage/lobby, and yes, we're short-sighted here.  But you just echoed a point of mine.  Do we expect a Jaxson to wait in inclement weather for transit?  Hell fucking no!!  I wait at bus stops with my umbrella in the rain all the time...I have no choice.  I know when to bring a change of clothes...lol  If I were in Jax, I'd choose my car every time over waiting in heat, rain, etc.

It is a winnable situation, on my return from Medellin I no longer wanted to park downtown, and though I live in the Mac... out in World Golf Village, I drive to the nearest Skyway Station and ride.

As to the transit ridership in Miami, I agree with you having lived in the area, one can't really get to anything using Tri-Rail except a bus stop... If you get to Metrorail you can go to the Airport or downtown but that's about it. The work-a-day element is completely lacking from the South Florida system.

I thought the Tri-Rail System was every bit as connected, perhaps even moreso (since it ties directly to Metrorail) than Caltrains, which sees exponentially higher ridership (literally squished standing room only during rush hour).  I find its ridership inexcusable, as well.  But my perspective is apparently flawed and it's 100% the system to blame and not car culture in S FL.

HEAVY RAIL. Where the system failed was that Tri-Rail (like Metrolink in LA) was just a temporary measure during freeway construction (or in LA's case, earthquake remediation). As such they really were not looking at long-term use and as Florida East Coast Railway was under the direction of Ed Ball and fiercely anti-passenger or public, they went to what is today the CSX route. That line didn't enter Miami until 1927, and West Palm Beach not much before that. So the entire system is WAY out of town to the west of everything. Metrorail was built as a sister to the Baltimore system, same cars, same plans, same orders, but Maryland kept improving and Miami did nothing until recently.

Here you go: The Baltimore Metro vehicles were built in the same contract as that of the Miami, Florida rapid rail transit system. Both Miami and Baltimore cars are identical except for the paint design. The Baltimore Subway car is the Budd Universal Rapid Transit Car (BURT). It is 75 feet long, 10 feet 2.5 inches wide, 12 feet high, 3 feet 6.5 inches floor height, weighs 76,000 lbs., has 76 seats, has 275 passenger crush load, uses 700 VDC electric power, has a maximum speed of 70 MPH, with minimum horizontal radius of 250 feet, with chopper control, and air conditioning.

Baltimore then added or connected it all with MARC, Amtrak Corridor trains, bus, and then overlaid the entire metro with a comprehensive Light-Rail system.

Thanks Ock.  Love the way you speak to the issue (I'm certainly a little more dry and a lot less optimistic, LoL).  I do question station length to train length, though.  I've certainly never seen a train longer than its station, and I believe there are federal regulations there?  What if doors "accidentally" open onto the tracks during boarding?  Technology fails and we live in a nanny state country, so there's a regulation for that I'm pretty sure.

A lot of people here in SF are disappointed that the new Central Subway stations will only be built to 2-car length LRT trains.  In fact, we're all sick of 2-car length LRT trains!  We have our own transit issues over here, but issues that arise from using the system daily and knowing what works and what doesn't.  Some of our biggest issues are union-related (same song in Atlanta with MARTA, and the reason BART shut down twice last year for strikes).  Once Jax gets significant transit, just wait for your little red county to be beholden to big blue unions.    Even the staunchest of democrats here in the Bay Area cannot stand our transit unions - they are a large part of the reason for delays on busses and trains, and why we have 2-car trains in the first place.

[JayBird]

^ After Hurricane Sandy destroyed the South Ferry station, MTA has tried to get it back up and running. Though it has now opened, they had to rebuild the old station which was for much shorter than the 10 car trains they use now. So, when the 1 Train pulls into the station, they announce you must be in the first five cars to exit, the doors in the last five will not open. And close to 200,000 people use that station just during the rush hours. So far, no one has been injured or accidentally got out on a closed portion. Though the commuters know to walk through, the tourists to Battery Park and Statue of Liberty get all confused and befuddled.. Yet somehow it all still works.

[peestandingup]

I don't know why people look at our weather (heat) as a negative here when it comes to transit & walkability. To me its quite the positive. Have you ever been in Boston or Chicago (or further south in DC for that matter) in the winter? That shit is NOT pleasant. It feels like you're walking through a frozen, post-apocalyptic wasteland. And trying to carry kids or groceries through that? Forget about it. I'd take sweating over that ANY day.

We're also forgetting what its like in the "winter" here. It's quite nice.

[simms3]

^^^Welp, I guess that confirms that because the 1 Train can do it, we should rebuild Jacksonville Skyway to be 5 cars too long as well!  LoL

Also, South Station appears to be the southern nexus (obviously if it was impacted by Sandy).  I've never used that station, but can you imagine if every station along the 1-2-3 route going up through Manhattan and into the Bronx were 5 cars too short?  I would imagine that would be an issue...delays exiting and boarding at each station if capacity is such that people must occupy all cars then come forward to the front 5 each time.  People having to get out of the cars to let others out, then enter back in before the people waiting on the platform take their spots, etc.

Good to know there isn't a regulation for that (also good to know that nobody has been hurt in the process...I've definitely been pressed against the doors in crowded cars before...would hate for that similar situation on an elevated monorail where one accidentally opened and someone fell out).  Still doesn't stop the fact that you can't build stations along an entire route to be shorter than the train cars that are a length designed to fit a high demand/capacity.