Skyway on the Move: An exclusive thread on EXPANSION and IMPROVEMENT!

[Ocklawaha]

What about street vendors? There is enough space in those stations for a small Walgreens! Why are we not using it?  Lake do you have any photos of those tiny kiosk type stores.

OCKLAWAHA

[Ralph W]

Man, you can't put anything in those spaces - they were designed to queue up the mobs of people waiting to board the train. JTA spent a fortune on extra velvet ropes and stands. All modeled after the Disney "D" or "E" ticket rides.

[Seraphs]

If I have only one vote it would be stadium district.  If I can be greedy I would add San Marco, Springfield and Five Points.  Talk about connectivity.

[Timkin]

I think 5 points via Annie Lytle should be first.  It needs to happen anyway, and the schoolhouse cannot be put off for many more years before our esteemed Code Enforcement starts eyeing it to demolish it.

[Seraphs]

Why not just wrap the entire car?


Wrap advertising on the Detroit Peoplemover.

It would be a great idea, however, they squawked at this during the superbowl.  I couldn't figure out why.  They wrap buses duh!  Same difference.

[charlestondxman]

Just expand it to the stadium. You get 5-10,000 every Jags game, and a few hundred for Suns games, you get huge revenue.

[JeffreyS]

The best vote for the skyway is to get Amtrak downtown.  If the number quoted on the site is true 72,000 on and off a year.  That would help the skyway as much as anything.

[Ocklawaha]

Just expand it to the stadium. You get 5-10,000 every Jags game, and a few hundred for Suns games, you get huge revenue.

Agreed, the idea that Peyton and Company didn't want to complete the stadium line in time for the SuperBowl shows just how out of touch the boy wonder really was. I wasn't even in the USA at the time and I HEARD COMPLAINTS ABOUT THE DEAD END MONORAIL.

Imagine your extension is completed, it also soars over the Matthews/Arlington Expy and has a station up on Randolph at about Jessie Street, in the heart of the east side. The trains are stretched out to 6-8 cars using the
unbuilt 'center car' design (I have the drawings). Suddenly weekday traffic jumps about 200% and the game day traffic is equal in one day to a month of current service.

V I S I O N ! JTA? Time to pull your head out.

OCKLAWAHA

[simms3]

The thing is, as much as I am all for expansion to an extent, many cities are having difficulties paying for their more extensive systems right now.  Do we foresee any state DOT funding for operations (and expansion) of the Skyway or for another system for that matter?

Atlanta has 3x the property taxes and higher fees and 400,000 daily riders and $2.00 base fare (as low as it goes if you buy in bulk per trip), and MARTA is still basically bankrupt.  Our state does not help out at all, and only Fulton and Dekalb counties cover the expenses.  They have increased headways outside of rush hour to near 20 minutes, shortened train lengths, shortened hours, and now base fare is increasing to $2.50 a trip (so a person like me who only needs to go 1-2 stations away has to pay the same, $2.50, as someone who is coming from North Springs to the airport).  Oh, and keep that in mind...most people in Atlanta take the train to the airport and to sporting events, and our airport is the largest in the world and we have (now) 3 professional  sports teams.  That and concerts draw huge train crowds, and MARTA is still putting a hole in Atlanta's budget of tens of millions of dollars a year.

Our skyway will never be a 48 mile long system like MARTA is, but even if we expand it by 2-3 more miles and double the length of the trains, and put advertising on the trains, and ridership increases dramatically, it would still probably be a money loser.  It is just so hard to make public transit profitable, so Jacksonville would have to be prepared for the expense.

Now I know that it could spur development and increase the tax base, and indirectly make up the expense that way, but 99% of people aren't going to see it that way.  It will be an uphill battle financially and politically no matter what.

10 Years ago you would not have caught a suburbanite in Cobb or Gwinnett County dead crying for MARTA, and now they are all clamoring for it.  Here in the south traffic has to be as bad as it is in Atlanta for people to really want public transit options no matter the cost.  In addition to our streetcar line and soon to be light rail loop, MARTA is potentially going to expand with two more lines...one out to Johns Creek (a suburb made out of nowhere from 3 other suburbs) and one to the Cumberland/Vinings area going East to Perimeter (not even connecting to Midtown/Downtown).

Having 3 million people in the area in 1990 was not enough to justify further expansion (well I guess there were small expansions in the 1990s intown and in Perimeter, which is still Fulton County...Sandy Springs actually).  Having 4.2 million people in 2000 was not enough either.  Now we have 5.4 million people, with 3.6 million people in the central 1,500 square miles, and traffic out in the burbs is an absolute nightmare.  They are now tolling our suburban HOV lanes (and there will be 2 HOT lanes in each direction in addition to the 6-7 non high occupancy lanes in each direction).  That's how bad it is.  That's probably how bad it needs to be in 2011 for people to start realizing that having options is a good thing.  Jax just doesn't have any kind of traffic resembling that yet.

The Skyway is as politically frowned upon as MARTA once was (MARTA for more racial/poor planning/crime points of view and Skyway for giant waste of money point of view, well and poor planning POV).

[Ocklawaha]

The thing is, as much as I am all for expansion to an extent, many cities are having difficulties paying for their more extensive systems right now.  Do we foresee any state DOT funding for operations (and expansion) of the Skyway or for another system for that matter?

There is currently in place funding through the Federal Government for Skyway Expansion. The new transportation bill is bipartisan and is going to at a bare minimum continue to fund at the current rate with adjustments for inflation. When Boxer and Inhoff see eye to eye, you can bet something great is about to burst on the scene.

Our skyway will never be a 48 mile long system like MARTA is, but even if we expand it by 2-3 more miles and double the length of the trains, and put advertising on the trains, and ridership increases dramatically, it would still probably be a money loser.  It is just so hard to make public transit profitable, so Jacksonville would have to be prepared for the expense.

Profitable as what? J. Turner Butler? Roosevelt? I-75? I-95? US-17? One more time here, ZERO transportation pays for itself 100% with the singular exception of freight rail and some inter-oceanic shipping. All of the 'user fee's' paid by the interstate bus and trucking industries combined wouldn't patch the potholes in the Pennsylvania Turnpike.  Tell us about profit out at Hartsfield as soon as DELTA, AMERICAN or SOUTHWEST start building their own airports, traffic control systems, research and administrative networks. FAT CHANCE! Even the private automobile is an ever decreasing return on an ever increasing expense.  AMTRAK? That one Federal program that some would have us believe is about to bring down the entire government? NOT A SINGLE ROUTE MAKES MONEY... In spite of what some have said or written about the Northeast Corridor... NOT ONE, NADA.

Frankly the Skyway's deficits would be much more tolerable if it was carrying the loads that it was first predicted to carry.  While it is a long - long - way off from what our 65 mile streetcar system once produced (36,500,000 annual passengers) Removing 783,000 people a year from downtown's streets is nothing to sneeze at.

Center cars added, Stadium/Eastside, San Marco at Atlantic, Farm Market/Woodstock, Brooklyn/Annie Lytle, would each probably double the ridership. Moreover it would allow us to actually REMOVE most buses from the downtown streets. This is something that many have promoted on these pages but in reality, until the Skyway serves ALL of the downtown, including everything east of Hogan, it's a pipedream.  

Now I know that it could spur development and increase the tax base, and indirectly make up the expense that way, but 99% of people aren't going to see it that way.  It will be an uphill battle financially and politically no matter what.

Ask most anyone in Jacksonville what the Skyway is supposed to be and you'll hear such insanity as downtown-airport, or the beaches, or Orange Park etc. FACT is the Skyway is built on the bones of an automated people mover system not unlike the ones at Orlando International Airport. Imagine taking a trip to the beaches from downtown in one of those little boxes? NOT! The Skyway was never intended to be more then an urban distributor system, never a citywide transit, or urban-suburban mass transit line. Downtown and 3-5 miles out and you've reached the end of it's effectiveness.

But imagine for a minute that all of the suburban bus routes tied into the terminals. Imagine it was running 20/7/365 and that workday, or gameday headways were 2 minutes. Imagine it reached Baptist Hospital, Aetna, BOA, Hyatt, EverBank Field, Blue Cross, Fidelity, Farm Market and Annie. Compliment the whole thing with streetcars on Water/Independence, Newnan, Lee, Beaver, Duval, and/or Monroe and Bay west of Lee. Streetcars that would someday reach those more distant points as true light-rail. Imagine you didn't have to drive in the Blanding Blvd. BS every morning or evening... Sell it to me as a choice, an alternative to an increasingly hotter version of highway hell and tell me people wouldn't flock to support it.

That's how bad it is.  That's probably how bad it needs to be in 2011 for people to start realizing that having options is a good thing.  Jax just doesn't have any kind of traffic resembling that yet.

Ask anyone from East McKeesport, PA to Alta Loma (unfinished furniture capital of the world) California, and they'll all tell you that at such and such a place the traffic is worse then yours. That's a fantasy, I've lived about 1/3 of my life in Southern (FREEWAY) California, right smack in the middle of LOS ANGELES, and I've spent 5 hours one evening on the San Bernandino Freeway in total system collapse-grid lock. Guess what? Blanding between Wells Road and Collins Road is just as bad on a daily basis as any in the country.

It wouldn't be hard to convince someone from Orange Park/Middleburg/Flemming Island that an alternative to the highway was a good thing, they instinctively know it. What really sucks and what the battle is all about is the basic concepts that they don't understand. Calling the Florida HSR line 'light-rail' or suggesting that an Clay County commuter train is a new high speed rail project, expecting transit to be directly profitable or building Skyway's to Callahan. Be it Los Angeles, Atlanta, or Jacksonville, we all share the learning curve and Jacksonville has no lock on transit ignorance.

OCKLAWAHA

[Jdog]

+ 1000

nicely put

[tufsu1]

There is currently in place funding through the Federal Government for Skyway Expansion. The new transportation bill is bipartisan and is going to at a bare minimum continue to fund at the current rate with adjustments for inflation. When Boxer and Inhoff see eye to eye, you can bet something great is about to burst on the scene.

which bill would that be? 

right now there are at least 3 different versions being bantered about in Congress...and there is actually a good chance that the new bill won't have a funding increase vs. the 2004 bill....plus the likelihood that the FTA New Starts program gets modified big time.

[Ocklawaha]

From the APTA website:

On Wednesday, May 27, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Ranking Member James Inhofe (R-OK), Transportation & Infrastructure Subcommittee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT), and Subcommittee Ranking Member David Vitter (R-LA) issued a joint statement on their draft transportation reauthorization legislation, Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century (MAP-21). While stating that there is still work to be done, the release announced that MAP-21 “will fund programs at current levels in order to maintain and modernize our critical transportation infrastructure.”

In a press conference subsequent to the statement’s release, Chairman Boxer announced the committee is planning a $339.2 billion bill, which is equivalent to current levels, plus modest growth to account for inflation.

Sure it could be changed, cut or "Micaized," but even if it were, the reason the Skyway is dead in the water can be found over on Myrtle Avenue, not Washington or Tallahassee or City Hall.

OCKLAWAHA

[tufsu1]

the Senate bill differs greatly from the one recently introduced by Mica in the House

http://www.metrojacksonville.com/forum/index.php/topic,12624.15/topicseen.html