Is U2C serious? Help me make it make sense....

[marcuscnelson]

U2C got a good working over on First Coast Connect today... many of the criticisms and observations on the Jaxson were flushed out.  Even noted that only Nat Ford and Mayor Deegan seem to be for it and everyone else against it. Left scratching heads.

Particularly poignant, they played the desperate pleas at a City Council event of a disabled citizen that uses Connexion to get to work and is looking at 5 fold increase in cost ($300+/week) to commute to her job.  They noted that JTA is losing $7 million on U2C that almost no one rides while forgoing spending $6 million to keep Connexion affordable for the lifeline it provides to so many more people.  Again, left scratching heads.

Don't forget Councilman Johnson, the JTA Board Liaison. He is very for it, and very insistent that those who take issue with it simply don't see the vision of the future, so on and so forth. He's on the screens on the NAVI vehicles for a reason:



Just yesterday at the board meeting he was insisting that Diamond is essentially the sole detractor, which might technically be true but I don't believe reflects genuine belief in the U2C's usefulness so much as an unwillingness to rock the boat (or especially now with the Holon plant, look opposed to "creating jobs").

[Charles Hunter]

I wonder if there is a connection between his support and his liaison position? Might be fun to name Diamond as the liaison!

[jaxlongtimer]

I wonder how many of the "for" U2C players think they have jobs down the road working for JTA, Holon, or other vendors?  Will be interesting to watch.

[Jax_Developer]

Unless Peluso has changed his tone for party politics, he has also tweeted & made public statements against the U2C.

[Tacachale]

Might be fun to name Diamond as the liaison!

No it wouldn't.

[marcuscnelson]

Came across this "NAVI Case Study" while looking up some other things today. Interesting to see what JTA's attitude about itself is on paper in the wake of NAVI's launch.

https://online.flippingbook.com/view/212373412/

[CityLife]

Don't have time to read it (and hopefully this will save you time too), but ChatGpt raises some interesting points when I asked how the "case study" dealt with the ridership issue. Point number 3 is fantastic.

Does the case study overlook poor ridership intentionally?

Based on the content and framing of the case study, the omission appears deliberate rather than accidental.

1. Ridership is entirely absent — not even framed qualitatively
Across the full document, there are:

❌ No ridership counts (daily, weekly, monthly)
❌ No projections or targets
❌ No early performance indicators
❌ No comparison to Skyway ridership
❌ No "initial uptake" or "growing awareness" language

That level of omission—especially in a 60-page case study—is not typical unless the metric is unfavorable or not central to the story being told

2. The study defines "success" very narrowly

Instead of ridership, success is framed around:

-Being first in North America to deploy AVs in revenue service
-Safety, testing rigor, and standards development
-Economic development (manufacturing jobs, HOLON facility)
-Ecosystem-building (workforce, partnerships, regulation)
-Replicability for other agencies

This reframes NAVI as:
a technology deployment and economic development project
not a ridership-driven transit service

That framing conveniently makes ridership non-essential to the narrative.

3. This mirrors how the Skyway was historically defended

There's a subtle but important parallel:
-The Skyway failed largely due to low ridership
-NAVI is repeatedly described as not replacing traditional transit and not intended to eliminate buses
-The study avoids any "passengers per mile" or "cost per rider" metrics that historically hurt the Skyway
-In effect, the document sidesteps the exact metric that undermined the prior system.

4. Free-fare launch without reporting uptake is a red flag

The study notes:
-A multi-month free introductory period
-Extensive ambassadors, attendants, and outreach
-Public feedback collection

...but still provides no participation numbers, which is unusual unless:

Ridership was very low, or

Ridership was highly variable and politically sensitive

5. What this study is — and is not

This is best understood as:

✅ A justification and positioning document
✅ A proof-of-concept and replication pitch
✅ An economic development success narrative

It is not:

❌ A transit performance evaluation
❌ A cost-effectiveness analysis
❌ An FTA-style ridership justification
❌ A service planning document

Bottom line (plain language)

Yes — the case study avoids ridership on purpose, because:

Ridership is weak

It conflicts with the document's definition of success

Including it would undermine the "model for other cities" narrative

That doesn't mean the project has no value — but it does mean the study cannot be relied on to assess whether NAVI is functioning well as a transit service.

[jaxlongtimer]

^No surprise.  All of these points have been made here by others and myself.  Only ones not getting it are the JTA board, the Mayor and a very few other hangers-on who may be benefitting from this project going forward, now or in the future (looking for a job connected to AV's?).

I have especially highlighted the below and continue to say this is deja vu and why U2C and the Skyway are inextricably linked.  We need to kill this entire whack-a-mole multiheaded beast once and for all.  Neither are ever going to provide a proper relative ROI, even under generous "public mass transit" metrics, given neither mode is "mass" transit to begin with and never will be.  Horse drawn carriages would be more ROI effective!

P.S. The only thing reliable about traffic studies is that they are UNreliable.  They grossly overstate traffic for transit projects like this while understating road projections (which is why we have continuous road construction).  Maybe, even the prostituting consultants couldn't juice the traffic numbers enough to justify the project without totally destroying their credibility so why show them at all?

3. This mirrors how the Skyway was historically defended

There's a subtle but important parallel:
-The Skyway failed largely due to low ridership
-NAVI is repeatedly described as not replacing traditional transit and not intended to eliminate buses
-The study avoids any "passengers per mile" or "cost per rider" metrics that historically hurt the Skyway
-In effect, the document sidesteps the exact metric that undermined the prior system.

[thelakelander]

Neither are ever going to provide a proper relative ROI, even under generous "public mass transit" metrics, given neither mode is "mass" transit to begin with and never will be.

Definitely not a fan of the U2C but dropping in to say that no form of public transit will ever fare well with ROI, if its not tied to supportive and complimentary land use practices. Doesn't matter whether its LRT, U2C, commuter rail, Skyway or bus, all with suffer low ridership. Coordination with land use and zoning has always been horrible or a complete afterthought in Jax. As a result, anything attempted to be compared in ROI terms will be just as disastrous as expecting a public library or school to cover the cost of staff, utilities and maintenance to its doors open.

[jaxlongtimer]

Lake, to be clear, I referred to "relative" ROI... i.e. compared to other "mass transit" solutions.  In this case, ROI may mean losing less per passenger mile than another form.  Not expecting to ever make money, just to lose less while providing more benefit per lost dollar, i.e. bang for buck.  The Skyway has never come close and it is nowhere close to doing so in our lifetimes based on current trends.

I don't need a study to recognize that more buses could hit the road tomorrow, carry more people more places, and do so for a fraction of the Skyway's building/replacement costs and maintenance.  Having U2C integrate with the Skyway is pouring gasoline on a fire which is why both need to be killed in one fell swoop.

Any business person would have abandoned the Skyway decades ago and redeployed their resources for a superior and time-tested solution appropriate to the Jax demand for mass transit.  For now, as you and others have noted in saying Jax demand doesn't yet support rail options (not counting Amtrak or Brightline), it pretty much leaves us with buses as that sole solution for the foreseeable future.

How many high rise towers would Downtown need to justify the existing Skyway?  I don't see that in our lifetimes unless everyone in Atlanta, Charlotte or Nashville picks up and moves to Downtown Jax soon  .

[thelakelander]

They all suck when we do everything to make them fail. The Skyway would be viewed different if the Northbank still had 60-80k people working there. Those days died a long time ago when we clearly subsidized an exodus of major employers right out of the CBD and to the Southside since the 1980s.

^All the business people did is suck tax money into their business pockets to get new digs at the average Jaxson's expense. They were about their company's balance sheet, not public transit of any kind.

[jaxlongtimer]

They all suck when we do everything to make them fail. The Skyway would be viewed different if the Northbank still had 60-80k people working there. Those days died a long time ago when we clearly subsidized an exodus of major employers right out of the CBD and to the Southside since the 1980s.

^All the business people did is suck tax money into their business pockets to get new digs at the average Jaxson's expense. They were about their company's balance sheet, not public transit of any kind.

I hear you but my memory is a bit different.  Downtown still had thousands of workers when the Skyway was completed and no one rode it then.  Most all the legacy companies HQ'd downtown were still there at the time.

I used to work Downtown and still frequent it for many reasons to this day but have never had the urge to ride the Skyway.  The core is small enough that I can walk most of its rails easier than trying to hitch a ride on it.  Maybe to cross the river and spare climbing the bridges but the Main Street Bridge is easily walked in my opinion with its relatively low slopes and height.  I just can't see any great demand in the present world for the Skyway and, of course, for the U2C.  If JTA hadn't cooked up the U2C project, one must wonder how the Skyway could have any support whatsoever for keeping it alive.  In that way, JTA has "mission accomplished" so far.  Uuuggh  !

[thelakelander]

But nobody's memory can document a real effort locally to coordinate mass transit (Skyway or anything else) with land use, zoning and targeting public investments, sports facilities, etc. That's a major make or break with generating ridership on public transit and we broke splendidly.

Miami's systems started off just about the same back in the 1980s. Metrorail was called Metrofail for a number of years. Metromover didn't fare much better. But since the late 1990s/early 2000s, they got really aggressive with TOD and building density around those public transit investments. Now ridership is light years different and there are actually some spots down there that are really walkable and don't require the use of a car.

[marcuscnelson]

^ There are so many "What-if's" when it comes to the last half-century of fixed guideway mass transit in Jacksonville:

• What if we'd just not made it into the Downtown People Mover program in the 70s and 80s?
• What if in 1990 when the UMTA declared the Skyway unsuccessful we'd abandoned it then instead of securing an earmark to expand it?
• What if in 1991 we'd instead used that earmark for some other kind of rail transit?
• What if in 1993 when we secured the Jaguars we held off on using the Acosta Bridge right of way and expanded the Skyway down Bay Street to the stadium?
• What if in 1997 when Matra was unable to deliver the expansions we picked a different APM technology instead of the monorail?
• What if in 2000 we actually invested the $100 million in BJP right of way funding into transit expansion and adjacent land uses?
• What if in the 2000s we did not waste several years trying to become some kind of BRT leader and instead joined other cities in developing rail lines with supporting uses?
• What if in the 2010s we actually decided to modernize and expand the Skyway to key areas instead of spending a decade trying to become some kind of autonomous vehicle leader?
• What if in the early 2020s we decided that Testing & Learning was plenty and self-driving would be most useful in other contexts instead of trying to ram it into being a poor downtown circulator?
• What if in the late 2020s we decided that it was finally time to start thinking about transit as more than a career burnisher for JTA executives, but as a way of actually getting people around the nation's largest (by land area) city?

[jaxlongtimer]

^ Marcus, great recap of JTA's unending failures. 

To add to your list:

* What if JTA was strictly a true MASS transit (not a road builder, land developer, tech developer, economic recruiter, taxi company, etc.) agency with COMPETENT leadership and a proactive, informed, engaged board to hold such leadership accountable?
* What if the JTA board was also accountable rather than, with all due respect to those who have served, being a group of mostly uninterested and unquestioning political appointees mainly padding their resumes and enjoying the perks of the job?
* What if JTA was FORCED to integrate its mass transit plans with Downtown and other City long term and community driven development plans (which, heretofore, also don't exist)?
* What if JTA and the North Florida TPO, FDOT and the City's public works actually talked and coordinated with each other, rather than working in silos?
* What if JTA wasn't influenced by special interests?
* What if Jax was any other city but Jax?!!!