The Red Line Podcast
@TheRedLine_pod
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The West’s premier transit podcast!
Salt Lake City
Joined November 2021
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GIVE THE KIDS WHAT THEY WANT
Are kids not excited to get their drivers permit or license these days?
My kid turns 15 today and he could not care less about it.
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-Hyperloop (which Elon admitted was a scam designed to kill California High Speed Rail) in bio
-Opinion ignored
Trains are incredibly absurdly obsolete technology.
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San Francisco nimbies will kill you and your family to protect a house that looks like this and is ~40 feet from a light rail stop.
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It's official folks! After 50+ years of planning and over ten years of delay-ridden construction, the first segment of Honolulu's new metro line (Skyline) is open! Here are a few fast facts for people who are unfamiliar with the project: 1/4
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Busses too empty? Run more service.
Busses too full? Run more service.
Too many cars? Run more service.
Small farebox recovery? Run more service.
Just run more service. It's that simple. Every bus route should run at *least* every fifteen minutes.
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If you build it, they will come.
10:26 on a Saturday.
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The United States has what is probably the wackiest political economies in the world around building transit, which is why we build such strange transit networks all the time. But Link Light Rail in Seattle? It might take the cake- it's a metro that uses LRVs. Listen below!
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Sprawl kills farms. Period. This is a time-lapse of my hometown, Boise, from 1984 until today. By my count, nearly 40 square *miles* of farmland have been lost since then. We could lose hundreds more if this continues.
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God willing, the Orellow line will run from Mexico to Vancouver!!! 55 MPH light rail for 1500 miles!
Leslie Lewallen said she opposes light rail in the I-5 Bridge. She claims light rail would increase the amount of drugs coming up from the southern U.S. border.
#Election2024
#Clarkwa
#Vanwa
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Despite what you have heard, Los Angeles hasn't always been the insane sprawling metropolis that it is today. In fact, at one time it may have had the best transit system in the world!
Listen to ep. 63: Pacific Electric Blues today!
As always, TRLP is available everywhere!
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Urban areas with easy access to outdoor recreation+sight amenities are good, actually.
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The absolute insanity that is Bogata's TransMilenio
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Parts of that section of freeway are already nearly 20 lanes wide. How many lanes are necessary to solve traffic, exactly?
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"So you're telling me that your transit line has the operating pattern of a subway line, the infrastructure of a streetcar AND a regional rail line, and uses juiced up trolleys for rolling stock?"
"Isn't it GLORIOUS!?!? We call it Light Rail!"
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Just say you hate the planet
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For the love of pete, can we just put up some gosh darn wires? It's standard technology literally everywhere else on the planet, it can't be THAT hard.
Arriving soon in California: First intercity zero-emission, hydrogen passenger trains in North America. This builds on the more than $1 billion in zero-emission transportation investments in the past few months alone. More:
@CAgovernor
@CA_Trans_Agency
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The San Diego Trolley is one of the most successful light rail systems in North America, and has recovered better from the Covid-19 pandemic than just about anywhere else. Just what makes it such a unique and groundbreaking system? Listen to our newest episode to learn more!!!!!!
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Everyone wants to act like the average Easterner lives in NYC/Philadelphia/Chicago rather than god's most unwalkable suburb. The only difference is that their suburbs were cut out of old growth forest instead of random plots of desert.
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There is no fundamental difference between this and a streetcar/LRT line except that it relies on inferior power tech and has far lower capacity.
Streetcars/Light Rail and pedestrian/cycle space are very compatible :)
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my friend just sent me these pictures from the tram in La Défense, Paris, a part of the city that most Americans never visit.
she says it's safe, clean, and reliable. no drug addicts or criminals.
in America this would be unthinkable.
what is the sickness that has infected us?
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Probably the most powerful action an average person in the US can take against climate change is to stop driving and start walking, cycling, and riding the bus/train. Why do we keep making it so hard for people to take the right choice?
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@pacific_zephyr
IT'S LITERALLY JUST FEEDER BUSES+DECENT ROUTE PLANNING. WHY ARE WE UNABLE TO GRASP THIS?
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Dallas is braver than all of us; it's the only city in the world that dared to ask, "what if BART was light rail?"
Listen to ep. 71: The Longest Light Rail in the U.S. is in Texas - DART today, and learn why I think it's a sleeper giant in US transit! Link below!
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Calgary is often held up as an example of transit success in a small North American city, with a pre-pandemic LRT ridership of over 300k per day, and hundreds of thousands more on their busses. But how can this be? Land use around C-Train stations is almost universally terrible!
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It’s literally so simple, but American transit agencies have trouble grasping it; more busses. Lots more. Even in the absence of Calgary’s advantageous lack of downtown freeways, just running a feeder bus from everywhere to the closest rail station would do wonders.
Canadian transit ridership always blows me away. Calgary looks like any other North American city, but their 37 mile light rail system moves 250k people a day
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My one contribution to Light Rail (TM) discourse:
I dislike American urbanists using the term 'tram.' We have a vernacular term for that mode of transit, and it's streetcar or trolley. Just feels weird to me that everyone is trying to insist on using the European term.
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I just got the most terrifying glimpse into the mind of the enemy. My Transportation and Land Use teacher just brought in a traffic engineer who works at a firm that does nearly a third of the traffic studies in Utah, and the car centrism of everything project was fascinating.🧵
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Sure, Chicago's grid is cool and all, but was it literally invented by GOD?!?!?!?!?!
I didn't think so, SLC stays winning 😎
friendly reminder that chicago has the most perfect grid of any major city in the world and it is glorious
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@gothgirl_prelaw
Your strategy of firebombing a Walmart pales in comparison to my strategy of voting
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LA has a subway?!?!?
But I thought that the only possible way to get around the greater LA area is by car!!! NOooooooooo don't make me take the train nooooo!!!!
Listen to Ep. 64: LA Has a Subway? Today!!! (Link below)
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WHELP! There goes the Greater Idaho nonsense.
A deposit of lithium recently discovered along the Nevada-Oregon border may be among the world’s largest according to a new scientific paper.
The deposit in the McDermitt Caldera could contain between 20 to 40 million metric tons of lithium.
Huge news for the EV industry.
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In Memoriam: The Murray AN*L Sign; ????-2023
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San Jose is more famous for its sprawling tech campuses and tracts of single-family housing than anything else, but it's been making great strides in transit; even if it's light rail may be the least effective in the world. Listen to ep. 61: The World's Worst Light Rail today!
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We talked about this while recording last night and it strikes me just how common Blue Lines are.
Why Blue? Why is that always our favorite color to name transit lines after? The same goes for green- I want the color psychology here.
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Skyline is the first new US metro system to incorporate both fully automated train operation (without ANY operators at all) and platform screen doors. This makes Skyline the most advanced rail rapid transit system in the US and maybe even in North America! 3/4
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Why Salt Lake City is INSANELY well designed
There is surprisingly little unique urbanist content on Youtube. Most of it is just clones of clones of Vox content or the similar.
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Just watched a real-time ride along of one of the Pittsburg T's lines and all I have to say is...
Portland🤝Pittsburgh
Building your expensive grade seperations in such a way that trains have to crawl along them at agonizingly low speeds.
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Phoenix is basically the most prototypical sprawling metropolis on the planet. But what if I were to tell you they're making great transit strides, and almost had a Skytrain one time? Listen to Episode 60: Phoenix has a Train? today!! (link below)
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Who could have predicted that using low floor light rail vehicles on what will become one of the country's busiest transit lines would cause capacity issues? I'm SHOCKED Seriously, UTA's TRAX will never carry a 10th of this many people, and our trains have the same capacity.
We’ve officially hit the point where the train was so full not everyone could get on that wanted to.
@SoundTransit
#Seattle
#lightrail
#crushload
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The Rio Grande Plan is now projected to cost somewhere between $3 and $5 billion (with a B).
For context, the entire UTA system to date (TRAX, FrontRunner, and BRT) has cost just over $5.1 billion.
NEWS: We obtained the city's engineering report on the Rio Grande Plan, an effort to align and bury rail transit through Downtown SLC.
We now know the expected costs, returns and obstacles of carrying out the plan.
#utpol
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It's quite unfortunate to see, but this is really just the Massachusetts government entering the 'finding out' phase of their experiment to use MBTA funds for highway infrastructure. That's a lot of money to dig out from under.
The MBTA needs a gobsmacking $24.5B just to repair and replace its decrepit track, stations, trains, signals, and other assets, an agency analysis released Thursday shows, providing the long awaited tally of just how broken the transit system really is.
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In the future the majority of America should live in a town with...
-A population of ~20 million
-Beautiful architecture
-Greenery
-Diversity of background and opinion
-Safe people and safe streets
-Great public transportation
-A low carbon footprint
-Abundant housing
In the future the majority of America should live in a town with...
-A population of 5-50k
-Beautiful architecture
-Greenery
-Homogeneity
-Safe; you can leave doors unlocked, etc.
-Friendly/neighborly townsfolk
-High trust
-Patriotic
-Religious & moral populace
What's your
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Streetcars that AREN’T a huge waste of transit money? Is this possible?
Yes! (At least, if you listen to me!)
Listen to Ep. 67: Successful Streetcars now!!!!!
Link below!
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Does your city have night bus service? If you live most place in the United States, the answer is probably no. There are, however, a few larger cities that provide transit 24/7! Learn all about night transit planning in TRLP Ep. 56: Night Buses! (Link in the comments)
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There's been a lot of talk recently about why transit costs so much to build in the United States, and we just made an episode on it! Listen below:
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I do wonder how different urban transportation would look in the United States if more cities had gotten Great Society metros or had hopped on the bandwagon when LA built their subway in the 90s.
Perhaps a more transit-oriented world.
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If I had a nickel for every DMU commuter rail line from an extremely insignificant exurb to a marginally more significant suburb, I'd have two nickels, but it's weird that it happened twice.
(Dallas A-Train and Portland WES)
Any other weird suburban DMU lines in the US?
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They won’t tell you this, but SLC is secretly a PNW city.
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All across this great land, there are commuter rails sitting alone, sad, empty of joy. YOU can help these poor little commuter trains feel better about themselves TODAY with your small donation of 41 minutes!!!! Listen to Ep. 59: The Commuter Rails Time Forgot Today! (link below)
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It's just so wild to me that not only does Phoenix have rail transit, but it's actually pretty good? Sure, the frequency isn't the best (every 20 atm), but it's a) fast, despite being almost exclusively street running and b) has great ridership. It's also getting an expansion!
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Hey, I live there!
If this was in every neighborhood, this country would become exponentially more livable overnight. (
@TrentSiggard
)
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Good. They shouldn’t back down; light rail is perfectly compatible with pedestrian spaces.
The debate over whether to install high-speed light rail along Atlanta’s beloved Beltline is expected to be one of the city’s biggest battles as BeltLine and MARTA officials say they aren’t backing down from the idea.
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WE ARE GETTING 15 MINUTE SATURDAY SERVICE ON TRAX!!!!!!!!
GO AND LEAVE A COMMENT; WE NEED TO SHOW OVERWHELMING SUPPORT FOR THIS CHANGE!!!
GO, GO, GO,
@RideUTA
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Although the first nine station segment is now in full service, most of Skyline's stations aren't open yet! The remainder of the line is expected to be completed in 2025 and 2031, when the line will finally reach the city center. 2/4
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Service until 2 is like a dream, I wish this weekend would never end :(
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Look. Boise's transit may be sub-par (not VRT's fault, Idaho won't allow for special sales taxes for transit), but the Main Street Bus Station is legitimately cool and an awesome central transfer point for the network. There are customer service counters and everything!
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Enjoying Alan Fisher getting a bit westcoastpilled
This is the America that the average conservative is scared of
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It’s TRAX Tuesday baby! Smallest metro in the US with urban rail 😎
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Excellent, excellent stuff from Rep. Cori Bush’s new Light Rail Transit Act. Looks like she’s taking a big swing to improve service on existing LRT lines and build out some new ones, perhaps with up to *85%* federal funding! That’s highway levels of funny money!
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Unlike some OTHER transit agencies that only celebrate America on July 4th, UTA is patriotic 24/7/365!!!! Red, White, and Blue livery like the founders intended.🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
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What was most interesting was how he mentioned ped and transit, then immediately moved on to talking about all the ways they were planning to mitigate car traffic. The traffic engineers are evolving to talk the Urbanist talk while walking the same old car dependent walk.
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So the boys and I had an idea while recording our Norfolk episode today...
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???
🎉ICYMI: Work on the “S-Line” project, a passenger rail line from Raleigh, N.C., to Richmond, VA., is officially underway.
Once complete, this new route will save travelers an estimated 90 minutes per trip and form a key link in the SE Corridor.
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Also he called a strip mall a ‘mixed use development’ which Alex and I just thought was funny.
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The answer is actually quite simple; good service (as often as every 6 minutes on the CTrain), and some of the best suburban bus service on the continent. Almost everywhere in the city is within a short walk of one bus route or another, feeding thousands of riders into the CTrain
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YOU TAKE THAT BACK!!!
Boise is a few suburbs in a trenchcoat *AND* a lovely walkable downtown.
I'd also like to use this opportunity to highlight the PERFECT light rail corridor that has gone unused for decades!!!! And that VRT has cool infra despite its poor service.
Boise is just a few suburbs in a trench coat forming a "city" with large number of people that is still completely irrelevant nationally.
It lacks things like a downtown subway and intercity rail, among others, disqualifying it from being considered a real city.
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TRAX will not be running to the airport (or anywhere for that matter) so I'm biking! Hopefully I won't get pulverized by a car on North Temple.
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US agencies stop doing transit security theater challenge: impossible.
There is an effective method to improve safety on transit; hire an unarmed guy to annoy people who are breaking the rules and deescalate problems before they begin.
I DO THIS JOB!! It's just a conductor.
You have got to be fucking kidding me.
METAL DETECTORS?
This is exactly what will improve the passenger experience and lure riders to Metrolink, security theater 🙄.
Crime is not an issue on Metrolink, anyone who says otherwise is lying and pushing an anti-urban narrative.
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Uhhhhh soooo UTA maybe single car Sundays were not the best idea? We just left like 30 people at Fashion Place West. They’re running an emergent train behind us to pick up the slack but still.
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Fun Fact!
Salt Lake City has two (2) buildings under construction that will provide more units than San Francisco has approved this year.
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The REM is finally open and we're not there celebrating :(
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This is Washington Park Station on TriMet's MAX, the deepest station in North America and the sixth deepest in the entire world. The station forms part of a tunnel that carries the MAX deep under the hills that border downtown Portland, allowing it to serve the western suburbs.
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I receive: High Speed Rail
You receive: rapid and enormous economic growth
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Senator Feinstein did a lot of things in her long life, but the one I'm choosing to remember today is her pioneering work to rebuild San Francisco's cable car system in the 1980s. Without her, they might not still exist today. Rest in Peace, Senator.
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Gonna disagree with Ben here. Cute, pedestrian-mixing streetcars are very cute, but TRAX runs through to multiple destinations. Speed should be a priority, so if anything we should actually *beef up* the fencing to allow trains to run the maximum possible speed (35).
New fences along Trax for Open Streets (starts this weekend). Definitely better than the temporary barricades of years past but hopefully the permanent design does away with fencing entirely.
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People know that I was the first to speak out in UTA's defense when the December service cuts were announced, but I've gotta be honest, the ski bus has become a massive debacle at this point. At least a hundred passengers waited in the cold for over two hours yesterday while...
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Do you like trains? (duh)
Do you like California? (probably)
Then you'll like episode 39: Caltrain!!!
Link below!
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@AmericanFietser
Metra refuses to buy any different rolling stock than the kind they’ve always had to ‘save on maintenance costs.’ Institutional inertia at this point
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Today was a busy day on FrontRunner! Control, my engineer, and I estimated we had nearly 800 people on one train!!
Wherever and whenever you're going,
@RideUTA
moves you!
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Whoever had the idea to put Keizer's (Oregon, a Salem suburb) new transit center right next to this railway line had some god-tier foresight. Someday, the WES will run down this line and it will be ridiculously easy to build a new station at the existing site.
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Rail transit on the Wasatch Front has not been expanded in ten years. Ten. Years. After fifteen years of aggressive transit expansion, our state leaders chose to return to the highway expansion status quo, leaving UTA to stagnate and struggle under the weight of Frontlines debt🧵
Happy Birthday, TRAX Airport Line. 🎉
The extension of the Green Line to Airport Station opened on April 14, 2013, since then it has completed more than 41 million trips.
In honor of our 10th birthday, skip the parking headache and take the TRAX Green Line to the
@SLCAirport
.❤️
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There aren’t many cities where you can walk out of your downtown apartment and start climbing a 10000 foot mountain. I’m forever grateful that Salt Lake City is one of them :)
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Finally, I have the complete set!! I can now navigate the whole Wasatch Front from the comfort of my desk.
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Ok, enough whinging and moaning. Time to get back to basics: destroying Indianapolis.
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What is preventing you from moving to Salt Lake City?
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I have exactly four opinions on TriMet and Portland transit in general:
1. Build the Tunnel- The Blue Line is your regional line, needs speed.
2. Extend the Yellow Line to Vancouver already
3. Y'all need WAY better bus service
4. The Streetcar needs 15 minute headways
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For the cost of UDOT’s newest freeway boondoggle, we could build a new TRAX line as long as the Blue, the Rio Grande Plan, and still have some money to kick around. This crap needs to stop
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… of cars
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The frequency on a lot of these busses isn't the best (covid cuts), but the general success of Calgary's transit shows us that transit can and will thrive, even in the most suburban areas, if you provide a level of service that people want to use.
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