Comment 101286

By tre (registered) | Posted May 12, 2014 at 19:19:22 in reply to Comment 101260

There are some carefully selected and manipulated facts from the HLR. If I were to call out on every attempt to mislead the readers, it would take a big wall of text. Instead, I will challenge the "facts" on two counts:

  1. On the issue of attracting new ridership, it mentioned that Charlotte's Lynx line saw a growth in daily ridership to from 9,100 in 2008 to 21,000 in 2010. An impressive argument for the LRT if you reject all other factors, for example the effect of the economic downturn on the travel pattern. What's also missing is the other part of the story - that ridership has since dropped to 15,400 in 2013. Was it a coincidence that they just happened to have picked the biggest ridership number as their "fact"? And why was the subsequent decline in ridership not even noted?

  2. As for the operating cost, it compared the cost of Calgary's C-Train (and there is at least one article that questions this estimate) to the cost of the HSR. But this comparison omits an important discussion. Calgary has a trunk-and-feeder system, with the C-Train being the trunk lines. C-Train operates with high efficiency only because it's supported by a bus network that feeds passengers to the lines; this creates a co-dependency between the two modes. But the "fact" took the profitable part of the system in isolation and compared it against the system average of another. What you get is a distorted and meaningless conclusion.

What we need is a real discussion, not with numbers exaggerated and taken out-of-context. For this reason, I find it difficult to view HLR as anything other than a disingenuous attempt at selling the LRT.

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