Charlotte:New light rail line's ridership exceeds forecast by 35%
....One problem that might have been constraining even greater public use of the new LRT service is "malfunctioning ticket kiosks" (ticket vending machines, commonly known as TVMs), which, says the Observer "are still bothering riders...."
Solution: make the train fare-free. The riders are reducing global warming, why make them pay extra for something that benefits all of us?
....The German town of Templin is another positive example of fare-free transit. Since 1997 the purchase of a ticket has been obsolete in several small German cities, including Templin (14,000 inhabitants). A study carried out for the German Federal Ministry of Transportation investigated and evaluated the benefits of fare-free schemes using Templin as reference (Keuchel et al. 2000). Overall, the results are fairly positive and encouraging—the benefits outweigh the costs by far. This could lead to a dominance of pull policies over push policies. Is this the beginning of a paradigm shift in policies aimed at solving environmental problems of transportation?...
When Minnesota's first electric streetcars were introduced in 1888, hundreds of people lined up to try them. The electric streetcars delivered both passengers and mail quickly and efficiently. The streetcars were a symbol of the boom that the Twin Cities were experiencing at the end of the 19th century: wherever new tracks were built, new land was developed, and the cities expanded. The remarkable success of the electric streetcar in urban service led to its use in rural and intercity operation. The term "interurban" was first used in 1890 to designate the intercity streetcar line between Minneapolis and Saint Paul, and came to be used nationwide to denote intercity operations in general. Streetcars were an elegant and non-polluting form of public transportation that brought the upper and lower classes of Minnesota together for almost seventy years, until they were finally displaced by the rise of the automobile in the 1950s.
It's starting to sink in...
"... companies are quietly rejecting Atlanta because of traffic. He cited MeadWestvaco, which relocated its headquarters —and hundreds of new jobs— to Richmond, Va., instead of Atlanta because of traffic... "
http://www.ajc.com/green/content/metro/stories/2007/12/17/traffic_1218_web.html
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