MCL1981 wrote:As I recall, all the ridership estimates WMATA touted for the initial opening of the siliver line were totally bunked. I'm not talking about future ridership estimates. I'm talking about today ridership estimates. It's apparently so low that they can simply close the stations.
And I thought the ridership was above projections, not below.
That's all well and good for people who don't live next to one of those stations. If you start shutting down stations, it isn't clear that the TOD will proceed to the point where the stations ever have the ridership that you seem to think is needed for them to be deemed worthy.
This is the death-spiral that a lot of people have warned about. You start closing stations and fewer people will take the train (you already have that in smaller amounts with the midnight closures). Then you re-evaluate based on this new information, and decide that some more stations can be closed, and the next thing you know they decide to shut the system down on weekends because nobody wants to deal the degraded service.