Re:Dial-A-Ride: Boom or Bust (1975)
by Animats on Wednesday June 17, 2015 @02:23PM
(#9734142)
Dial-a-Ride in Santa Clara county was a nice service, but Santa Clara County is 200 square miles, and at the time, had nothing like a "downtown". Downtown San Jose had almost no tall buildings back in 1975. There wasn't much commonality of trip sources or destinations, and thus most buses had one passenger.
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oh, there was a handful of tall buildings (I recall seeing the Community Bank and Bank of America buildings using a telescope from the eastern hills), but there was never sufficient density of population or workforce for transit to be cost-effective.
The (lack of) such commonality was key.
SCCTA/VTA's infrastructure was always politically oriented, not need-based. Note how Mineta obtained hundreds of millions of Federal funding for light rail along the Mountain View/Sunnyvale corridor (despite mass reductions of workforce in the area at the time from Lockheed and the Blue Cube)... then quit his House seat early and joined Lockheed Martin's executive ranks.
But I'm sure that was just coincidence.