Seems like it serves at least an entire university and has a dedicated pedestrian bridge.
Dunking on US public transport is easy and fun, so I sympathize, but if we do attempt public transportation it’s generally not needlessly stupid. Sometimes it ends up stupid anyway, but I try not to hate unnecessarily. It seems pretty close to the university, and I’m sure there are reasons why it’s in the middle of a highway.
Rail sometimes end up in the middle of a highway because the government already owns the land in that median, and it’s a lot easier and cheaper to build there than buying and clearing other routes.
The seeds of urban sprawl with shitty transportation were planted decades ago. Fixing it isn’t cheap, but some bandaids are easier than others.
Not sure about this station specifically, just speaking broadly
If the priority was on mass transport and not roads (which they quite happily destroy the entire neighbourhood to build), then this would solve the issue. And takes up far less land then a 8+ lane highway.
Better than nothing but a cynical approach to it, and I wonder if that is part of the plan.
“We built this rail line, in a bad location, and few are using it. I wonder why. Guess nobody likes rail, we should build more roads now instead.”
Also being general, not about this station in particular
Typically it’s the other order, in the us. We want to build a train line but it’s ungodly expensive and legally fraught to get that right of way. However there’s a convenient highway where we already have a right of way, and there’s room for rail in the median.
I’m not convinced it’s a good idea since no one would want to use it, but it’s well-meaning people trying to get a thing done
it should also be noted that the station has bus connections that jump onto (and come off from,) the highway, serving as a connection between busses coming from places trains don’t run to the train.
That is fair. We have a new train station next to one of our universities too and it replaced a bus line. It doesn’t have a highway right next to it as our higher education establishments tend to be in areas of quiet for obvious reasons (but still fairly close tbh), but that’s a different problem.
Seems like it serves at least an entire university and has a dedicated pedestrian bridge.
Dunking on US public transport is easy and fun, so I sympathize, but if we do attempt public transportation it’s generally not needlessly stupid. Sometimes it ends up stupid anyway, but I try not to hate unnecessarily. It seems pretty close to the university, and I’m sure there are reasons why it’s in the middle of a highway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garfield_station_(CTA_Red_Line)
Rail sometimes end up in the middle of a highway because the government already owns the land in that median, and it’s a lot easier and cheaper to build there than buying and clearing other routes.
The seeds of urban sprawl with shitty transportation were planted decades ago. Fixing it isn’t cheap, but some bandaids are easier than others.
Not sure about this station specifically, just speaking broadly
If the priority was on mass transport and not roads (which they quite happily destroy the entire neighbourhood to build), then this would solve the issue. And takes up far less land then a 8+ lane highway.
Better than nothing but a cynical approach to it, and I wonder if that is part of the plan.
“We built this rail line, in a bad location, and few are using it. I wonder why. Guess nobody likes rail, we should build more roads now instead.”
Also being general, not about this station in particular
Typically it’s the other order, in the us. We want to build a train line but it’s ungodly expensive and legally fraught to get that right of way. However there’s a convenient highway where we already have a right of way, and there’s room for rail in the median.
I’m not convinced it’s a good idea since no one would want to use it, but it’s well-meaning people trying to get a thing done
it should also be noted that the station has bus connections that jump onto (and come off from,) the highway, serving as a connection between busses coming from places trains don’t run to the train.
That is fair. We have a new train station next to one of our universities too and it replaced a bus line. It doesn’t have a highway right next to it as our higher education establishments tend to be in areas of quiet for obvious reasons (but still fairly close tbh), but that’s a different problem.