re: The Red Stick Trolley flopped, so let's try a Tram!!!

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The tram is within 70802.

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Yes, but the two most populated are 70805 and 70802 and the Tram is only in one.

If you wanted the Tram to serve the two most populated areas it would run down Nicholson to Plank Road and on to the airport.

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Zip codes aren't the best way to show this IMO. They cover large areas that might contain several city blocks of office space or universities filled with people during the week that aren't accounted for

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I agree with you here.

I think you'd want to connect a destination place with a dense area where a lot of people lived that regularly travel to the destination place.

I see Downtown as a destination place, but I see LSU as a destination place also. I think connecting the two places isn't the best choice for this experiment.

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To Laberge???? Why go umpteen miles through empty fields, and wide open land so a few people can gamble? That would be idiotic.

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I agree here.

Unless they pay for it.

Last I heard, the city would pay to get to Brightside, and Laberge would pony up the rest. They may end up scrapping going all the way down there, though.

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Commuters to jobs downtown will take it from 7-9. Lunch crowd will take it from 11-2 happy hour and commuters will take it from 4-7. Dinner crowd from 6-9. Barflys from 9-3. That leaves it being under-utilized from 3-7am, 9-11am, 2-4pm, and from 8-10pm, just like every other mass transit system in existence. It will be busy half of the time, and not busy half the time. I want to see if the use studies will show that the half the time when it is busy will make enough revenue to support the other half when it is not.

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I honestly can't believe you believe this.

Rail just fascinates folks I suppose.

Austin has about 1 million more people can't get support for another line.

It just costs too much.

What's left out is the cost to replace the rail as well once it wears out. Compared to roads, holy moly!

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They CAN'T use this money for state highways.

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False, the parish can and has improved state highways with local money. Bluebonnet and Burbank are two examples. Nicholson is also in the Green Lit plan and it is to be widened in a couple of years or so. It too is a state highway.

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They CAN use this money on passenger rail while getting the feds to fork over an extra $100 million worth of investment.

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Kansas City got the Feds to pony up roughly 37 million dollars of the funds for their Tram(total cost 102 million). How will we get 100 million dollars for ours?

I realize people other than yourself have been saying the Feds would pay 80 percent, but they didn't in Kansas City. Why the difference?

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I see Downtown as a destination place, but I see LSU as a destination place also. I think connecting the two places isn't the best choice for this experiment.

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This is a good point.

People that work and live downtown arent going to use this tram to go to LSU. People that work downtown and live elsewhere(not on the route) will not use this tram. Besides a few days a year, why would any large amount of people take the tram from downtown BR to LSU?

This will be a huge money pit.

Because we already got Congress to allocate it (thanks, Graves!)

This is fact. You can thank Congress for that back in the late 70s when they started requiring environmental and economic impact studies before anything could be built. It slowed infrastructure growth to a crawl and caused the costs to skyrocket.

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Because we already got Congress to allocate it (thanks, Graves!)

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Err no we didn't.

At least not in april.

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Graves said he fully agrees that the Nicholson corridor needs to be revitalized and he believes that LSU and downtown should be connected. But he said it’s unclear at this point whether the tram project will emerge as a priority. It’s possible the project could end up competing for dollars specifically designated for rail projects, such as the New Orleans to Baton Rouge rail line, which has been in planning for several years.


“In regard to saying that’s the best investment of those funds, I just want to wait and see what other projects are out there and which ones make the most sense for that investment,” he said.

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LINK

In the same article it says Graves got La. 100 million for a Fastlane project and that JBE plans to use it on I-10/I-49 in Lafayette, etc.

Did something recently happen to change all this?