RtS: IMAX at GardenWalk, Anaheim

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by The Original OC Adventure

Why not?

They could do it in three steps.

1. Reserve the left-most lane for buses, using center island platforms for stations. This would require doors placed on the left side of buses. Shouldn't be too hard to do.

2. Replace the fossil fuel buses with electric trolley buses.

3. Gradually lay track and replace the trolley buses with street cars similar to those used by the city of Portland Oregon.

So not only does your simple 3 step plan require investments of hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more, for each step, it's investment in things that would be designed to be made obsolete by the next step?

Put doors on the left sides of buses. But then get rid of those buses you've just spent about $100 million* on modifying in favor a different, more expensive kind of bus. But then dump those buses for another, even MORE expensive type of vehicle.

Seems to me it would make a lot more sense to start with a plan that's designed to make use of the money spent rather than throw money down the drain in pursuit of some master plan that's liable to have the plug pulled at any point down the line. L.A.'s model of building small, achievable chunks that, on their own address a need and can be later networked together to addresses more general needs strikes me as a far more reasonable solution that neither necessitates huge spending on temporary solutions that will be scrapped, nor leaves things in a lurch should there be a change in course/funding/popularity a decade or two down the road.



*OCTA's got about 1000 buses if my research is correct. If fixing a couple dents on GC's car door costs $5000, I think $10K is a lowball estimate for making that kind of modification to a bus.