Just had a chance to ask some planners why Park West is excluded. The answers are:
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It hasn’t truly been excluded yet: decisions like this haven’t been made yet.
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Their modeling has shown that it reduces ridership by making travel times longer. Having stations spaced “too closely” has a deleterious effect on the service. They want 3-5 miles between stations so it doesn’t slow things down too much.
Their models are, however, based on lumbering locomotives pulling bilevel coaches which accelerate slowly and have long dwell times because they lack level boarding. There are technological solutions to these problems.
In addition, I suspect, though I couldn’t confirm, that their models are based on block or precinct level data from the 2010 census, which (in such a fast growing part of of fast growing metro region) is extremely out-of-date.
There are 5.5 miles between Cary and McCrimmon. Park West is literally at the midpoint, “bending” the station spacing rule from 3 miles down to 2.75. If we can’t do this, for the largest concentration of affordable housing on the entire line, then WTF are we even doing thinking about commuter rail in this cursed corridor?!
- The tracks are curvy there and they want straight platforms.
There may be ways around that, though, by either compromising and allowing a curvy platform, or building a straight stretch to put a platform on.
Basically, though, they are doing their best to follow the data and analyze this empirically, which I do applaud. I am just a dude out here who cares a lot (too much?) about transit. They are working hard doing their job.
If there really is no way to make this work, then so be it. But we should definitely give it another look first (and it sounds like they probably will.)