[Iowa_Flames_Fan]

Originally Posted by Bunk

Keep in mind that cities like Boston and New York are 5-20 times the size of Calgary. Calgary, for a size of 1.2 million is miles ahead of pretty much any city near its size in North America for transit, particularly LRT. Calgary's LRT gets 270,000 rides per weekday. Portland, Oregon on the other hand, a city hailed for its smart growth and great LRT/Streetcar system only gets about 140,000 trips per weekday, despite being twice the metro size as Calgary.

That doesn't mean that Calgary doesn't need to expand its system, it does. I would say that Calgary needs to build a SE line, North-Central line (underground below centre street), a circle route and several inner city streetcar lines - such as a cross beltline route. More importantly though, Calgary needs to better tie land use to transit - more TOD nodes and corridors and better planned subdivisions to integrate with planned transit lines.

Good post--my one caution is how you interpret high ridership--one way to look at it is that a lot of people riding the LRT just confirms that the market is underserved in terms of public transit infrastructure.