Albuquerque-Santa Fe corridor study, comments

To: NM Dept of Transportation; ATTN Debbie Bauman

COMMENTS ON 2/8 PUBLIC INVOLVEMENT MEETING ON ALB-SF CORRIDOR

• The process appears to be open and thoughtful, not stifled by a pre-existing concept of the outcome.
• The double metro areas contain a million people who spend thousands each on transportation, so there may be something like five billion dollars spent annually on transportation. The study should look for how to tap into this big source of money. Of those billions of dollars and 36,000 daily trips (and growing), the study seems to be implicitly asking for a small amount of money to deal with a small number of trips. What if the goal was to handle 20,000 daily trips with growth potential to 60,000? It is unclear what fraction of the market you are expecting. Would a more aggressive goal lead to a better system, that would have a much higher value?