you've got a good story here. I'm in St. Louis where we just added to our commuter rail. Plus we just ended a pricey lawsuit where our mass transit org lost in court to collect unpaid bills from the original contractors. Yours is a city to city thing and ours was an in-city thing so there are differences. From what I've seen I'll fill you in on 2 big lessons I learned from ours.
1. The transit organization from day 1 should want full ownership of the project and not manage from 30,000 ft and put trust in private contractors.
2. Put your stations right in the middle of dense/busy areas and not off to the side with poor pedestrian utility.
We lost money and ridership because those won't followed. You guys can pan me for being moon-battish now.
2. Put your stations right in the middle of dense/busy areas and not off to the side with poor pedestrian utility.New Mexico isn't heavily populated Saint Louis! There are no dense/busy areas where King Bill is building his train -- that's the core issue. Mass transit doesn't make sense when it has only 2,500 riders per day, costs $500 million to build, and recovers only 7 to 9 percent of operating expenses at the fare box.