January 15, 2008
Light rail not the answer
I've always been a fan of mass transit, especially trains. Nothing makes a big city more liveable, more civilized than a subway. Paris' Metro made getting around a snap when I was a college student, and Manhattan sports an incredible subterranean people-moving system, supplemented by buses on the surface.
I commuted into New York City from the New Jersey suburbs for a semester at the U.N., alternating between riding the trains to Hoboken, taking the PATH under the Hudson River, and riding the Lakeland bus to the Port Authority on 42nd Street.
What all the rail-based systems have in common is that they were built during the early years of the 20th century, when the cost of labor -- and materials -- was quite low.
Today? Not so much. And as much as I like riding the rails, it's no longer the obvious solution to what ails American cities. In fact, notwithstanding the anguished howls of protest from the eco-weenies, the automobile provides the most cost-effective and efficient means of moving us from here to there.
Joe Sherlock makes the argument, with the facts and figures (and links) to back it up.
"Three light-rail lines have been added to L.A. county's transit system in the last 20 years. Together, these cost $2.5 billion in capital costs, they serve about 125,000 passengers per day and account for a fiscal loss of approximately $252 million per year - if one acknowledges that capital costs are real, something that transit operators and boosters often neglect."
"So if you do the math, the capital costs alone come to $20,000 per daily rider (and that's making a generous assumption about how many "regular" riders there are). Add in the annual operating loss, and it would have been cheaper to buy each rider a compact car and a full tank of gasoline each week for the rest of his life."
All of this for a negligible decrease in traffic congestion: In no city in the country does light rail ridership equal more than 1.2 percent of travel.
How much does it cost taxpayers to move one person one mile? About six cents for freeways and $2.75 for light-rail. Therefore, light rail costs 40 times more than freeways. The person-mile cost of buses is $1.59 - still much more than roads but considerably less than rail.
The answer is more. More roads and more cars. For less money.
It's a win-win.
Posted by Mike Lief at January 15, 2008 09:14 PM
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