Posted on 07/21/2010 5:53:01 AM PDT by Willie Green
This is what rail pimps like you produce, Willie - boondoggles.
But the 32-mile project, which saw its first passengers at 5:25 this morning, is two years late and over budget: it’s hard to see the system as a model for future major capital investment in transit in the Austin region. The route between Leander and downtown Austin, passing through northern parts of the city, was supposed to be complete in early 2008, at a cost of $90 million. Instead, its cost eventually escalated to $105 million, not including affiliated parking, bus service, and other amenities. The trains provide slower service than competing buses within the urban core and have incredibly spread-out frequencies, arriving just every 35 minutes during rush hour and not at all other times. The terminal station is separated from the downtown business core and far from the University of Texas.
And I'm not going to waste my time wading through cost estimates that span an entire frigging decade just to explain to you why what was originally planned is not the same as what was finally built.
See post six, Willie, for the $100 million/mile cost as being part of a national range of project costs. As usual, you nit-pick on one situation while ignoring the big picture.
Oh, and the $3.3 million per mile for the Austin project? It got only partial double-track and only enough capacity for 3,000 or so persons a day - after 43K were initially promised to sell the project to the public - and a train that runs slower than express busses, and is far away from key downtown locations. So much for relieving congestion and offering better service.
So you can nit-pick while sane people look at all of the links I have posted as to how much of a boondoggle the Austin project actually is.
And I'm not going to waste my time wading through cost estimates that span an entire frigging decade just to explain to you why what was originally planned is not the same as what was finally built.
Yeah, because doing such reveals what a bait-and-switch the project was. Dishonesty from rail pimps like yourself.
A survey of North American light rail projects shows that costs of most LRT systems range from $15 million per mile to over $100 million per mile...Seattle’s new light rail system is by far the most expensive in the U.S. at $179 million per mile. And Seattle’s Sound Transit estimates two-thirds of its light rail riders come from the existing bus system, and at its peak, light rail is only carrying about 2,688 new transit riders per day.
That is what you are pimping, and what I was talking about - not just Austin, but the entire underperforming/overpriced concept of light rail.
Oh, and Willie, in post 13, I was responding to your discussion of light rail in general - in that post, I never mentioned Austin specifically. So you are just another liberal hack, trying to pretend I said something I did not.
The ridership is actually a bit ahead of schedule --- averaging over 23,000 boardings per weekday already --- and if it continues its rapid growth, then it appears that eventually the system might conceivably pay for itself just out of ticket sales. (However, this system was built with a substantial amount of grants and if you were to add those in as capital costs, well, that would change the framing a bit.)
I think the odds are not bad that it will at least eventually be able to pay for operating costs (ex interest), especially if they bump up the ticket prices just a bit. I myself regard a $2.50 fare from SeaTac to Westlake as a bargain price; the roughly equivalent ride from Hamamatsucho to Haneda Airport on the monorail I believe is about $5.00.
I didn't see any contingency planning with respect to earthquakes. If they aren't paying for insurance against that possibility, then the economics are probably not as favorable.
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