Light Rail Isn't the Track to the Future

Express-News ^ | February 9, 2009 | Randal O'Toole

[george76]

As America's largest city without rail transit, some people want San Antonio to “keep up” by building light rail. You need to know only one thing: Light rail is really expensive.

I mean, really, really expensive. The average mile of light-rail line costs two to five times as much as an urban freeway lane-mile. Yet in 2007 the average light-rail line carried less than one-seventh as many people as the average freeway lane-mile in cities with light rail.

Do the math: Light rail costs 14 to 35 times as much to move people as highways.

The Government Accountability Office found that bus-rapid transit—frequent buses with limited stops—provided faster, better service at 2 percent of the capital cost and lower operating costs than light rail.

If light rail is so expensive, why are cities building it? Starting in the 1970s, Congress offered cities hundreds of millions of dollars for transit capital improvements. If they bought buses, they wouldn't have enough money to operate those buses.

So cities like Portland and Sacramento decided to build light rail—because it was expensive. Only light rail would use up all the millions of federal dollars. Other cities that wanted their share of federal pork soon began planning light rail, too.

How successful is light rail? In 1980, before Portland began building light rail, 9.8 percent of the region's commuters took transit to work. Today, it is 7.6 percent.

Light rail is a giant hoax that makes rail contractors rich and taxpayers poor. San Antonio should be proud to be America's largest city that hasn't fallen for this hoax.

[Carry_Okie]

I have some experience in heavy rail, including controls and signalling. I do not understand why light rail is so much more expensive than a freeway, especially when you account for new technologies like concrete ties and in-field replacement and rail grinding. There must be something else at work here.

A lot of light rail has elevated lines or must buy land in areas with very expensive real estate. Then there is running high power electrical controls and power distribution.

[Reeses]

Also rail systems do not fail gracefully making them a poor systems design choice for time-sensitive cargo. Multi-lane roads with 20,000 automobiles form a highly parallel, fault tolerant design. It’s possible to gain the capacity and fuel efficiency of trains by having private automobiles hook up into virtual trains, however leftists will reject this because it doesn’t move them towards their real goal: making everyone equal so that no one feels envious. Leftists believe an envy free world is a precondition for happiness.

[hinckley buzzard]

And in Portland, the lunatics actually reduce road miles for cars by converting space for bikes

An old friend of mine has been a Portland "planner" for many years. Talking with him some years back, he made it unabashedly clear that the intention of the city's planning office was to control people. He mentioned exactly what you descibe as an example of how they would see to it that people lived and moved when where and how they (the city) wanted them to live and move. Nothing more nor less.

[hinckley buzzard]

Chicago St Louis Baltimore and Cleveland all have lightrail from main airport to downtown. I have used all three. No doubt there are others I am unfamiliar with.

[hinckley buzzard]

Should say "all four". Geez

[Pylon]

I use the light rail San Diego Trolley regularly to get to downtown, Petco Park, Old Town here in San Diego. I have read a few times that it was one of the first new trolley systems in the country when it was first constructed in the 80’s and has been the most successful. They are planning a new extension now that will link you from central San Diego to the La Jolla/UTC/UCSD area. $5 for a day pass that is good on the trolley and bus is hard to beat as long as you know where you are going and it doesn’t involve many transfers.

[sinanju]

As I see it, electric trolleys made sense in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century era before internal-combustion technology came into it’s own. But trolleys could not compete with buses.

And that’s the long and the short of it.

[x]

As I see it, electric trolleys made sense in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century era before internal-combustion technology came into its own. But trolleys could not compete with buses.

It depends on population densities. In a place like Manhattan, private car ownership makes less sense than subways or even trolleys.

[PAR35]

Light rail is nothing more than a glorified trolly, very slow.

If you consider 65 mph slow. It's fun to watch the cars caught in the bumper - to - bumper traffic on the freeway as you go whizzing past.

[Richard Axtell]

Light Rail is kind of like and urban amusement part ride or a ride at EPCOT Center or the Monorail at Disneyland. They are fun for the “rail hobbyists” that like to ride them,... less fun for the taxpayers who have to pay for them. Think about it folks... rail only works in urban areas and regions that grew up around rail in the first place. You cannot cost effectively superimpose a good rail system on a non-rail town, like Phoenix or San Antonio. This is all just an expensive model train layout, scaled up. My advice... keep it to HO scale in your basement, and ride the bus.

[Wicket]

I had a rather frustrating conversation with a couple of conservative friends about Portland’s light rail, which has been forced on taxpayers by our we know better than you government.

I talked about cost per mile, that bus ridership has gone down, that traffic can work better if we just add more lanes, but their whole thing was - think how bad traffic would be if we didn’t have light rail . . .

[Attention Surplus Disorder]

“Mostly true, though in San Francisco you can take BART straight to SFO.”

Rumor has it that taxicab companies heavily lobby cities to prevent good connections dirctly from mass transit to airports. I don’t know if that’s true or not.

The BART connection to SFO is FANTASTIC. I seriously doubt I’ll ever get to SFO any other way. The only bad thing is, if your return flight to SFO gets cancelled/rerouted/rescheduled, and you have to take a different flight into SFO and end up there super late at night, BART closes at 1 am or 2 am and then you’re stuck. Until morning. Happened to me on a flight from London and I slept for 6+ hours in the airport. Sucked.

[Fred Hayek]

It’s because it’s a government project. First the consultants milk it to death with endless studies, going in circles and nothing to show for it. No route plans, just a lot of bean-counter speak made up of mindless drivel. In the end only a dinky system is built, so there are no economies of scale.
Rail transit, the way it is currently implemented, is nothing more than a make work program for clueless consultants. Proof that government does not want to solve the problems they claim they will solve, just spend our money and perpetuate the problem.

[Moose4]

They can’t even get Triangle Transit to put in enough stops in RTP or keep a transfer station out here, how are people supposed to get to their jobs in the sprawl of RTP once they get off the train? TTA lost their transfer station over near the Radisson and dropped several shuttle stops recently, including my workplace.

I’m fortunate in that I can ride a shuttle van provided by our apartment complex, due to the large number of Indian tech workers we’ve got living there. Free (well, included in the rent), convenient, easy, and saves the $2.65/gallon gas for my wife and our daughter.

}:-)4