Posted on 05/17/2011 11:42:32 AM PDT by Qbert
A study released earlier this month by the Cascade Policy Institute questioned whether pricey mass transit options in Portland, Oregon are really being used by the public. The city has been a leader in securing funding for various forms of passenger rail and trolley systems. The Obama administration, for example, pledged $745 million in federal gas tax dollars to pay for the construction of a $1.5 billion, 7.3 mile light rail project connecting Portland to Milwaukie. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has singled out the city’s priorities as for praise.
“By adding innovative transit opportunities, Portland has become a model livable community, a city where public transportation brings housing closer to jobs, schools, and essential services,” LaHood wrote in March.
The Cascade Policy Institute wanted to verify the claim that the TriMet transit system was able to move more passengers than a standard bus line. The researchers did so by attending five special events where use of mass transit would make the most sense, including the final playoff game for the Portland Trail Blazers. The events were spread throughout the year to examine the effects of different weather conditions on transit use. City officials have never made a study of this sort.
“This is important because transportation planners at Metro, TriMet, ODOT and other agencies routinely make multi-billion-dollar decisions based on travel surveys, computer models or simply their own personal beliefs about how people should travel,” Cascade President John A. Charles, Jr wrote in his report. “They rarely have any direct knowledge of how people actually travel under specific conditions of time, mode availability, parking pricing and geographic constraints.”
The Cascade team counted a total of 47,666 individual attendees, noting how many headed toward the venue from a light rail station and how many arrived by automobile, bicycle or foot. At best, 21 percent arrived by rail to see the Trail Blazers. At worst, the opening of the Gresham Civic Station saw just 2 percent arrive by rail. On average, rail accounted for just 11 percent of the trips recorded.
“The field research shows that continued use of the phrase ‘high-capacity transit’ by local planners to describe the regional rail program is Orwellian,” Cascade President John A. Charles, Jr. said in a statement. “Light rail is actually a low-capacity system, and the streetcar is simply irrelevant. TriMet’s buses carries two-thirds of all regional transit trips on a daily basis, and that’s the service that should be recognized as high-capacity transit. Unfortunately, bus service is being sacrificed by TriMet in order to build costly new rail lines that carry relatively few people.”
A copy of the report is available in a 1.2mb PDF file at the source link below.
http://www.thenewspaper.com/rlc/docs/2011/cascademyth.pdf
>>Wille has gone to the great roundhouse in cyberspace.<<
Nothing as grandiose as the great roundhouse in cyberspace. He’s over at Liberty Post. org pushing his Agenda 21 programs with B-chan.
Ironically, the Twin Cities wasted about this much on their light rail, instead repairing bridges.
I think we can agree that Sacramento’s light rail was botched.
Way back when Sacramento had a choice between joining BART and connecting to the Bay Area or having their own Toonerville Trolley the shortsighted pols - led by Anne Rudin and Phil Isenberg - chose light rail saying that BART would take jobs out of Sacramento. So, instead, there’s some 20,000 people per day commuting from Sacramento down the I-80 to the Bay Area and the ones who take the Amtrak (CalTrans, really) Capitol train have made it the second money-maker for Amtrak after the Boston-DC corridor.
Oh, Lord, that is CUTE!!! (-:
No surprise here. The whole thing is billions of dollars for a private train set!
No surprise here. The whole thing is billions of dollars for a private train set!
Yeah, if rail was so nonviable, what about Vanderbilt, etc., etc., who made zillions running railroads?
Your point about walking to the train station is especially good.
I'm a skeptic of light rail in general, so Whenever I'm in Portland (or any other city that has a light rail system) I make a point of checking out those trains to see if they're being used.
Unlike, say, Denver or LA, in Portland I have found that the trains are generally carrying a lot of passengers, and there are lots of folks waiting at the stations.
Not saying that these "researchers" are lying ... but I suspect they're massaging their results to fit their pre-conceived notions.
Willie Green still sucks.
Yes.
Public transportation is not about effective timely transportation.
It’s about creating a larger more powerful nanny state.
Doesn’t help that it only runs 4 times in the Morning and 4 Times at night
Railroads did not die a natural death because they were inefficient. The govt. sabotaged them with taxes, regulations, and union favoritism, then the govt. "had to" take them over "to save them." Exactly what the govt. is now doing with the health care industry. First they cripple the private system, then that becomes the pretext for socialism.
The truth is that the government wanted to benefit the airplane companies, for military considerations, by boosting air travel over train travel, out of fear that airline makers couldn’t stay viable in peacetime.
I disagree very much.
Cars and motorcycles represent individual freedom and prosperity.
Public transportation represents the socialist quest to control the populace.
Maybe because 99% of Americans actually use highways.
When is the last time you carried five pieces of plywood with you on the train returning home from the hardware store?
I’m not saying I would carry plywood on the train. I’m saying the train is perfectly capable of carrying plywood to your local hardware store or lumberyard (mine is only about 2 mi. away, vs. 15 mi. to the nearest big box), where you can pick it up. In fact, that’s how things were done until very recently.
And don't kid yourself that our highway system and all the other infrastructure dedicated to cars wasn't heavily subsidized by the govt.
>>>...99% of Americans actually use highways.<<<
Perhaps. But as the population increases and we’re not building a corresponding amount of highways or airports then how are these people supposed to get around?
Some years back when Los Angeles proposed their Metro Rail it got the same kind of opposition as I see here but when I have to go to Los Angeles now I fly into Burbank, walk over to the Metro Rail and 20 minutes later I’m at Union Station. The same trip with a rental car is nearly an hour during the day. The trains in LA any more are packed. And those are people who are not on the road so that frees up highway capacity for people like you.
Ironic that Eisenhower, who pushed the Interstates, later bashed the military-industrial complex.
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