Cheaper maybe. But where would those stretch limos run? On the same gridlocked highways that are the problem! The whole idea of rail is to have a segregated guideway that does not suffer interference from traffic, but moves large quantities of people quickly. The footprint of a rail line is a mere fraction of an urban freeway. In the city, where space is very expensive and at a premium, it is intuitively obviously that the number of people moved per square foot occupied is much higher for a rail line than for an urban freeway. After all, an urban freeway transition ramp is nothing more than a way of making a left turn at 60 mph, and it uses a massive amount space. Forget the silly arguments about how we are hurting Mother Earth. Put this in the context of facilitating commerce and making the most effective use of a scarce resource: Urban space.
The root word of “conservative” is the verb “to conserve”. Too many conservatives think that profligacy is as American as apple pie, and anyone who uses an expression like “scarce resources” just has to be a socialist. Urban space does not grow on trees! An urban environment only works with high-density workplaces, high-density living and high-density transportation. This has been known for a century.
Los Angeles tried to build a large regional city on the basis of the automobile and found itself with a huge freeway system that gridlocked most of the time. Building more freeways only bought temporary relief. Eventually, Los Angeles bit the bullet and built subways, light rail lines and a huge commuter rail network. The terrible irony is that it spent tens of billions of tax dollars rebuilding a privately owned network that it had torn out 50-70 years earlier when it thought that the automobile was the wave of the future. The lesson was hard and expensive.
Vancouver (BC) and Philadelphia wised up earlier than most. They shut down urban freeway building before it could really get rolling and put their money in building or revitalizing public transportation. You don’t need a car to live or work in Vancouver.
you say: "it is unreasonable to expect to drive your SOV on an empty urban freeway at the height of the rush hour at 70 mph. " Why not?
You’re joking, right?
Why build such a low standard into the system? can we at least beat 15mph that many of these LRT systems average?
You have a point. Light rail is being sold as a panacea. Ever since San Diego had a huge hit with its line in 1981, the concept has become very trendy. This is dangerous. Sometimes it’s just the wrong way to go. You can get much more speed and throughput with heavy rail (subways or elevateds), but it’s much more expensive, especially when you’re building in an area that is already heavily built up.
When you use tax dollars to build something and need direct democracy to build it, you often have to shade the truth, i.e. lie through your teeth, about the eventual cost to get the necessary votes. I witnessed this here in Seattle. A 1994 vote on building a regional heavy rail system failed when the voters got sticker shock. A scaled down 1996 version using the trendy expression “light rail” won, but it’s the wrong solution. We really need a heavy rail system like Chicago’s.
You can beat light rail’s carrying capacity easily, but the cost will frighten off the voters.
Dont social engineer the people around the transport system.
When the Madison Administration got the federal government into the business of building roads and canals for the sake of “internal improvements”, that was social engineering.
When the Lincoln Administration subsidized the building of railroads with government land grants, that was social engineering. It was also corporate welfare.
When the Roosevelt Administration started up the federal highway program to put people back to work, that was social engineering. And it was popular welfare.
When the Eisenhower Administration enacted the program to build the interstate highways, that was social engineering. Granted, Ike didn’t see it that way when he was in office, but by the time of his death in 1969 he understood clearly what he had wrought.
The world we live in – with suburban sprawl, urban and suburban freeways, congestion and gridlock, a world in which you absolutely need a car to get around – is the result of government social engineering after World War II intended to revive a housing market that had swooned 95% during the Great Depression.
About 30 years ago we began to understand that the urban freeway violated the principle of high-density living and working. The Century Freeway was the last urban freeway built in America. Since then the emphasis has been on high-density mass transportation to make the cities livable again.
build something people will use.
People will use a line if the line offers a faster commute or a less stressful commute.
Is the metro mass transit system self-funded? OF COURSE NOT - it is heavily subsidized by in our local community sales taxes, then plenty of federal funding as well. As for highway funding, you assert but didnt lay out the numbers for subsidies of highway. Good description of categories, but waht are the dollars in each bucket? I know for a fact that plenty of gasoline tax revenue is diverted from highways. Bill Clinton in 1993 for one was using gas tax revenue for mass transit. IN other cases, the gas taxes go into general funds. I am all for making highways self-funding via gas taxes etc. but let's get real: Whatever the finding per passenger mile of roads, the subsidy if any is a pittance compared to cost/passenger mile of car/road transport.
At the state level, most states have either constitutional or statutory restrictions that forbid the use of gas tax money for anything but roads. There are exceptions, but they are few. Those who say that they “know for a fact” that this money is going for education, welfare or other general fund items are simply wrong.
At the federal level, Amtrak cracked the gas tax restrictions in 1974, but the money diverted to Amtrak is miniscule. Clinton’s gambit went nowhere. I suggest you drop in at Amazon and buy Getting There by Stephen Goddard. It is the definitive book on how we got where we are today.
A day will come when drivers truly pay for highways via use taxes, but you won’t like it when it arrives.
Some day every car will have a transponder in it. When you leave your driveway to drive on a locally maintained road, the counter will start. When you turn onto a county road, the local counter will stop, and the county counter will start. When you turn onto a numbered state highway, that counter will start. When you enter a limited access highway, you will pay a surcharge. If you drive during primary commuting hours, you will pay a congestion surcharge.
In the interest of fairness, gas taxes will be abolished, as will other car-related taxes. At the end of the month, you will get a bill for your monthly usage fee broken into local, county, state and surcharged categories. Expect to pay about $300 a month to operate that motor vehicle. After a while, you’ll grit your teeth and buy that bus pass for $35 a month.
Once trucks with transponders get billed for the true damage they do to highways, long distance trucking will no longer be economically viable, and the railroads will haul trucks over long distances.
These are the kinds of things that happen when you eliminate subsidies. Established lifestyles change.
"Portland has decided to become a European-style city, concentrating its people in urban villages," You miss a BIG POINT: What if people living in the town/city dont want to live that way???
When you choose to live in a city, you give up certain rights you would have if you lived in a rural area where your next door neighbor was 5 miles away. That’s just how the world works. If you want to see a city designed for rugged individualism, check out Los Angeles. It didn’t work, and they have finally seen the light.
Concerning your quote about Smart Growth: The idea behind Smart Growth is get people out of cars and onto public transportation. Congestion relief will only happen when people do that, and even then it won’t change all that much. All successful cities are congested. It’s not about eliminating congestion, but controlling it.
The problem in Portland is that many people just haven’t gotten it yet. Their city is densifying – the eventual destiny of all successful cities – and people still want to drive their SOV’s as though the city was still one large suburb in search of a core. As light rail expands, people will eventually discover that public transportation is faster and less stressful than taking the car.
Concerning the profitability argument
Before the Great Depression, private industry ran urban transit companies. Beside buses, you had subways, els, trolleys and even high-speed electric rail interurbans. You had steam or electric commuter rail lines linking cities and suburbs. Take a look at Metro-North, the old New Haven Railroad, and see how cities in New York and Connecticut had truly high-speed commuter rail service into New York City over a century ago.
Once we had government-built and -subsidized highways, the private rail systems all began to lose money. When the Wagner Act and rampant unionization raised the labor costs through the roof, cities bought these systems because there was a social need for public transportation, but it was no longer profitable. Unions learned how to milk these transportation authorities of their tax money because union members were voters. Think of it as a hostage situation.
Today, it is flatly impossible for an operator to make a profit running public transportation. For rail systems, it’s the property owners near the stations who rake it in.
If you want to turn this over to the private sector and get government out of the rail-building and -subsidizing business, you have to break the unions and repeal the minimum wage. Why? Because unions and the minimum wage are both forms of government subsidy artificially driving up the cost of operating a transit system.
But then again, would you want a train driver, in whose hands your life lies, to be some guy only making 75 cents an hour?