Young talent in Detriot?
LOL! Any “talent” would flee that hell hole.
All Aboard the Detroit Special. High Speed Transit to Unionville Nirvana.
RE: Can light rail keep young talent in Detroit?
Counter question : Is there a good reason to stay ?
If those dummies want to put their money into it, I have no problem. As investors, it would be their money.
BUT I DON’T WANT ONE SINGLE RED CENT OF MY TAXPAYER MONEY GOING DOWN THAT PIT OF A SUCK HOLE.
These people are damned DELUDED. I don’t give a rat’s ass if they waste their money, but if LaHood is going there IT IS GOING TO BE MY DAMNED MONEY AND I AM SICK AND TIRED OF IT.
"I think it's about more than just transportation," he said. "It's about economic development. Cities that I've been in that have a light rail system, you've seen all kinds of businesses pop up around the system itself -- whether it's the young people that are living in that area, whether there's entrepreneurs that come to the area."This be the field of dreams theory of economic development: If you build it, they will come. It's a species of magical thinking peculiar to our own era, and a convenient rationale for stimulus spending without the benefit of stimulating anything.
Well it could group all potential victims in one place ... make it easier for young and talented criminals to make a good living
the thing out to keep on going well past 8 mile just to get clear of the combat zone. What happened to the bulldozer idea?
Why would I want to invest one thin dime into that marxist hellhole?
Willie, you are always out to fleece the tax payer with a subsidized train, why don’t you tell everyone you are a liberal. We all know it anyway.
Can light rail make monkeys fly out of my butt?
It'd be better for the economy to just put those millions in a pile and set them on fire.
Well it will be good to ‘save or create’ police jobs in the city because of it.
Whole new opportunity for murders, rapes, drive-by shootings, prostitution, drug deals - you know just day to day Detroit stuff.
Keeping “young” talent in the Islamic Republic of Detroit!!???
Yeah, good luck with that - first in FINDING any “talent” in Detroit and second in getting them to stay VOLUNTARILY!!!
How much will the security and armed-guards cost?
which will run from Hart Plaza to 8 Mile
uhh.....8 Mile is the DETROIT CITY LIMITS!
This route will service nothing BUT blight and decay.
Almost a half bil?
man! How many miles is that?
“That group says a similar 3.6 mile light rail project in Portland cost $103 million to construct and resulted in roughly $2.5 billion in local development.”
First lets look at the fact that the morecities that build light rail will reslut in dimishing returns. This is economics,not some money fairy waving a wand and crating a 24x multiplier to investment.
Second,location means something. Its not simply light rail that causes investment but light rail with other factors such as labor force,crime statistics,maybe even silly things like no ex mayors in prison.
Third i don’t even need to search around for comparable statistics to know that Portlands return was cherry picked to cast the project in the best possible light.
Lastly we’re talking Detroit. Give me a break.
The Eminem Express.
No thanks. “Light rail” = “flushing hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money into a few well-connected pockets.”
}:-)4
A rail-based solution to a transportation problem is supposed to relieve congestion. To measure success, you measure the amount of congestion relief you get and for how long. Relief is never permanent because of the Ironclad Rule of Transportation: “Transportation infrastructure always creates its own demand.”
In Detroit, there is no congestion to relieve because there is no city anymore. It’s gone. What they are suggesting is to build a rail transit line to stimulate real estate development.
That, by the way, is a valid use of rail transportation. A century ago, the real estate developers who created Los Angeles built the high-speed electric interurban rail lines that connected and serviced the new towns they built. Note that it was entrepreneurs that built the lines that were merged into the Pacific Electric in 1911, not any governmental entity. There being no highway network, the transit operators had a captive audience. As early as 1914, people could take a 70 mph Red Car interurban from Covina into downtown Los Angeles, and that stimulated the development of the City of Southern California as we know it today.
Today, there are a number of cities that have built light rail interurbans to stimulate a special kind of development known as “high-density transit-oriented development”, or “TOD”. You measure the success of these lines by the amount of TOD the lines create, because that generates the passenger load the lines carry.
Unfortunately, the record for TOD-based rail lines is mixed.
Rail lines built to solve transportation woes have a better track record than those built to stimulate real estate development. Detroit, as a dying city, doesn’t have those woes any longer, and rebuilding the region’s old interurban network isn’t going to bring it back from the dead. It's just too late.