There have been plans for at least $9 million of subsidies along the toy train tracks, between the city and met council, for a year or two now. So this proposal doesn't initiate subsidies, though there will probably be more, with or without this proposal being made law. There is a signed agreement in the stacks of paper associated with the lrt that states that only Minneapolis and Hennepin County property taxes will be raised to cover lrt operating costs. Can't remember whether the precise wording is that if property taxes are raised, it will only be those, or something else. It may "draw" from the I-35W area, but the increase over bus ridership will be so small as to not be noticeable. That's why it's a farce that $49 million of federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality program money are financing the line, instead of being used for programs which might further those ends. The optimistic projection of reduced auto trips and pollution reduction amounts to 1/10 %. The council claims that if it doubled the number of buses on the roads, it would increase the number of transit trips by 41%. The projected capital cost for doing that is $440 million, or less than 2/3 of the "official" cost of this project, which might increase transit ridership by 2.2%. The bus option adds 28 times more rides per million spent than the choo-choo. Our area doesn't have the concentrated downtown employment, nor the concentrated residential areas to make rail successful. There have been some recent raves on the list about heavy rail (subways). You hear promises about rail lasting more than fifty years. Vacant promises. To date, Washington (DC) metro has cost $20 billion in 1999 dollars. It faces a ten year period of replacing and refurbishing stations, elevators, tracks, railcars, etc., at an annual cost of $1.1 billion. The system is only 25 years old. What we should be doing to improve mass transit is to invest in a cost- effective manner. Don't build rail, don't build busways, like the proposed riverview corridor in Saint Paul. Put more buses on the street, more often, going more places, when people want to travel. Use mini-buses and subscription commuter van services, allow jitneys. Above all, look at the results that are being seen with what is often called rapid bus, not the same as bus rapid transit. This is being done in LA. Normal buses stop only every 1/2 to 1 mile and have traffic signal preference to get more green lights (like lrt or brt). On two busy lines, the average speed of the trip increased 23-29%, and the number of rides increased 26% in the first 90 days. The number of rides are still going up as more buses are added to reduce crowding. The Wilshire-Whittier corridor now carries more than 86,550 rides a day, more than any lrt line in the country. Don't believe all of the rosy stories about lrt uses exceeding projections. Salt Lake City claims that current weekday use of 19,000 trips greatly exceeds the projected 14,000. The trouble is that the projection was made so that such a claim could be made. The pre-lrt bus ridership on the buses replaced by lrt was above 20,000 a day. Why would you make a projection for what is supposed to be a crowd-pleaser of 30% less than former bus riders? Dishonesty says it all. I don't have it at hand, but I can get the projection that was used to get the funding. After all, that's only a little higher than the projection for the riverview corridor. There's a lot of rail hooey out there. Commuter rail lines that will average 34 mph, "high speed" rail lines across the nation that would beat driving to Chicago by all of 1/2 hour. The real reason that the rail fans are pushing this pipedream of high speed rail is that after 30 years and $20 billion of taxpayer subsidies, Amtrak lost $944 million last year and will lose more this year. Amtrak is under Congressional orders to break even by the end of 2002. It'l never happen, that's why they want $40 billion more in new construction authorized, thinking that it would prevent the shutdown. Bruce Gaarder Highland Park [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - Minnesota E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
