Jeff Rosenberg says "Stop. Enough. Los Angeles is not even CLOSE to being one of the most densely populated urbanized areas." about my statement about urbanized area population density.
Sorry, but you need to catch up with the last few decades. See http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/GCTTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=&-ds_name=DEC_2000 for the complete table. "Population Density per square mile of land area - In urbanized area" Los Angeles 7,068.3 New York 5,309.3 Twin Cities 2,671.2 National av 2,670.4 "Housing Units" Los Angeles 2,395.3 New York 2,041.5 Twin Cities 1,071.1 National av 1,073.1 I never gave you Peter O'Toole or Ken Avidor. I am not anti-transit, I am anti-wasteful transit. How can you justify spending $715 million on something that in the wildest dreams of the pushers will increase ridership by 4,800 round trips a day when $440 million would double the number of buses in the system? Nobody has a number for how much of an increase that would buy, but assume that it would be 40%. That's about 46,000 round trips a day. Lrt will give a more wealthy-type ride for a few. It is one route. There are about 200 other routes in the Twin Cities for which it does nothing. Are you contesting what is said about Curitiba, for example? Easy enough to look at other sources for Curitiba. Mr. McGuire says that I was "quick to point out" his lack of transit expertise. I merely agreed with his statement. As far as other areas with more potential, maybe none of these lrt lines should be built. Consider the recently opened Hudson-Bergen (NJ) extension. Over $1 billion for fewer than 1,500 daily round trips. Since the line only recovers 1/3 of its operating expenses from fares, the costs are huge, the benefits minimal. Do you really think that a developer who builds near an lrt stop would have kept the money in its pocket rather than building somewhere else? It's really easy for a developer to tell a reporter that "the lrt stop convinced him to build". Wink, wink. More TIF money or other subsidies come rolling in. After running its first line for ten years, Portland asked its staff to see how much development had been "spurred" by lrt. Since the answer was essentially zero, they adopted a ten year property tax waiver for properties built within 1/2 (1/4?) mile\of a stop to try to get people to build. Gasoliine (or more properly oil) is sold on the open world market. Is Norway or Spain or Britain or France subsidizing oil? Please show us your facts. Visit www.EffectiveTransit.org The Independent Unsubsidized Voice of Citizens for Effective Transit in the Twin Cities (no lrt) * lrt isn't a potato chip, you can stop at just one * Bruce Gaarder Highland Park Saint Paul MN [EMAIL PROTECTED] REMINDERS: 1. Think a member has violated the rules? Email the list manager at [EMAIL PROTECTED] before continuing it on the list. 2. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. For state and national discussions see: http://e-democracy.org/discuss.html For external forums, see: http://e-democracy.org/mninteract ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
