Just a few counters to what Chris Johnson had to say about lrt operating costs.
A useful article by economists at the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, where the lrt carries far more people than Hiawatha hopes to carry. http://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/re/2004/c/pages/light_rail.html Chris criticizes Ms Nompelis for not doing what he calls "the simple math." The example he gave is indeed simple math. He took what the transit industry likes to call "riders" and which are really "boardings." That is, each time someone gets on a train or bus. To use a (possibly) extreme case, if the weekend free ride counts were gathered by couting each person who got on a train at each station, if someone rode the line from the warehouse district to Fort Snelling and got off and on at each station to see the "uniqueness" of each and then rode the return trip in one shot, they would be counted as 12 boardings, and thus "riders." That's assuming 12 stations. Another piece that Chris misunderstands is that each real rider makes a return trip, thus daily ridership is 1/2 of the boardings figure. Then you must take into account the fact that each rider will make more than one round trip on the toy train each year, and may take more than one round trip or multiple stop trip in a day. Thus, 9,500 daily boardings turns into at most 4,750 riders per day and if 2/3 of them do the trip each weekday and the rest are some other frequency (down to once a year), you can do math like the following. 3,500 every day riders x 2 boardings a day x 260 weekdays a year = 1,820,000 boardings a year out of 2,470,000 total (at 9,500 a day.) This leaves 650,000 boardings a year to parcel out amongst all other riders. That's 2,500 boardings a day or 1,250 round trips. If we say that the rest average out to one round trip a month, that would be about 1/21 (the average number of weekdays in a month) or perhaps 60 more riders. So, the number of daily riders could be anywher between 3,560 and 4,750. Multiplying those numbers by the $11,000 annnual figure would give a range from $39,160,000 to $52,250,000. Remember that these cost figures include the annualized capital cost, not just the cost to operate it. You shouldn't get too carried away by the ridership projections for the full line, since they include a fair number of free rides between the two airport terminals as a substitute for the free shuttle currently paid for by airlines and passenger fees. The FTA never estimated the operating costs, as far as I know, that's the job of the EIS prepared by local agencies. Chris makes much of the fact that "federal dollars" paid for half of the train building costs. Gee, I wonder where the feds get those taxes, perhaps Minnesota doesn't pay taxes to the feds? Chris makes reference to the cost of expanding highways and says it's about $50 million a mile (doesn't say whether that's lane-miles or end-to-end miles). Let's take an actual project going on right now, expanding I-494 from Highway 5 to I-394, for $111 million. I haven't tried to figure the miles, but estimate about 5, so that's $22 million a mile. The federal and state gas taxes pay for most costs associated with building and maintaining roads. Chris makes personal attacks on politicians who don't see things the same as Chris does, including making references to possible effects of the Shoreview transmitting towers on those folks, but then goes on to talk about moving out of the same area. 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
