Bruce Gaarder wrote:
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.
Another piece that Chris misunderstands is that each real rider makesBruce contains to portray himself and pontificate as if he were the resident unassailable expert on transportation economics, when in reality hs is no such thing. I've studied transportation, and its economic, environmental and societal issues, for over 25 years as a hobby and I would never claim to be an expert -- although I know more than Bruce.
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.
Contrary to Bruce's insulting statement that I "misunderstand...that each real rider makes a return trip," not only is Bruce's statement about return trips false (simple example, trip to the airport to catch a plane), but even if true, it is completely irrelevant here to the central point I made, which was: the rich Taxpayers League and Phil Krinkie just plain lied to the public when they said each rider (however they*, not I, not Bruce, not Met Council defines it) costs $11,305 a year. The reason being that the number is several orders of magnitude wrong, no matter what estimate you use for ridership, boardings or trips.
Multiplying those numbers by the $11,000 annnual figure would give a rangeKrinkie's news conference called it cost of operations. Cost of operations does not include annualized capital cost in the vast majority of situations, and more so with respect to government operations.
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.
Again, this a perfect example of lying with numbers. Krinkie and Bruce both want us to believe that LRT is ridiculously expensive by comparing a dreamed-up operational cost number which includes capital costs to an even more fanciful number for driving a car, the simple lease price of a vehicle -- ignoring its other TRUE operational costs like insurance, taxes, gasoline and maintenance, AND COMPLETELY IGNORING the capital costs for the highways and parking lots required to utilize that vehicle.
That's like my saying my house is cheaper than your apartment by comparing my utility bills to your rent, plus insurance, plus utilities, while ignoring the purchase price, real estate tax and mortgage costs of my house.
The plain fact is, Bruce, Krinkie, Mady Reiter and the rich Taxpayers League are all trying to convince us that the LRT is too expensive using a number that is almost 1,000 times higher than reality for pure operational costs at ridership levels assumed by the public. So even if the ridership levels are measured differently, as Bruce seems to think is so important, or even if they are 100 times less than accepted estimates, the phony number is still too high by a factor of 10.
You tell me -- is intentionally inflating a number by ten to a thousand times and then making a big deal about it in the press "mass deception" or accurate data? Does Bruce's defense of that number make him the expert he pretends to be, or just another dogmatic anti-LRT ideologue?
The answers are obvious, I think.
Chris makes much of the fact that "federal dollars" paid for half of theMinnesota pays a whole lot less than 1/50 of those taxes, and it's well-known that we get back less revenue proportionately from the feds than other states. The net-net is that getting this money back from the feds only partly compensates for the fact that Minnesotans continually subsidize pork-barrel boondoggles in other states. The LRT is demonstrably a good thing, so getting some federal dollars for it is hardly a bad thing.
train building costs. Gee, I wonder where the feds get those taxes,
perhaps Minnesota doesn't pay taxes to the feds?
But as usual, Bruce misses the whole point anyway: it doesn't matter that Minnesotans pay federal taxes. What matters is the intentional misleading of the public by anti-LRT zealots like Krinkie and Bruce by implying that Joe Sixpack and Jane Knitwith out in suburbia and rural Minnesota are having to pay -- ohmygosh!-- three-quarters of a billion dollars for a "toy train" for lefties in Minneapolis. Sorry, but that's a bald-faced lie. Minnesotans, just like taxpayers across the nation, are having to put up a few dollars towards this project, that's true. But unlike the grossly misleading statements made by Krinkie and the rich Taxpayers League, most of the money being put up by Minnesotans is coming from Hennepin County residents, and most of that is coming from Minneapolis residents.
Moreover, the amount non-Hennepin County Minnesotans are having to pay for the LRT is a fraction of what those same people are having to pay for mega-highway projects, like the new Wakota Bridge, which is going to cost about half a billion dollars by itself.
Chris makes reference to the cost of expanding highways and says it's aboutFor every project Bruce can name where the price is demonstrably less than $50 million a mile, I can find two which cost more. Again, the creative use of numbers to split hairs while missing the central point that highways are grossly expensive and to claim otherwise is deceptive -- a practice the rich Taxpayers League, Krinkie and other LRT opponents continue to use over and over, at the same time the claim LRT proponents are engaging in deception. Not only are they dishonest, but they're hypocrites, too.
$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.
as Chris does, including making references to possible effects of theBruce, unable to make convincing arguments, resorts to trivial attacks on my joke, demonstrating that in addition to not being an expert, he also has no sense of humor.
Shoreview transmitting towers on those folks, but then goes on to talk
about moving out of the same area.
The reality is this: transportation infrastructure is expensive. In most instances, only government can build or pay for it. Like the cost of tools for an occupation, over the long run the specific construction cost of some specific piece of the infrastructure (e.g. a mile of road) is less than the cost of failing to do intelligent, thoughtful planning of where we want growth, development and people, being particularly mindful of the fact that its part of a larger system.
(For example, how many people out there are aware that road development is one of the reasons for exploding numbers of deer across the country? Despite all the animals killed on the road, the cleared shoulders and clear cuts through woods provide far more advantages for feeding and migration then the detriment of collisions and pollution.)
Inflammatory, misleading and down-right false statements by politicians and ideologues don't help us solve the societal problems we face with a growing metro-area population, land use, highway congestion and automobile use (we average 10.1 auto trips per day per household in the metro area). Pretending the problems don't exist only works for a very few people. Most of us get stuck in traffic now and then to remind us of that reality, even if we ignore the other environmental, economic and societal costs.
Failing to look at the big picture, at all options, and to keep the discussion open-minded and cooperative, is to simply fail at solving any part of the problem in any real way. Playing to knee-jerk fears and partisan politics might get you re-elected by your ignorant constituents this year, but it's going to be disastrous for the metro area and hence the state in the long run. Remember, more than half the people in the state live and work in the 7-county area.
Chris Johnson - Fulton
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