On Friday, July 2, 2004, at 08:00 AM, Bruce Gaarder wrote:
Since I don't have "Republican allies" and not all lrt opponents are Republican, I don't listen to all kinds of interviews with Republicans or Democrats or ..., I don't know what words Krinkie used.
But you're pretty much repeating the Republican party line, trains=bad, freeways=good.
Please call Leslie Davis of EarthProtector, who studied the lrt eis documents, made many comments on them to the FTA, for the opinion of someone who is definitely not a Republican.
Nor a Democrat.
Since there are a couple of messages missing from the web archive, I don't know all of what was said in response to what I posted. Was there any indication that someone read the article by the Federal Reserve economists?
Most of us are not so obsessed with train hating to search for Fed Reserve arguments against trains.
I stand by my comment that most rides turn into round trips. If a person
takes the lrt to the airport, they probably will take it back when
they return. An air traveller coming in and taking the train in will
most likely take the train to leave. This evens out overa few days.
A big reason advanced for building the train was commuting. How many
work commuters don't go back home at night or make the same trip every day?
This metro area is known for it's multi stop commutes, where the typical commuter might take route 55 to work, hop a bus down the mall and back to lunch, then after work take an express bus to Burnsville Transit Center to meet their spouse who works in Northfield and has the car and go grocery shopping before heading home. BTW, route 55 is the Hiawatha LRT line, and for purposes of fares and transfers it's just another Metro Transit route.
Let's see, if the 9,000 "riders" don't mostly make round
trips, then after a year, everyone in the 7 county area will have ridden
the train once, using the transit industry standard assumption that
weekend ridership will be about the same as that on one weekday. Wonder
how they get home?
Please see above.
I was talking about the same costs as the economists. Total annualized
costs, and I would compare that to the total annualized costs of owning and
operating a car.
If we we're still deciding whether to build the system that might be true. But we've already bought it and letting it sit there and rust would be a waste of the entire investment. And even with steel prices up you wouldn't get much scrapping the Hiawatha line. Like the Postal Service, Amtrak, and the City of Minneapolis the Hiawatha Line is a long term public investment and would probably cost more to shut down than to keep running.
I believe that the most recent ISTEA transportation authorization said that each state should receive at least 95% of its gas tax money back for projects.
Which will be disastrous for rural states with hundred of miles of Interstate and National Highway System routes to maintain and upgrade on a small population base.
Of course, it would be even better to convert the federal gas tax to an additional state gas tax (zero change in total) and let the state decide how to spend its own money without the feds taking a slice and maybe giving us back the rest.
Which would be the death of said Interstate and National Highway Systems- How will Minneapolis businesses ship to out of state markets if Wisconsin decides to abandon I-94 and North Dakota does the same?
Since the Wakota bridge project was moentioned by someone, please find the total length of ALL roads being rebuilt and report that. Also report the number of vehicles and passengers that use the bridge and pass under it on the roads being rebuilt each day. I believe, without checking, that that number would be well over 150,000 passengers a day. And remember that the bridge is heavily used by trucks for freight, which the Hiawatha line is not. In other words, multiple purpose.
Bruce, you seem to be losing track of just what you're counting here.... 150,000 people means maybe 100,000 passenger carrying vehicles/day and that's hard to believe for a 1950s vintage 4 lane freeway. If your talking about 150,000 passengers a day for the whole metro area or state, your number is low. Keep in mind that 150.000 is the number of people working downtown every day, and many of them live in or near downtown and walk, bike, or bus to work. So far less than 150,000 people are clogging over 20 lanes of 3 interstate highways to get to work downtown each day. And you're trying to tell me that 4 lanes of the Waucota bridge is handling 150,000 people a day?
I believe that you can find a number of references to what the range of costs per mile for roads and trains is. It is wide.
But while even articulated buses are limited to 60 odd feet in length and trucks are limited to a single 53 foot long trailer, the practical limit on train length is about 10,000 feet. The bigger vehicle will usually provide the lowest cost per passenger or ton, so there's no way a private car, never mind bus or truck, can beat a train for efficient transportation.
Adding a lane
within existing right of way can be relatively inexpensive. But I don't
have time to argue about that and it's not a Mpls list issue.
Assuming the additional lane was designed for to start with. Even then by the time the additional lanes get added on the design is obsolete and the rest of the lanes need rebuilding anyways. An excellent example is WI-29 from Chippewa Falls to Abbottsford- built as an expressway with only 2 lanes completed but 4 planned in the 70s, by the time the other 2 lanes were added in the 90s pretty much the whole thing had to be to be built from scratch, including many bridges and interchanges.
The megamall stop was moved across 24th Avenue at a cost of $39.9 million,
which was supposed to buy buses (100-200 of them, depending on size).
Metro Transit says we didn't need them because of route cuts.
Those buses would have lasted Metro Transit only 10 years while the light rail line will have a life of at least 100.
I could go on to point out cities that lost total transit ridership after adding trains, but I won't.
They didn't lose ridership, some of it just shifted to another form of transit- rail.
While more than half of the people in the state live and work in the 7 county area, the train will either not be used by them or only occasionally as entertainment transportation, after they drive to it.
"the train"? Bruce, they'll be more than one. In fact, Amtrak already serves the northwest and southeast metro area as well as our core cities. And if you're commuting to the next major metropolis leave you car and let METRA take you everywhere in Chicagoland.
Research has shown that if you double the number of buses per hour, you will get an additional 50% in ridership. I could refer you to a transit consultant who often works on rail projects, and is proud of at least some of them, who will tell you that he believes that the main criteria in transit projects is getting the most increase in ridership without overcrowding, etc. for the least public money.
And I suspect you get similar results if you double the number of big busses that run on rails, AKA light rail or commuter rail.
What is needed is more frequent bus transit
Agreed, but when you've got busses running on 7 minute headways like some Metro Transit routes and still full you need something bigger and it's going to have to run on rails. Now consider that the Hiawatha Line will be running on the same 7 minute headway and each pair of cars is the equivalent of 3 or 4 busses. You'd need busses on 2 minute headways to replace the Hiawatha Line- can you imagine the congestion on Hiawatha Avenue?
and more/expanded roads
Where are you going to put them? Even at the fringes of the metro area land along major highways is going for a million dollars an acre and up, and 10 million an acre is not unheard of in the closer in suburbs. Any expansion will thusly have to be within the existing right of way, and they're isn't much right of way left.
that carry people around the region without going through the center cities and causing traffic and other problems.
Sounds like what the Interstate System should have been- regional networks between major cities rather than long cross country routes (rail can serve those long hauls better) and ring roads around major cities. The idea of running Interstates through the cities was hotly debated,and unfortunately the wrong decision was made.
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, I sometimes wonder if some of you train haters had a traumatic experience with a streetcar early in life and still haven't recovered from it.
near North Side Station in Hawthorne,
Dyna Sluyter
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