Jane Strauss wrote: I keep wonderign how long it will take for politicos and others to figure out that you can't build your way out of congestion. The more traffic lanes
there are, and the less conveneint, reasonably priced, transit, the more folks will drive. Mark Anderson: I have three responses to this: 1) The fact that mass transit advocates have repeated ad nauseum that you can't build your way out of congestion doesn't make it so. I have seen no evidence that this is true. Everyone always brings up Houston and Atlanta as proof. But the fact that those fast-growing cities still have congestion proves nothing -- where would they be if they hadn't built the highways? Much slower-growing I imagine, since traffic would no doubt be in permanent grid-lock. Like where the Twin Cities would be now if it had grown as fast as Atlanta, with the miniscule amount it's put into new roads. 2) What makes you think that the politicos believe that we can build our way out of congestion? If only it were so. How many highway miles have been built in the last 20 years, as the Metro population increased by over 50%? If we had kept up with our infrastructure for those 20 years, rush hour might not have expanded to most of the day in Minneapolis. 3) I'd love to hear a real plan for mass transit, so we can truly see how much it really costs. The real question is, "can we build our way out of congestion with mass transit?" I doubt it. On the MNDOT web site, it says that we drive about 39.7 million miles each day in the Metro. On the Metro Transit web site, is says that there are 19,300 LRT riders each day, and the line is 12 miles long. I'll give the LRT the benefit of the doubt, and assume the average ride is 5/6 of the line, or 10 miles. That means they have 193,000 people miles each day. The Hiawatha line cost $715 million. To seriously dent the car traffic in a growing region like the Twin Cities, they better plan on replacing 1/2 the current car miles, which would be 19.85 million miles. At the same rate as we paid for the Hiawatha line, we'd need to spend 19.85 million/193,000 * $715 million = $73.5 billion. Anybody have that kind of money hiding in their couch cushions? Now I would agree that Hiawatha was a stupid over-priced place to put our first train, so there would be a lot of places with better value to have LRT. But to replace so much auto traffic, we'll need to put the trains in a lot less efficient places than even Hiawatha. Plus of course we'd need to knock down a lot of houses, which is verboten to a lot of mass transit advocates. And usually one needs at least 50% more train miles to replace x miles of auto miles, since the train rarely goes exactly where its customers want to go. For those of you who think that it's the bus routes that must be dramatically expanded to replace all the cars, congratulations! That at least makes more sense than putting tracks all over the place. But I'd sure like to see a plan for that too. I suspect you'd have to spend $billions per year improving service just to entice 1/4 of the folks out of their cars. So does anyone have a plan for reducing congestion? All I know is that traffic has worsened dramatically in the Southwest Metro for the last twenty years, which is where I mostly drive. The population has boomed, but there have been zero new highways added in that area during that time. I think it's logical to see a connection there. I believe new roads would help a lot. But then I don't buy into the dogma of the mass transit people. Mark V Anderson Bancroft REMINDERS: 1. Be civil! Please read the NEW RULES at http://www.e-democracy.org/rules. If you think a member is in violation, contact 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 Civil City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[email protected] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
