On Fri, 13 Feb 2004 11:46:27 -0800, Koz wrote:
It looks like the costs went up again for this thing...the Light rail
was voted upon at about $ 14,000 per foot and by the numbers given here
it's up to almost $ 19,000 per foot.

So, $100,320,000 a mile.

Building a single expressway lane costs about $20,000,000 a mile today
in the Atlanta metroplex. That's 5 times less than the cost of your rail line.
Peak carriage rates are 10,000 vehicles per lane per mile per hour for the
I-85 corridor. Assuming most vehicles are single occupant, call that 10,000
people per lane per mile per hour. That's a peak cost fraction of $2,000
per person per lane mile per hour.

Now lets contrast that to MARTA, the heavy rapid rail system. Its construction
has been financed by a 1% local sales tax and 90% federal matching funds
since 1969. Very roughly, over that span it has cost about half a billion dollars
a mile of my and *your* tax money. Its daily ridership (subsidized fare) is
about 0.5% of the people in the Atlanta metro area.

During peak hours, it carries a train every 5 minutes. Each train can hold
320 people, so that's a total of 3,840 people per hour per rail line passing
a given point, or given the headways implied, 480 persons per rail mile per
hour. That gives a capital cost of $54,166,666 per person when calculated
on the same basis as the expressway lane.

During off peak hours, it runs one train every 30 minutes, for a total
ridership of 640 people past a given point per hour *if the trains were full*,
they rarely ever are. That works out to such a ridiculously high per
passenger mile cost I won't even include it here.

Now these costs actually must be spread over the life of each of the
systems. But even doing that, the public capital expenditures for the
roadway still comes out much lower than the public capital expenditures
for the rail system per passenger mile.

Of course, if you count the private costs of the cars on the roadways,
things look a lot better for the rail system. That is they do until you realize
that the trains don't go from where most people live to where most
people work. That may have been the plan in 1969, but housing patterns
and work locations have *changed* in 35 years. The diverse roadway
network and the individual directability of personal automobiles has
accomodated that, but the fixed rail lines have not. So people have
to own and use cars anyway.

Of course the real problem is that the transportation plan is not about
getting people "around" the area, it's about getting people into and out
of downtown. Basically, the rail becomes a subsidy of sorts to the
downtown core in order to increase business density. I personally
support a better distribution of job location rather than just moving
people in and out of downtown.

That's called "urban sprawl" by city planners. It *is* the reality anywhere
housing and business construction is unconstrained by geography or
legal strictures. Only when housing and business locations are constrained
by geographic barriers or government fiat to a linear model can the resulting
travel patterns favor fixed rail.

Here in the Atlanta area the rail system is hub and spoke, with the hub
downtown. But most of the places people live, and the places where they
work, are *not downtown*. In other words, you'd have to go downtown and
change trains to go back out of town to get there.

It has been estimated that the average commuter in Atlanta, who now
drives 22 miles each way, would have to ride MARTA (trains and buses)
an average of 62 miles to get within walking distance of his workplace
from his home (or the closest park and ride lot to his home).

I went through the schedules and determined it would take me nearly
two and a half hours to get from the park and ride nearest to my home
to my workplace. I drive it on average in under 30 minutes. It is bad
enough that an hour of my day is spent on my commute, there's no
way I'm going to tolerate 5 hours a day on trains and buses. And
there's no way I'm going to move closer to work either. I like where
I live.

For two wage earner families, which have become the norm, the
alternative of moving closer to work is often an impossible choice,
because one spouse may work in one part of the metro area while
the other works in another. Rapid rail is going to fail as a viable
alternative for at least one of them, probably both. And given the
relatively rapid job changes most people experience, the geometry
changes too frequently to make a 30 year mortgage investment
on the basis of the location of rapid transit lines.

OTOH, lets look at BART, a system designed by the same people
who designed MARTA. Because of the linear geography of the region
it serves, BART actually works fairly well. I don't have even approximate
cost figures for the system, but I do know that daily ridership is much
higher than for MARTA, and that it actually goes in the directions many
people need to go, thanks to an accident of geography which constrains
development to a linear strip between the mountains and the bay.

So mass transit *can* work, in certain circumstances, but it fails to be
practical or cost effective in more cases than not because those special
circumstances are absent.

Gary