The folly of Light Rail
One of the favorite hobby-horses of the liberals is public transportation.
Lately, Light Rail has been getting a big push as the next big thing since sliced bread. Portland, Oregon got all kitted out starting in the 1980's and is sort of a poster child for Light Rail what with planners from other cities visiting to see just how much of a 'good thing' it is.
It is a pity that they don't scratch the surface and look at some of the pesky statistics -- inconvenient truths indeed!
From
Moonbattery:
Emulating Portland's Mistakes
One distinguishing feature of liberals is that instead of learning from other's mistakes, they emulate them. The most obvious example is socialism, which has been tried many times with invariably disastrous consequences, but which never goes out of style among moonbats. A more specific example is light rail transit. Tom Barrett, the Mayor of Milwaukee, actually traveled to Portland, Oregon recently so as to study that city's financially disastrous light rail system, the better to impose a similar debacle on his own town.
Van Helsing continues with a heads up from someone who actually lives in Portland:
Randal O'Toole has spent most of his life in Portland. As he reports:
Portland's public transit has done nothing to relieve the region's growing congestion; its high cost has sparked a taxpayer revolt; the developments along the rail lines were themselves heavily subsidized; and those subsidies led a crafty cabal of ex-politicians and developers to milk the system for their own gain.
Portland residents have repeatedly voted against the light rail boondoggle, but bureaucrats always find a way to expropriate the cash they covet. Their friends are getting rich on rail construction contracts and developer subsidies:
Meanwhile, budgets for schools, fire, police, and public health have all been cut, as property taxes that would normally go to those services have been diverted to subsidies for rail transit and high-density developments.
Since Portland began building rail transit in the 1980s, public transit's share of commuter traffic has actually declined from 9.8% to 7.6%, because bus service has been reduced to help pay for the poky and largely useless light rail.
Supposedly the light rail has spurred high-density development. This development was actually impelled by over $1.5 billion in handouts at taxpayers' expense. The term for perverting the market by coercively financing projects that only bureaucrats want is socialism.
Seattle recently got out from underneath a monorail project that hoovered over
$120 million from King County taxpayers wallets with zero to show for it. King County is also building a light rail system to connect downtown to the airport -- a possibly good idea but who leaves for a flight directly from work? Getting from one's home to the downtown terminal takes longer via public transportation than getting from one's home directly to the airport using one of the cheap Shuttle Express busses.
I tried public transportation when I lived in Seattle and gave it a good eight or nine months before I threw in the towel and started driving again. I lived about two blocks from a bus stop that went directly to a stop three blocks from my work. Perfect. There was an express bus that left in the mornings and evenings that suited my schedule. My problem was that even though this was the express bus, with limited stops and fast service, it still took me 90 minutes to travel the route. That was three hours/day spent riding a bus.
Driving the same route took about twenty minutes so I could save two hours per day. This was so much worth the seven dollars it cost me for daily parking.
Public transportation is a great idea but it needs to be small and nimble. Smaller busses (forty riders), electric or diesel/hybrid and just have a gazillion of them out there. Much cheaper than light rail and infinitely more flexible.
Posted by DaveH at August 18, 2007 9:11 PM