Light rail can be built along existing rights of way whether on freeways or at street level
Sometimes, sometimes not. Depends on exactly what your trying to build where.
And if its using the right of way with a road, its not reasonable to assign 100% of the costs of establishing that right of way to the road and 0% to the light rail.
I posted real world examples where the cost of light rail was up to $3617 per inch, or ignoring that since it was an automated system, and just considering regular light rail than as high as $1509.23 per inch. Obviously those are on the high end, but light rail is often not exactly cheap, particularly in terms of passenger miles. Even in the case of the system that your site uses as an example, the St. Louis system, you could give every poor Metro rider a Prius and a bunch of money for fuel and maintence/operating expenses, and still come out ahead, even if you only save the annual operating subsidy (and not the much higher capital cost) by canceling the light rail project. (And that's assuming that all metro riders without cars are poor, presumably not all of them are.)
stlouisfed.org
In other locations light rail costs could be high enough to give "every rider", a Prius
coyoteblog.com
(note I put "every rider" in quotes since its really not every single rider, your only buying (and fueling and maintaining) the number of Prius equal to the average daily ridership, not for anyone who might on rare occasions use the light rail system.
I'm less skeptical of light rail than Coyote is. I figure there are some specific situations where it probably make sense. But generally if the density is high regular "heavy" rail makes better sense, it faster, can serve more people, and doesn't use up road space, or have to deal with traffic issues. If density isn't that high than its unlikely that any form of mass transit is going to be very cost effective. |
