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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (452571)	1/30/2009 6:45:36 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575980

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. All the light rail lines built in LA, San Diego, Portland and Seattle were built on right of ways.....either freeways or street level. The only one that might not [that I know of] is MARTA in Atlanta. 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.) Except if you did give everyone a Prius, then you would have to build more freeways which makes it a ridiculous alternative. With light rail, capacity can be increased significantly by simply adding more cars. With freeways, you have to build more lanes where feasible, and new freeways where not. You've driven the Beltway......you know exactly what I am talking about in terms of capacity limitations and congestion.