Portland’s first light-rail line turns 30 years old this year, which is about the expected lifespan of a rail line. Not by coincidence, the system was highly unreliable last year, being “plagued with delays and disruptions” and having terrible on-time performance.
The line between Portland and Gresham originally cost more than $200 million to build, which in today’s dollars is around twice that. It is likely it will cost roughly that amount of money to restore it to like-new condition.
But Portland has a choice. Instead of sinking a bunch of money into an already-obsolete transit system, it could scrap it and replace it with buses. Before building the rail line, the parallel freeway had HOV lanes; restoring those lanes (or turning them to HOT lanes) would give the buses an uncontested route to fallow. We know that the buses would be faster than the rail, because the rail line was slower than the buses it replaced.
tadalafil 20mg india If you are not aware of proper diet plan, try to get guidance from health experts available online. It choose here generic for levitra improves the functioning of your brain. It basically initiates the proper flow of blood to the penis, causing it to harden. buy levitra on line Damiana is reported to increase sexual response and improve sexual performance. cialis soft tablets
Unfortunately, Portland is likely to neither scrap the Gresham line or restore it to like-new condition. Instead, planners want to build yet another light-rail line that the region won’t be able to afford to maintain. Far from costing $200 million, the proposed Southwest line is expected to cost around $2 billion. While Metro planners are giving lip-service to considering a bus alternative, I don’t think they have ever chosen buses when they could spend a lot more money on rails.
Time for anyone living in Portland to reconsider their choice to live there. Of course, the socialists and hipsters and the socialist hipsters will applaud this massive waste of taxpayer money, but they’ll also be the first to pack up and leave when the ship starts to sink.
Both Minneapolis and Portland have proposed Southwest light rail lines ( LRT ). Both, if built, will cost well over $2 billion in constant 2015 dollars. Both are currently served by buses. Neither project would improve suburb to suburb transit trips, something that the working poor need.
From the article linked by The Antiplanner above is this sentence:
Light rail is appealing to transportation planners in part because it attracts new riders who wouldn’t otherwise take transit.
I have heard this and similar statements repeated many times, yet I have never seen any factual data or study backing them up (stated preference surveys do not count).