A new plan calls for building almost 400 miles of new rail lines — mostly subways — in Los Angeles. A citizens’ group called Get LA Moving (GLAM) has prepared a detailed rail map and financial plan.
Click on the map to download a larger version in PDF format.
GLAM uses the following brilliant logic:
- All world-class cities have rail transit.
- Curitiba, which is not a world-class city, uses bus-rapid transit.
- If L.A. wants to be a world-class city, it had better give up on bus-rapid transit and go back to building rail.
To be fair, that is not the only logic they use. They also say things like, “I drive around in a minivan, but I long for the day when someone will build me a train to ride instead.”
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Okay, that’s not an exact quote. But it pretty accurately expresses the thought behind the plan.
Won’t it be hugely expensive to build 400 miles of rail lines? Yes, they estimate $31 to $38 billion. That’s presuming an average cost of $100 to $125 million a mile for subways. They argue that new technology allows subway construction for a fraction of the amount that American cities typically spend.
I agree that cities spend too much on rail transit, but GLAM’s numbers are still pretty optimistic. New York City is spending $2 billion a mile for a new subway in Manhattan. San Jose says it will cost well over $500 million a mile for a 4-mile BART subway. I suspect a 75 to 95 percent reduction in costs is just a bit much. A more realistic bare-bones cost is probably more like $100 billion.
You know what they say: “A billion here, and billion there, and pretty soon . . .” (Often attributed to Everett Dirksen, but he denied he ever said it.) Most people really don’t understand just how much a billion dollars is, so they have no qualms proposing multi-billion dollar plans.
Remember, Los Angeles is the city that was building rail transit under a plan written with the help of those powerful rail advocates, Wendell Cox and Tom Rubin. But the initally projected costs turned out to be far too low, so the transit agency, MTA, had to cut back on bus service to continue construction. This led to the famous Bus Riders’ Union lawsuit, which MTA settled by agreeing to restore bus service. To cover the costs, MTA halted plans to contruct many of the proposed rail lines.
There are several reasons why transport under a city costs so much – generally three times more than elevated transport. The biggest reason is all the stuff under a city already. There are building basements and foundatiions, sewer and other utility lines, a lot of water in the soil, buildings above that must be supported. The stations need ventilation systems, elevators, escalators, turnstiles, gates, lighting, security systems, attendants, etc.
Elevated systems need some of the same things but not as much and there are ways to make them much cheaper by using small demand-response automated vehicles instead of big fixed-schedule vehicles with drivers.
Some people think small demand-response automated vehicles are too Jetsons-like, futuristic, pie-in-the-sky, too-good-to-be-true, gadgetbahnen. They are wrong. They forget that millions of people ride them everyday. Of course I am writing about elevators, which use relatively small cabins and have been automated for decades. The horizontal version of small, automated, demand-response vehicles with off-line stops is called personal rapid transit or personal automated transport.
A better city for underground transport is New Orleans. Build the subway tubes at ground level; then bury the city with fill dirt dredged from Lake Pontchartrain until it has a level above expected future sea levels and storm surges.
We already have demand response vehicles – private cars. Why build a whole new system, when we can increase the capacity of the system we have, probably at less cost?
Thanks
JK
Jim, thanks for being a good straight man and asking a question which gives me another opportunity to explain how we can do better with newer technology than what we have now.
Your question is similar to what people were asking a hundred years ago, “Why do we need to pave a lot of roads for horseless carriages when we are doing fine with railroads and carriages with horses?”
The answer is that our present system of roads has a number of problems which can be reduced or eliminated with an additional grade-separated system to add capacity. In most areas of society we have improved productivity by using automation. Grade-separated exclusive guideways are easier to automate. Cars, buses, trucks and trains bump into things and cause injury and damage. This is an expense which can mostly be eliminated with an automated, elevated system.
Adding capacity to our present system of roads and cars is also quite expensive for real estate in most metro areas both in freeways, arterial streets and the seven or eight parking spaces for each car.
Grade separation for heavy vehicles such as trucks is expensive for the construction and maintenence of the overpasses and bridges. A bridge for small vehicles is much cheaper. Limited access roads are barriers for wildlife, bicyclists and pedestrians and make other vehicles have to go farther to cross them.
It is easier to use clean electric vehicles on a guideway than battery-powered cars on a road because of the cost of the batteries – a small 100 mph guideway vehicle will cost less than a 100 mph battery-powered road vehicle, and the guideway vehicle will be able to legally go 100 mph in metro areas.
So,a new elevated system of small demand-response automated vehicles would take many people where and when they want to go quicker, cheaper, safer and more reliably than their present transport choices, including cars, which many people can’t drive or afford to buy.