A wheel fell off one of the cars on a Boston commuter train Tuesday morning, leading to delays and frustrated commuters. The main injury was to the reputation of Keolis, the French company that has a $2.7 billion contract to operate Boston commuter trains for eight years.
Keolis may not be entirely at fault, however, as the Boston transit system has been neglected for years and has a multi-billion-dollar maintenance backlog. “It’s a really unfortunate situation that we inherited with this incredible dis-investment in the system,” says an MBTA official. “The good news is, we have tripled our expenditure to about $900 million a year.” The article quoting the official doesn’t say how they are spending $900 million a year, but given the context, he must mean maintenance and capital replacement. However, this is hard to verify considering MBTA hasn’t posted an annual budget since 2016.
Whatever they are spending on maintenance, it may be too little, too late. Boston transit ridership has been dropping, down 2 percent in the most recent quarter and 13 percent since 2014 (according to the most recent National Transit Database update). As an MBTA officials observes, “This type of ridership trend is in line with a national trend.”
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Treat represents a group that recently changed its name from Transit for Livable Communities to Move Minnesota. This seems to be a recognition that transit simply isn’t going to offer the utopian solution to urban problems that its advocates have promised for so many years. While the organization is still fairly anti-automobile, its motto, “people first, mode second,” shows promise that at least some former transit advocates are recognizing that the “new normal” does not mean transit.
That means much of the money Boston is spending to improve transit might be wasted. It also means that the Twin Cities’ Southwest light-rail project, which the Federal Transit Administration recently announced would “likely” receive federal matching funds, will be a complete waste. Someone needs to stop the trains before the taxpayers suffer any more hits.
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Jessica Treat with the advocacy group Move Minnesota, formerly Transit for Livable Communities, says many other cities are also experiencing drops in bus ridership. She suspects that ride-share services such as Uber and Lyft may be part of the reason. While the exact cause is uncertain, Treat says it’s a new normal for transit agencies.
” ~Minnesota Public Radio
It’s not just Uber and Lyft. It’s been going on for a hundred years. There isn’t dense , mass employment today in the ways we saw it 100 years ago. Minneapolis isn’t full of factories and mills, each location employing thousands of people. It’s mostly a city of wealthy – the 1% of the 1% by historical standards – people who work from their home office, occasionally traveling to Eden Prairie or Bloomington or whernever the office is.
Add to that cars are getting more reliable. For the cost of 2 monthly buses passes you can buy a car and cut your transportation time in half. And there’s a nice bonus of being able to shop at Target and buy more than 2 bags worth of stuff. YOu just put it i the car. No need to limit your trip to what you can carry 2 blocks to the bus stop.
The Southwest line has the potential to be a stinker on par with the Northstar. Lines that are viewed as sucessful, like the Hiawatha line, are viewed as so because the have ridership pre-built for them on existing bus lines. They replace the bus line and then funnel others into it. Southwest LRT doesn’t appear to be using that model. The ridership looks likely to be abysmal even by the very low bar Metro Transit sets for itself.
$2.7 billion in 8 years is $924,657 per day…$38,527 per hour…$1,605 per minute…$26.76 per second.
Collectivist transit approaches don’t work because poly-distant populations still have to go to the stations in order to use it.
Like many cities, their greatest asset is the street grid, which no matter what direction you take you can go anywhere from anywhere. I’ve said it before the downside to transit it only goes where it’s been routed, a single artery that only transports from A to B and having just one artery is not a healthy organism. Transit as they propose is monolithic, built to a specific size, specific scale, specific timeframe. Where as the automobile or rubber wheeled vehicles in general and the street grid are a cellular organism. Look up Dr. John von Neuman and his study of cellular automata; in comparative biology. A multicellular organism does not thrive on a fixed number of cells, instead it responds to stimuli by producing more cells to accommodate a need. The city is the organism, the cells are cars, personal demand is the stimuli. When the system encounters an effluent, it produces more cells (cars) to accomodate the stimuli (people needing to move) or produces special cells (mutli person vehicles like buses or vans) to accommodate specific circumstance. In nature all stimuli are confronted with the production of cells.