The latest cost estimate for the proposed 4.5-mile Arlington, Virginia streetcar has risen to $358 million, or $80 million per mile. This puts it in the same ballpark as light rail, as current light-rail projects in Dallas, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Sacramento, and Salt Lake City are costing $50 million to $80 million per mile (though the average for all current light-rail projects is nearly $110 million).
A model of the proposed Arlington streetcar. Local taxpayers will be lucky if the rail supporters in the Arlington County Department of Environmental Services will be satisfied playing with the model instead of forcing taxpayers to build the real thing.
What would Arlington get for all this money? Proponents, such as Arlington County manager Barbara Donnellan, still call streetcars “high-capacity transit” even though streetcars have about the lowest capacity of any transit system imaginable. Heck, minivans can probably move about as many people per hour as streetcars.
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Sometimes the Antiplanner imagines that rail supporters privately snicker about how they can sell increasingly ridiculous projects to American politicians. “I sold a light-rail line that costs $100 million per mile and carries fewer people than a bus route.” “That’s nothing; I sold a streetcar line that costs $80 million a mile and carries only a quarter as many people as your light-rail line.”
During a radio show about transportation finance yesterday, the Antiplanner got to use one of my favorite lines. My counterpart, David Goldberg of the pro-rail Transportation for America group, argued that people wanted a choice of transportation options.
“Dirigibles are a choice,” I noted. “Helicopters are a choice; being shot from cannons is a choice. But I don’t think the federal government should spend billions of dollars building cannon emplacements in our cities.” Streetcars are an obsolete technology, and cities shouldn’t build them just because they offer an alternative to buses, which are far less expensive and far more flexible. And as to the claim that developers like streetcars better because they are more permanent than buses: a century ago, more than 800 American cities had streetcars. How many of those cities have them now?
Arlington taxpayers revolted against a planned series of million-dollar bus stops. We can hope they’ll also be smart enough to kill the streetcar.
Isn’t this the same “project” (I hesitate to use that term to describe what is nothing more than a corporate welfare giveout to contractors and a Soviet planner wet-dream) that msetty referenced, complaining that opponents were meanies who were flinging poo and lying and in general being unfair to all the corporate welfare recipients waiting at the trough to build this boondoggle?
I suppose when opponents talk about how expensive the boondoggle is, and how it will not accomplish any of its goals, the y are lying and “flinging poo”, but when the proponents fund astroturf movements, pretend the streetcar will usher in world peace, and buy off the local policitians to ram the boondoggle thru, that is all A-OK. You know, cause we somehow need to start paying off that $50-100 trillion debt the evil automobile owes to the poor, oppressed rail transit groups.
I choose Dirgibles! Yes!
I want to know why no one is proposing to build one of thse 100-mile-an-hour roller-coaster trains for transit?? Stretch one of those things out, put a roof on it, strap in and zoom to work!!
I choose Dirgibles!!!
The proposed Southwest LRT line in the Twin Cities is currently projected to cost in the neighborhood of $54.5 million / route mile. There is no evidence that it will carry more people more efficiently than the current bus system. It does however give Metro Transit a toe-hold in the SW part of town where many local cities have opted to create their own transit city rather than using Metro Transit.
Here in Portland OR if your against wasting billions of tax dollars building light rail lines or trollies just to take bus riders out of busses and put them in rail cars the left tries to paint you as some kind of a backwards nut. Even though all the actual numbers and facts proove that rail transit does none of the things government says it does, none. The left wing dominated government and it’s left wing dominated government schools have done a great job of indoctrinating the childeren into young statists coming out of school and convincing them rail transit is great. Then with the help of the left wing controled media simply not publishing the real rail numbers it’s easy to see why much of the public views anti-rail folks in a negitive light. A lot of folks look at the government’s push for light rail and simply think that if government wants rail transit so bad it must be good. They aren’t told the facts and don’t dig for them so you can’t blame them.
The public is never told the real reason the left want’s to build light rail if it is such a waste of money. And that reason is the only thing light rail construction does well. That one thing is to steer billions and billions of tax payer’s dollars to left wing supporting friends and unions so they will get more campaign contributions in the next election tostay in power. That’s what light ral construction is all about. Transportation is just the ruse.
An NBC documentary discovered the real reason why minorities and white people view riding public buses so differently…..
https://screen.yahoo.com/white-000000112.html
That’s a really nice looking model. I bet just the model cost more than buying a couple of buses.
If the latest cost estimate is $80 million/mile, we really don’t want to know how much the actual final cost will be.
@prk That’s $54.5 million per directional route-mile. In other words, well over $100 million per route-mile.
Thank you MJ. I’d like to believe that I was thinking route miles and my fingers just went and screwed things up with “track miles”. Either way, it’s very expensive especially considering they already own the right-of-way.