Early tests reveal that the Twin Cities’ new light-rail cars require 67 minutes to go the 11 miles from downtown Minneapolis to downtown St. Paul for an average speed of 10 miles per hour. Metro Transit managers say they expect to get the time down before the line opens for service on June 14, but the 39 minutes promised on the agency’s web site seems unattainable considering they have added three stops since the line was originally planned. Even 39 minutes is less than 17 mph, hardly a breathtaking speed.
Buses currently do the same trip in a mere 26 minutes. Some people are mildly outraged that the region has spent $100 million per mile to get slower service. Too bad they weren’t outraged when the line was being planned.
Officials say that most people won’t ride the entire distance, and what really counts “is that these new Green Line passengers have a very high quality and reliable ride.” For that, they needed to spend a billion dollars.
Speaking of reliability, last week Portland’s TriMet tweeted an apology to passengers for three light-rail failures and delays in as many days. One of the delays was when Portland temperatures exceeded 90 degrees and TriMet had to slow all trains to avoid damage to the wires (so much for being an “all-weather” transportation mode). The other delays were due to equipment failures, no doubt partly because TriMet is failing to meet its maintenance schedules.
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Given these kinds of problems, conservative Seattle writer Georgi Boorman wonders why the left loves transit so much. “If progressives were really bent on providing as many people as possible with cheap and convenient transportation, they wouldn’t devote such a singular focus on finding new ways to subsidize mass transit,” Boorman argues. Her answer is that “The left believes that government control is the agent of progress, and centralization is key to government control.”
Such centralization includes “gathering the population into a smaller and smaller area, making government oversight easier” as well as creating “a uniformity of experience: Wake up, walk to the train station, board the train, arrive at work, walk back to the train station after work, ride the train home.”
Is Boorman correct? The Antiplanner hesitates to ascribe motives to people who have different political views, but Boorman’s question is a legitimate one. Transit costs an average of nearly four times as much as driving, travels at about half the average speeds, and reaches a limited set of destinations. If left-wing support for transit is not a part of an agenda of social control, then why do they so ardently favor transit over cars which are cheaper, faster, and can go almost anywhere?
It’s certainly not for the reasons they often proclaim in public: a desire to reduce traffic congestion and save energy. As Denver Post editorial writer Vincent Carroll observes, the density-and-transit agenda is only going to make congestion worse. The Antiplanner would add that this agenda will only save energy by reducing the quality of life (including the size of homes and personal mobility) of the urbanites forced to suffer under such plans. American urban residents should say “No!” to such plans.
msetty said that it’s a good project, that’s good enough for me!
AntiPlanner: “It’s certainly not for the reasons they often proclaim in public: a desire to reduce traffic congestion and save energy.”
JK: Oh, but that is almost certainly the real reason – the rail advocates are too numerically, logically and data illiterate to realize that they have been lied to by the light rail profiteering hucksters.
thanks
JK
“While buses and other transit modes may seem to be viable options, one need only to experience the convenience, speed and connectivity of light-rail transit to know that the other modes are not equivalent” ~Rocky Mountain News editorial, 2006, on why Fastracks _needs_ to be LRT instead of buses.
It’s sad to see this sort of thing happening. We spend billions just to move folks equally as slowly on a train as they could’ve travelled on a bus. LRT when implemented is not very efficient.
What is most appalling on about the current routing isn’t the time but how much more expensive it was to build than promised. Like far too many large public projects, much of the cost increases is disguised by delivering something that is an inferior product. In this case a glaring example is their abandoning of the originally promised tunnel at the University of Minnesota.
University Avenue wasn’t a pedestrians dream before this project. But now it’s a mess for both pedestrians and autos. I have a feeling in 20 years people will be talking about ripping this all up and doing things over. This does nothing to make things more walkable nor liveable.
http://www.metrotransit.org/Schedules/WebSchedules.aspx?route=16
http://www.metrotransit.org/Schedules/WebSchedules.aspx?route=50
http://www.metrotransit.org/Schedules/WebSchedules.aspx?route=94
A general negative about LRT is the interference with vehicular traffic, which wastes time & gas.
– Traffic light timing is unachievable on the parallel road & is messed up on intersecting roads.
– Intersecting roads often have longer wait times, especially when the LRT route crosses two roads near an intersection.
– A road lane is often taken out to build the LRT, or prevents lane expansion.
Roads usually handle more vehicle-passengers per lane-mile than LRT or buses. Sure, the public transit has a larger capacity, but that is an invalid comparison when ridership averages less than half of full. If looking at capacity, then one should consider that all cars are full at 5+ passengers. Measuring reality is much better.
The NYC area carries about 1/3 or 2/3 (forget which one) of all US public transit riders and is mostly an exception to the last paragraph. They still cannot even cover costs.