Chuck Plunkett, a member of the Denver Post‘s editorial board, has a few choice words to say about light rail. Words like “obsolete” and “a transportation option that our environment can no longer afford.”

The Post must have joined the Antiplanner in the pockets of big oil. As recently as a year ago, Denver’s largest paper was an enthusiastic supporter of rail transit. Plunkett himself says he has “long been a fan of rail.” But after reading the Antiplanner’s analysis of light rail and greenhouse gases, and replicating that analysis using the latest available data, Plunket concludes that “further expanding rail in metro Denver would be an outrage.”

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The first question that should be asked about any public policy is, “Who benefits and who pays?” This can be relevant to tollroads, one of the few ideas that is supported by both smart-growth advocates and mobility supporters.

The difference is that mobility supporters believe in tolls as a way for users to pay for the facilities they use — and, not so incidentally, to give signals to those users about when and where it is particularly expensive to travel — while smart-growth advocates believe in tolls as a way of punishing those who drive and taking their money to spend on transit.

The center lanes are the Dulles Access Road; they are free but go only to the Dulles Airport. The other lanes are the Dulles Tollroad and are heavily used by commuters.

Case in point: Virginia’s Dulles Toll Road, which was once owned by the state of Virginia but lately has been taken over by the Metropolitan Washington Airport Authority. The latter organization is nearly doubling tolls on the highway in order to raise money for a boondoggle of an extension of Metrorail to Dulles Airport.
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Twenty-two subway lines enter downtown (south of 60th street) Manhattan. According to the Metropolitan Transportation Council (New York’s MPO), these subway lines carried some 400,000 people into downtown between 8 and 9 am on a typical day in 2007 (open the “rec sec” sheet of the Subway data sheet).

A blogger asks, “what would it take in terms of auto facilities to replace the morning rush hour carrying capacity of the NYC subway?” He concludes it would take a minimum of 167 new lanes of bridges, tunnels, or other highways into downtown Manhattan. But there are several alternative views of his calculations.

He assumes that the only alternative to subways is autos. But what about buses? Many 40-foot buses can carry 64 passengers (42 sitting, 22 standing, which means a higher proportion sitting than on a subway). Spaced five bus lengths apart, 11 buses per minute can cruise down a highway lane carrying more than 42,000 people per hour. That means fewer than 10 new lanes would be needed to carry the people now taking subways — and those 10 lanes would take up a lot less space than the 22 subway lines.

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