Who could possibly suggest such a thing?

Speaking of which, I seem to have fallen behind on these bits of shameless self-promotion. Here is an article on infrastructure stimuli, one on light rail in San Antonio, and most recently one about turning NYC’s Broadway into a pedestrian mall. I also had an op ed on rail transit in the late-lamented Rocky Mountain News, but its last edition was last Friday, and no one seems to know how long its web site will be maintained.
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Eugene, Oregon’s Lane Transit District (LTD) is facing the same problem that is no doubt confronting transit agencies all over the country. High gasoline prices are encouraging some people to leave their cars at home and take transit. But those same high fuel prices are threatening LTD’s finances and may force cuts in service.

As noted in the Antiplanner’s recent study on transit and energy, part of the problem is that transit agencies tend to buy buses that are far larger than they need. The average LTD bus has nearly 43 seats and standing room for 30 more, but carries only 12 passengers. Obviously, if your system is operating at only one-sixth of its capacity, you are wasting a lot of fuel.

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There is a town in England that is worried that people won’t consider it a “world-class city,” so it has persuaded the government to build it a rail transit line. What is the name of this town? Oh yes, it’s called London.

You can see why London’s political leaders are worried that people don’t consider it to be a “world-class city.” I bet they don’t even have true Neapolitan pizza yet.

Not enough trains to be a world-class city.

Seriously, whenever anyone starts using the term “world class,” better check your wallet, because they mean to pick it. When they emphasize jobs at the top of the list of benefits, you can be sure you are going to lose.

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One reason often put forward to build rail transit is that it will save energy. Lately, rail advocates have added the claim that it will reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Many people accept these statements without question. A recent NPR story argued that “part of the solution (to global warming) is light rail.” The Antiplanner previously noted a magazine that declared Portland the second-greenest city in the world partly on the strength of the reduced greenhouse gases emitted by its light-rail lines.

This week, the Antiplanner is going to look at these claims in detail. Today we will set up the problem. Tomorrow, we will look at actual energy consumption and CO2 emissions by various transit systems in 2005, the most recent year for which data are available. Later we will look at the construction costs of rail transit and examine energy consumption and CO2 emissions before and after light-rail lines are put into operation. Finally, we will compare rail transit with alternative policies that might be able to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions at a far lower cost.

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Back in the 1970s, some people thought that personal rapid transit (PRT) would replace the automobile. By sometime early in the twenty-first century, we would all be traveling in small, computerized vehicles riding soundlessly on fixed tracks. The vehicles would go nearly 100 miles per hour, and each car would go exactly to where its occupants wanted to go over the least congested route.

I’ve been intrigued by this concept since 1972, when I heard a presentation about it by a consulting firm named Deleuw-Cather to the Portland city council. DeLeuw-Cather was trying to get some city to buy into the idea, and it claimed that the Germans and Japanese were experimenting with this system and had solved most of the technical problems.

Wikipedia photo by Darren Ringer.

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