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Seems to me that Los Angeles had a thriving lightrail system until the auto industry and their friends came in and sabotaged it. The heavy rail they've put in recently is going gangbusters. Portland has excellent buses and lightrail. Vegas is building a system - already worried that it won't be enough to handle capacity. Seattle has the same issue. San Antonio is building an entire light rail systemright now - they sure disagree. Phoenix is doing the same.

Dallas, Denver, Galveston, Houston, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Sacramento, San Diego, and San Jose all seem to be under the impression that mass transit works for them. They're all planning to add more. Maybe you just need to explain their mistake to them, help 'em out.

Of course I could mention about fifteen more cities that are working to put more mass transit in place or the increasing trend for real estate developers in places like Brentwood (that's in L.A., folks) to build "New Urbanism" oriented housing developments placed with the assumption that their buyers will be mass transit-focused, or how profitable such developments are turning out to be.

But that would be crass. Snarky, even.

I'd never do that.

-Rustin

With its wimpy 50-horsepower engine, the Fortwo takes 20 seconds to get from zero to 60.

Goodness gracious, that just outright sucks!

The light rail TRAINS in San Jose can tie that performance.

http://www.lightrail.com/carspecpages/sjspecs.html

(they can go 65 but California's excessive regulations [imagine that! I though CA was such a free state!] restricts them to 55 in practice - other than that and the fact it ain't 24/7, their system RULES)

You know your car is too slow when it can be tied by a train.

And how do you want people to get around?

Walk? Good for short distances, but for someone like me who lives 12.5 miles away from work, it is not a complete solution. Walking to a train station is reasonable though.

Bus? Ha Ha Ha! Very funny! You weren't serious? Were you?

Train? YES! Make some of that surcharge go to building light rail in every city. Expensive to build, cheaper than busses to run, and enviornmentally benign.

If we push light rail which people will WILLINGLY ride, rather than buses, which people will only ride if they don't have a choice, maybe public transit will become popular enough to help the environment.

Speaking of light rail, that is a solution which is hear now, it is proven and it works. And it need not be too expensive if you control costs. Same with monorail, the situation in Las Vegas notwithstanding (ugh, don't get me started on that mess).

The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority has a nice light rail system which is run well. I rode the whole system back in September/October 2001 (they have since added to it) and found it a very pleasant way to travel.

Public transportation is a good idea - but buses, basically, suck.

They are slow, noisy, polluting, have a high operating cost, come at irregular times, have a high rate of failure, subject to and contribute to congestion, and are generally unpleasant.

Light rail is much better. It is faster, much quieter, much cleaner, has a lower operating cost, maintains excellent on-time performance, is reliable, and not subject to, nor contributing to congestion, and much more pleasant to ride. Heck people with access to a car will often take light rail BY CHOICE (I would if it were available to me here in Las Vegas (*)), you do NOT see that with buses.

The system in the Santa Clara Valley (San Jose, Mountain View, etc) is an excellent example. It made life MUCH easier when I was there for a business trip.

Yes, light rail costs money to build, but so do freeways (which are MUCH more expensive). Light rail gets ALL its costs attributed to it - but the costs of buses are often not attributed to the buses themselves, e.g. increased road building and rebuilding needed to deal with the need for more capacity and wear and tear brought on by buses.

So when light rail is compared to buses in regard to costs - buses have an unfair advantage - since they aren't made to account for the ancillary costs they entail.

(*) In Las Vegas they do have some privately owned systems between casinos (which I use) which are quite nice (albeit limited). In 2004 we will have the Las Vegas monorail system for the resort district.

Light rail is the wave of the future.

Seriously though... The author made some obvious research errors on this. Though many trolley systems were dismantled decades ago, in more recent decades, they've been slowly building them back in places. But the marketing guys now call it... " light rail ". They're still trolleys.

Actually, on several of these things, the technology continues to exist. It just moved on from the original implementation as technology tends to do. Amiga inspired many current desktop video production systems. WordStar is the ancestor of features found in most word processors today.

Then again, he's also getting nostalgic about some technologies that had good reason to fade away. Like airships... Set aside the Hindenburg for a moment and realize that the US Navy had already given up on them before that accident because, even when filled with Helium, they're very sensitive to bad weather. Nearly all the Navy's airships (which were flying aircraft carriers) went down in storms.

I could go on. But it's pretty obvious that the author is calling things dead just because he hasn't followed where the technology went. Or he gets nostalgic about things that he didn't bother to look up the reasons why other technologies left them behind.

It's just another case of a so-called journalist failing to do his homework before writing about technology. Happens all the time.

Not dead yet! Historic streetcars are running in San Francisco, and of course lots of cities including SF run light rail, essentially updated streetcars.