Slashdot Mirror

Back in the 50s, when the interstate highway system was planned and construction began, did anyone budget for future maintenance?

Yes, it is part of the Federal tax on fuel ($0.184 gallon). Cars and trucks actually pay more in than they use, with transit (in particular, rail) being heavily subsidized in cost. In Seattle, fares cover about 40% of the cost of the Link light rail, and only 20% of commuter buses. Seems that roads were properly budgeted for, but transit was not.

I realize they theoretically "can" hold more capacity, but I would suggest that they WON'T move more people per hour than the two dedicated traffic lanes do today.

according to the DOT, I90 express lanes move about 7,000 vehicles an hour at peak, including buses and carpools https://www.wsdot.wa.gov/North...

ST projects (and they usually offer VERY optimistic projections) that in 2030, the entire eastlink project will carry 50,000 riders/day. So, in 13 years, along the whole route, ST "projects" that the trains will "almost" carry the amount that cars carry today, for free.

http://www.soundtransit.org/ea... (bottom right rail has the projection)

but overall, yeah, they're a great boondoggle. tell me again why not just more buses,a nd keep the lanes available for carpools, buses, ambulances, etc?

b) Take a 1.5 hour plane flight...where I need to be at the airport 2 hours early, and get dropped off about an hour or so from Seattle city center in traffic, thus making the whole trip take about ~5 hours...without delays due to weather or pilots being late. Oh yeah, and don't forget about the baggage limits, security, incredibly uncomfortable cabin, and people with no social skills involved with that option.

I agree with most of your post, but I would like to point out that this is no longer correct. We now have light rail going from Sea Tac to downtown Seattle. For the most part you aren't competing with traffic. (I can't recall how that stretch that runs along the middle of the street gets there) The stretch is similar in some respects to BART. It's a much more limited service than what BART offers, but if you're mainly wanting to get into town it's quite convenient. Plus it's pretty easy to get connections elsewhere.

Link Light Rail (Central Link) Schedule

Actually, we voted on this last November, and it passed.

East Link from the Seattle transit tunnel to Redmond, via I-90 and downtown Bellevue. Construction begins 2013, estimated completion 2020.

Maybe we'll have it by 2030. That is if we don't follow the typical Puget Sound political process of voting on it a half dozen times before it gets killed.

maybe most, but many of the systems I've used before have been great and google's definitely not the 1st one to think of such a system.

http://www.transitinfo.org/ does a really good job of the bay area starting from San Francisco all the way down to San Jose. They even cover the east side such as Oakland and Berkeley.

http://www.soundtransit.org/ is another great one where they cover most of the greater seattle area.

I would not say this idea is anywhere new or as hyped as everyone is claiming it to be... It's just a nice service they're providing to area(s) that don't have such a system yet.

[most of long anti-light rail diatribe deleted]

I seem to recall that building monorail is 1/10 the cost per mile. ... I think the overall budget for the 14 mile light rail project is something like $2.4 Billion. The city officials love it.... You couldn't kill the light rail project any more than you could kill the "big dig" in Boston... It's all about pork.... That's exactly why I like the monorail and hate the light rail. Light rail is going to be 10 times more expensive and doesn't even span a major traffic route! Nothing's getting solved here in Seattle by building it and nobody's going to use it.

Monorail: $11.4 billion / 14 miles (SMP's June financing plan, see this Seattle P-I article)
Light rail: $2.4 billion / 14 miles (your figures, corroborated by Sound Transit)

So ... how, exactly, is light rail 10 times more expensive per mile?

And how does the light rail line, which runs along I-5, not "span a major traffic route"? Do you really think that nobody in Rainier Valley or Tukwila needs to commute to downtown Seattle, or that nobody needs to get to or from the airports?

And those four times we voted for the monorail? That was before anybody knew that the monorail officials were planning on paying for the line by selling 50-year junk bonds.

They are.

Actually, there is in fact great interest for building rail transit in Seattle, the Monorail was just doomed from the start by poor management and poor planning. However, the Sound Transit Light Rail is chugging along just fine, and with any luck will complete its own line and supercede that which the monorail would have occupied in the near(ish) future.

Engineering!=CAD

I am an engineer. I've worked on many engineering studies over the past few years. I run a engineering company now. The number of times I've had to use a propriety CAD package I can count on my right hand.

Thanks to all of the open source packages out there, there are plenty of engineerng apps available for Mac OS X.

Monorail is perfect for Seattle primarily because we have a severe shortage of right-of-way. The hills and water forces all travel into a few narrow corridors, and the cost of acquiring new space in those corridors is incredibly expensive and politically contentious.

However, monorail just needs a 3 foot square space for a column every 120 feet. It fits in the parking strips of our narrow Seattle arterials. Thus, it adds huge new capacity without buying land, tearing down homes, or taking away lanes from cars.

By they way, we also have a light rail project in the Seattle area. However, it's years behind schedule and at $200 million per mile is twice as expensive as the monorail.

Your last sentence is the flaw in your argument. Engineers dont decide on the rail count, the politicans do. That's why Seattle's regional transit agency, Sound Transit, decided on a light rail system. The only problem with that is that is that Seattle A) Has lots of hills and B) Has no unused railroad lines to commandeer

Actually, it's not Seattle's regional transit agency - Sound Transit is a three-county state appointed agency, and Seattle has very little say in what it does or what taxes the state imposed on us for it.

Seattle's transit system is the ETC, part of the City of Seattle, not the multi-county Sound Transit regional transportation agency.

What may be confusing you is the busses in Seattle are run by King County, which includes the dark land where bill g resides, across Lake Washington in Bellevue, Redmond, and Issaquah, all places that are definitely not Seattle. You have to cross the world's largest floating bridges to get there.

-

Actually, Sound Transit, the multi-county organization with a board appointed by the state are the ones that are building the light rail.

Seattle has a separate project, the Elevated Transportation Company, which was created by city initiatives and a couple of lawsuits, and which last night held the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) hearings for it's Phase I.

I understand the confusion. Sound Transit is building a 14 mile long light rail system for regional needs, while the City of Seattle's ETC is building a separate (but connected) 14 mile long monorail system for local needs paid by local Seattle taxes. And the mayor of Seattle is on the board of Sound Transit and supports both projects, while most Seattle citizens love the monorail but hate light rail.

-

There's another organization working on that. The light rail system was approved by voters in 1996, and is scheduled for completion in 2009 (although only 14 for the price of the 21 miles apporoved by voters). The problem with the tunnel is that the rails weren't installed with proper insulation and grounding, so they have to close the tunnel for two years while the do the retrofitting. Meanwhile, dozens of busses will be pushed back onto surface streets during and after the completion of the line. Fortunately, the monorail should be operational before they take the tunnel out of service.

The monorail line will be run by a separate agency, but transfers between the two lines will be simple. The light rail line and monorail line will complement each other.