Well, read the articles on this topic in the San Francisco Chronicle
and you'll have a very good idea of what the future will be. No cars, a
great environment. David Suzuki said so himself.
"Jack May" wrote in message
news


"David Nebenzahl" wrote in message
news:1117905837.a4c5047dd67088fcee36e629def10cfe@t eranews...
On 6/4/2005 10:07 AM Jack May spake thus:

"Joey Jolley" wrote in message
...


Only in a topsy-turvy Reagan/Bush world where war=peace,
ketchup=vegetable, and trees cause pollution.

It is economic, not politics. Just to make it easy for you, let us
assume that trains take no energy to run and produce no pollution, but it
takes money to buy and run a train.

There is only a limited amount of available for transit and a limited
amount of taxes that people will support for funding transportation. If
you think there is unlimited money, I would like to hear the reason.

Rail cost about a million dollars to get one person out of their car and
10K to 20K to support the running of the rail for that new rider. For
example BART to San Jose is expected by VTA to attract 5.7K new riders.
It is probably a lot less than that.

Present estimates for BART to San Jose is 4B. Every body knows that
overruns will push it at least into the 5 to 6B range and probably more.
That is about a million dollars per new rider and a lot of those new
riders will not just come out of cars because they counts some transfers
from other transit as new riders.

The operating cost of new rider is $32 per trip times two trips per day
(low figure) for 5 days per week or over $16K per year. Even as bad as
BART to San Jose is, I have calculated similar numbers for other systems
over the last several years.

That money could have been used instead to reduce congestion by building
infrastructure to remove all stop lights on all expressway in Santa Clara
County ($2.5B), have accidents and stalls moved from the freeways in less
than 6 minutes as in Houston & Seattle, or put in ramp metering on all
ramps.

Everyone of those approaches would reduce congestion hundreds to thousands
of times more than BART to San Jose for a lot less money per added
capacity per person. So for each person you get out of a car with
transit is going to produce far more congestion than spending the money
directly on reducing congestion by putting the money into roads.

The net result is that there will be far more pollution, fuel consumption,
and CO2 produced by spending money on just getting people out of their
car. Even though our example pollution free, fuel free train produces far
more pollution and fuel consumption indirectly by increased road
congestion caused by the money diverted to transit. That make rail a
environmental disaster.

BTW, this is not my theory alone. The EPA now concedes in court over and
over again that not spending money on roads increases congestion which
increases pollution. There is apparently no way to divert transportation
funds to transit to get people out of their cars without significantly
increasing pollution. The exception is if there is no congestion on the
roads which is certainly not the case now.

Of course this requires rail advocates to keep more than one thought at a
time in their head (mainly about steel wheels) which makes it very
difficult for them to understand.