JFK Airtrain: Good News, Bad News, Good News and Bad News

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Author: Michael Voight "mrtravelkay"


Ok, enough already.. Now you have to put someone else's name on your
"work"?

In article ,
"Baxter" wrote:

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"Robert Coté" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Baxter" wrote:


"Robert Coté" wrote in message
...

is directly on topic. The Portland light rail extension, AirMAX, is
significantly financed by the $3 PFC that every commercial air
passenger
pays coming and going.


Well, not quite, bobby - that $3 only covers the part of AirMAX that is
on
Airport property.

And Tri-Met, Metro, City of, and the Port authority are famous for their
rigorous financial firewalls.

You got any actual proof of wrongdoing? If you do, then hie yourself to the
Attorney General's office. Otherwise you're just blowing smoke.


Those trains run all the way to Beaverton (on the other
side of downtown). Also, that $3 is only on departures - not both ways.

You are correct. I should have said "coming through and going" to make
that clearer.

Actually, you're trying to obfusticate.


Here, I'll try again. _Y-o-u- -a-r-e- -c-o-r-r-e-c-t-._

Were I trying to "obfusticate", I could have done a much better job and
still left myself room to squirm out on a technicality. As it was, what
I wrote was not clear. Your correction was clear. The accusation of
obfuscation is unfounded. I don't generally take off for common
mispellings but didn't you just attack for far less than obfuscate/
obfusticate?

And do note, the $3 fee only applies to construction (airport share =
~$28
million) - not operating costs.

Yeah riiiight. $28 million. Hmmm, generating $1.3 million per month it
should only be around for 22 months.


So? How long is the PFC going to last?


'Course, you're welcome to challenge this - but to do so would undermine
most of your other arguments about how much LRT costs.


Not at all.

Oh, yes - what figure are you up to now for MAX costs $5 billion? Or more?


Hard to tell without defining terms and too far off topic for airport
rail threads.

Sancho Panza wrote:

"nobody" wrote in message
...

That can be done either by building more highways which cut off parts of a

city from each other, take up large amounts of valuable land and generate
noise-pollution or by building rapid transit systems.

Is that saying in other words the rapid mass transit, most likely rail, does
not create or add to any of those problems? That is patently not accurate.

On an absolute scale, no, it's not accurate.

On a relative scale, the amount of land consumed by an eight-lane
freeway is a good deal greater than that devoted to a two-track rail
line, even after throwing in the storage yards and maintenance shops.
Noise generated by vehicles on a freeway is constant; the same is not
true for trains.


--
-----------Sandy Smith, Exile on Market Street, Philadelphia----------
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"There is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is
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"Exile on Market Street" wrote in message
...
On a relative scale, the amount of land consumed by an eight-lane
freeway is a good deal greater than that devoted to a two-track rail
line, even after throwing in the storage yards and maintenance shops.
Noise generated by vehicles on a freeway is constant; the same is not
true for trains.

This is only true because rail carries so few people. If you normalize the
data to area per person mile for highways vs rail, urban rail at least seems
to takes a lot more area.

Light rail at least in Santa Clara County CA. takes the same area as two to
three lanes of road and carries less than a lane of traffic. If you count
only the people rail gets out of cars, about the only political reason used
for rail, those three lanes of rail carry less than people than about a
tenth of a lane.

Since transit use is declining typically about 10% to 15% per decade all
over the world (as expected for a technology at the end of its life), the
space inefficiency will just get worse.

In article ,
Exile on Market Street wrote:

Sancho Panza wrote:

"nobody" wrote in message
...

That can be done either by building more highways which cut off parts of a

city from each other, take up large amounts of valuable land and generate
noise-pollution or by building rapid transit systems.

Is that saying in other words the rapid mass transit, most likely rail, does
not create or add to any of those problems? That is patently not accurate.

On an absolute scale, no, it's not accurate.

On a relative scale, the amount of land consumed by an eight-lane
freeway is a good deal greater than that devoted to a two-track rail
line, even after throwing in the storage yards and maintenance shops.
Noise generated by vehicles on a freeway is constant; the same is not
true for trains.

What about after taking into account the Park-n-ride lots and all the
other additional infrastructure in support of rail transit development
patterns?

Jack May wrote:
"Exile on Market Street" wrote:
On a relative scale, the amount of land consumed by an eight-lane
freeway is a good deal greater than that devoted to a two-track rail
line, even after throwing in the storage yards and maintenance shops.
Noise generated by vehicles on a freeway is constant; the same is not
true for trains.

This is only true because rail carries so few people. If you normalize the
data to area per person mile for highways vs rail, urban rail at least seems
to takes a lot more area.

Light rail at least in Santa Clara County CA. takes the same area as two to
three lanes of road and carries less than a lane of traffic. If you count
only the people rail gets out of cars, about the only political reason used
for rail, those three lanes of rail carry less than people than about a
tenth of a lane.

Is this the thing that you can see from Central Expressway south of Mountain
View? It appears to be the worst-case example of rail.

A well-planned and utilized system like DC's Metro or the NYC subway clearly
carries far more people per unit of time per width of footprint.

Since transit use is declining typically about 10% to 15% per decade all
over the world (as expected for a technology at the end of its life), the
space inefficiency will just get worse.

I'd think this would alarm you. Combining 10-15% more road users plus
population growth with current congestion problems seems to indicate that in
a matter of years nobody will be going anywhere (except for those of us on
bikes).

miguel
--
Hundreds of travel photos from around the world: http://travel.u.nu/

Miguel Cruz wrote:


Is this the thing that you can see from Central Expressway south of Mountain
View? It appears to be the worst-case example of rail.

A well-planned and utilized system like DC's Metro or the NYC subway clearly
carries far more people per unit of time per width of footprint.

I don't know how busy the route to Mountain View gets, I always see a
lot of empty seats when I ride it. It has several stops along our main
location. I think it is a very convenient way to get from MV to anywhere
along Tasman, or to the Great Mall in Milpitas.

The route to downtown San Jose from near North First and Tasman seems to
be a lot busier.

Robert Cote wrote:
What about after taking into account the Park-n-ride lots and all the
other additional infrastructure in support of rail transit development
patterns?

Park and ride lots are near the railway stations and generally, you don't have
much housing right next to the train stations. Secondly, every car that parks
in the suburb is a car that won't need a packing space downtown where parking
space is at a big premium.

"Miguel Cruz" wrote in message
...

I'd think this would alarm you. Combining 10-15% more road users plus
population growth with current congestion problems seems to indicate that
in
a matter of years nobody will be going anywhere (except for those of us on
bikes).

You are correct. I did the analysis for our SVMG transportation committee.
The official estimate are around 400K to 750K extra commuter over and above
the present 800K commuters by 2025. The dot-com increase was about 180K
extra commuters, which almost lead to grid lock.

BART to San Jose would have gotten about 5K to 10K commuters out of their
cars which would have no measurable effect on congestion reduction while
spending most of the transportation dollars if not more.

VTA has no plans in place beyond trying to keep BART alive. MTC has
effectively no plans except to keep pouring money into little used transit
system.

There are three possibilities that together have a reasonable chance of
preventing perpetual grid lock. Getting all the metering lights working
could increase capacity by roughly 200K at around $50M or so.

Removing all stoplight on the expressways with overpasses has been estimated
by VTA to be $2.5B, a fraction of BART to San Jose. A rough guess of 300K
capacity increase.

Getting magnets in the freeways and expressways for ITS and having
incentives for automobile companies to supply the in car technology could
increase capacity by maybe 500K or more over time with a cost of maybe $10M.
The ITS solution is not well studied and has a wide variation in my
estimates.

The problem can be solved but our transportation agencies don't care.

Jack May wrote:

Since transit use is declining typically about 10% to 15% per decade
all over the world (as expected for a technology at the end of its
life), the space inefficiency will just get worse.

Did you make that factoid up?

Transit ridership in the US is the highest it's been for the last 40
years. I also checked the statistics in France and the UK to see what
has been going on there, and the long term trends are up in both
countries.
Rail transit ridership in Europe, in particular, has significantly
increased, and prompted the construction of about a dozen light rail or
VAL lines in France, plus a number in the UK, with an additional 25 or
so planned.

They also experimented with a guided bus system, but have given up on
the technology, and are now intending to essentially encircle the city
with light rail lines running through the suburbs.

The tram lines in Paris have been a huge success, with one line
attracting triple the number of riders as the bus line it replaced. It
now handles about 65,000 passengers a day. Paris also just completed an
automated metro line (Meteor) which was needed to offset the
overcrowding on other heavily used lines across the city.

Since all of this is contrary to your contention about "technology at
the end of its life", how to you explain all these success stories?