This is a joke, right?

It is well that the LA Times article referenced the Simpsons monorail episode, for it was directly applicable. We also read that the 14 mile project was to have cost 11 Billion (that's with a "B") dollars. There must be a cheaper way for haters of the American spirit and folk to express their rage.

the Big Dig.

The monorail has won at the polls but the politicians are pushing Sound Transit's more expensive light rail plan forward. I think that this time the monorail will be a victim of the MSM and the politicians and will be defeated. Of course, if they were forced to have a vote on light rail it would go down in flames as Sound Transit is a politically funded cesspool of inefficiency and corruption. Well, so is the monorail program, but the Monorail is cheaper to build and operate and it doesn't take up traffic lanes. If they would run a monorail line between the north/south lanes of I-5 and Hwy167 and the east/west lanes of Hwy520, people stuck in Seattle's notoriously bad traffic would almost certainly give up driving after watching the trains continuously whiz by.

Also, IIRC, the operations cost is predicted to be $17 per passenger for each one-way trip on light rail IF they get the number of riders predicted. What a mess.

I'd be interested to see the cost-per-passenger anaylsis of the first two years of the Las Vegas monorail program for comparison. It was a major expansion of the original momorail between the MGM Grand and Bally's and has a different rationale -- to get casino and convention center customers off the jammed Las Vegas Boulevard while going between locations -- but the effectiveness (or not) in how well the line solves that problem could show whether or not a similar expansion of its monorail would get Seattle drivers off their highways along the proposed route.

OJ: you will gain credibility when you give up the Suburban.

"the operations cost is predicted to be $17 per passenger for each one-way trip on light rail IF they get the number of riders predicted."

Why don't they just pass out vouchers for cab rides?

Posted by: Robert Schwartz at September 24, 2005 11:01 AM

Robert,
on the current Seattle mass transit train system known as Sounder the subsidy is MUCH higher. I'm working off memory from an old Seattle Times articles but, again, IIRC it is something like $32 per rider. I might be confusing that number with the ferry system that also requires huge subsidies per rider. Yep, people love trains. Mostly the people who manage, operate and run them.

I still think this is a great area for mass transit if it is run alongside the current freeway system since most everything channels along two routes into the city, but Sound Transit's light rail is likely to be a huge failure.

I remember the Sounder subsidy being such that some wag suggested it would be cheaper to permanently hire a limo and driver for each rider.

Also please tread carefully with that "will of the people" type nonsense. The original monorail vote passed by only a few dozen votes, and as we discovered last year, in King County close votes are always suspect.

And, the major source of funding for the monorail is (wait for it) bonds paid off with automobile licencing fees. Ones so huge that the state this year had to change the law to now require people to use their residence address for registration because so many people in auto-loving Seattle were using addresses outside the city limits to avoid those fees.

The only people who love mass transit are the ones who never use it, or even have it available for their use.

Oh, and they just closed the down-town bus tunnel for two years, totally screwing up traffic, so they can retrofit in rails for the RTA trolleys. Seems there are rails already there, but I heardsomething about no one ever checked to see if they'd actually be usable (clearances and proper grounding and such) when the tunnel was buit. Our tax dollars at work.

Make the fee high enough and you'll have riders.

Am I the only one who remembers the days and days it took to count the votes in the last referendum on the Monorail? The NO side was ahead until the last few votes trickled in from KING County - the same place where votes were "found" for the current usurper as Governor.

Anyone who wants to get in on the pro monorail side of things, head on over to 2045 Seattle to fight the good fight.

http://2045seattle.org

The voters of Seattle are idiots. They oppose zoning to allow greater density then vote for mass transit. The massively expensive light rail and monorail both go north/south when what's needed (and would actually be used) is more transit going east/west.

obc: I think you are on to something.

I've written more on this foolish project here and here.

"Make the fee high enough and you'll have riders."

Trolling again, I see.

They tried that and people did what they always do, tried to avoid the taxes. So the coercive power of the gov't came to the rescue to pay for something people obviously don't want to pay for. There aren't any riders because the project won't be running for the better part of a decade.

The Monorail only runs within Seattle, so only Seattle votes on it. The "Light Rail" Trollies are the product of the RTA district, which encompases, but doesn't include all of three counties including King. The first RTA vote went down to defeat, so they redrew the boundaries to exclude the outlying areas that were 90% or more against, and barely passed the second time. This was almost a decade and a billion dollars ago. There's nothing to ride on, and like the monorail, won't be anything for years more.

The people od Seattle would likely vote high enough tolls, parking taxes, and congestion fees to pay for more rail too.

carter:

The trusty "the majority that disagrees with me is stupid" argument, eh?

You use it often enough, what's wrong with it?

I never use it.

Oh for God's sake, oj. The overwhelming majority in this country likes their cars, and doesn't much care for trains. You have to go to a lefty sinkhole like Seattle and then carefully exclude the suburbs to get any other result. In other news, most people think we won the Second World War, and the Cold War; that an atheist can be a good person; and that Eric and Julia Roberts are two people. Go ahead and stop digging this particular hole.

Polls always show that Americans don't think our wars were worth it once they're over. They likewise show that people wouldn't elect an atheist president. I doubt anyone has polled the Roberts question but I've never heard of someone rejecting the theory once it's broached. People liked trains, not cars, which is why the feds had to intervene. The Automobile Culture is a function of the state not the popular will.

Whatever happened to "The Conventional Wisdom is always wrong?"

Once everyone accepted it that turned out to be wrong. :)

The Conventional Wisdom isn't what the majority thinks but what the intellectual classes think they should think.

Orrin, you are the intellectual classes. Your position on mass transit is the ne plus ultra of ruling-class snobbery: you think people actually want it, but have been brainwashed into not knowing what's good for them. Meanwhile Amtrack keeps losing money. Nobody doubts that roads depend on government but so did railroads for Chrissakes. Don't make me start posting links to the history of the transcontinental railroad.

joe:

Exactly. It took a shift by government to destroy the rails. Now we just need to shift back and fix the mistake.

In this instance, yes. The good liberals of Seattle voted for the monorail (by a slim margin) because the idea of a monorail appealed to them, not because they would ride it or because it was a practical, cost effective transportation solution. And they did it without thinking of the side effects of a multi-year project which constructs what is in effect a large concrete wall through the middle of downtown Seattle, or questioning whether the cost estimates and financing estimates presented on the ballot measures were realistic (which they were not).

By the way, unlike some of your critics here, I don't oppose mass transit in principle, in fact I frequently ride Seattle's buses.

That shift was government following the popular will, not leading it. People liked cars better than horses and wagons, so local and state governments built the paved roads that were needed. Once those roads were built the passenger train became a dinosaur even without an adequate interstate system. Nobody was more surprised by that development than the U.S. Congress, which had to be prodded into action in order to finally build a nationwide road network in the '50s, only about a quarter-century behind Germany, for example. This wasn't some conspiracy, oj, just business as usual.

joe:

No, it wasn't. The military wanted a road network so it built one, just as it was the Nazis who built the German highways.

Agreed; but as with roads, so with railroads. Don't make me start posting links to the train timetables of the Frech and German general staffs in 1914.

joe;

Agreed. It's just a choice of top-down systems.

Everyone likes cars better.

Four times in the last eight years, Seattle's voters have been asked whether they want the city to build a monorail line, and four times they have said yes.

Oh, no, erp! We just now got him down for his nap...

I just enjoy the way TimeZone Boy can not only pontificate with such certainty about a city and area with which he admits he never wants anything to do, but tell us locals how wrong we are.

Four times in the last eight years, Seattle's voters have been asked whether they want the city to build a monorail line, and four times they have said yes.

It's so pompously New England that I think he's deliberatly trying to act out the caracture.

And my criticism of the RTA and transit here in general isn't because I like cars or hate trains (I'm actually a railfan, but of heavy freight operations), but because all that money being spent has never been to benefit those of us living on the Eastside. If it was, the first RTA line would be running parallel to I-405 between Kent and Lynnwood through Bellevue and be half built by now.

Raoul:

We Puritans have our own updated rail system in the works:

http://www.nashuarpc.org/commuterrail/

Raoul,
That would make too much sense so it can't happen up here. They would first run you down to Renton, then insist that you get a scenic tour of the Ranier Valley-MLK Boulevard area and get dropped off in Pioneer Square next to the Mission.

Joe:

Oh for God's sake, oj. The overwhelming majority in this country likes their cars, and doesn't much care for trains.

I'll bet it likes low interest rates and law and order too. So we are all going to have cheap mortgages and safe streets, because that is what the people want, right?

Peter: no, not necessarily. However, it's the political class's job to do their darndest to deliver cheap mortgages and safe streets because that's what they were elected to strive for. What they wind up striving for instead is the approval of their college professors, the trendanistas they go to cocktail parties with, and the press. Throw in a healthy dose of porkbarrelling and you arrive at light rail, and yes the Big Dig also. It's a principal-agent problem. On this subject oj is a principal-agent problem with halitosis and back fur.

Joe: All we really need to do is point out that OJ is anti-city and pro-train.

I realize we're all having great fun with this one, but you guys can't seem to get by the car/no car paradigm and see that changes are happening in real time that are costly in terms of infrastructure costs, community cohesion and, in some places, order and safety. Aesthetics, too, but I'd leave that one out of it for fear of giving the Starbucks crowd a new mission. It is not strictly true, Joe, to say that politicians are elected to deliver cheap mortgages. They are elected to deliver general prosperity and order within a democratic system, and that involves a lot of conflicting things and a lot of trade-offs. If you just want affordable housing above all, look to the Soviet model. What the people "want", or say they want, especially materially, is a dicey thing to ground public policy in exclusively. Democracy isn't the preferred option because the people are all-knowing.

Let's start from today as year zero and declare contemporary car use to be the ideal. Population, cars-per-family and fuel efficiency are all expected to grow at x %, requiring a future investment of y% in highway maintenance, z% in police and traffic control services, w% in noise and pollution management and v % in new urban freeway construction, parking lot construction and community relocation. Do we just all join hands and sing "We love our cars" and say it costs what it costs?

Joe:

Re: Eric and Julia: Do you not appreciate these quaint, innocent eccentricities become every conservative and are a sign of sound moral and mental health? It's the coldly pragmatic rationalists who get irritated by them I fear. I know you are far too wise and humane to be one of those, so what's yours?

Peter B:

Mass transit imposes its own costs.

In terms of the infrastructure costs that you mention, not as much as with autos, but still a significant amount.

The biggest cost (or benefit) is that if the plebes only have mass transit, they'll also live in mass densities, i.e., NYC.

Some people, like Orrin, believe that being packed like sardines in fifth floor walk-up railroad flats is the essence of humanity, although like most social revolutionaries he doesn't practice what he preaches.

I simply note that almost everyone with the means to do so left that environment ASAP.

Therefore, yes, in America we'd say "It costs what it costs", because the benefits far outweigh such costs.

Posted by: Michael Herdegen at September 25, 2005 9:20 AM

So Orrin is both anti-city and a hypocrite for not living in one? Crafty guy.

Colour me confused here. Are you saying more cars are good because they contribute positively to urban life because they offer a means of escaping it?

Michael:

People should work in the city if they need to, but no one should live there and mass transit shouyld bring them there.

Ah, a city that no one lives in. So OJ's model for the future is Hartford?

OJ: What you're describing is the so-called "edge city", which depends for its very existence on suburban sprawl and the automobile.

Peter: This, too, shall pass and I'm all for that. But do I think that government can shape -- or even foresee -- the future? I'm skeptical. Flying cars, the hydrogen economy, moving sidewalks or closing Manhattan to any vehicle except Segways -- all are possible but I don't expect any one of them soon. But I'm pretty sure that fixed-track trains, which require a high population density at both ends, a static immobile population, and, except for rush hour in Manhattan and Boston, are both money-losing and more polluting than cars, are not going to be the answer.

As we've noted here many times before, if we were at all serious about pollution and "energy security" we would be building lots of nuclear plants. If we were serious about pollution and saving money, we would simply be outlawing cars more than 10 years old, which would be a more effective anti-pollution measure than any other, would dramatically decrease our use of gasoline and would cost significantly less money even if we gave everyone with a now-outlawed car $5,000 to buy a new one.

That would be "new to them", of course.

David:

Yes, cars are effective ways of getting the family to the train station, grocery store and soccer games.

David:

I know a lot of modern LRV projects have turned into underused boondoggles (designated bus expressways with variable feeder lines are usually better if they are safe and maintenace is kept up), but look what happens to most cities when public transportation goes on strike. At some point there has to be a recognition that choice and rugged individual self-reliance play differently in urban and rural areas. I may grumble that I'm not allowed to burn leaves or feed wild animals at home, but I'd feel downright oppressed if someone tried to stop me from doing so at my chateau in the country. Or rather I would be if I had one.

Isn't it obvious that population growth and the expansion of suburbia is going to mean either more highways and parking space or more investment in public transportation? Are you voting for all of one and none of the other?

Facts are such inconvenient things.

Posted by: Robert Schwartz at September 25, 2005 11:48 PM

Peter: The only American city I know of that is paralyzed by transit strikes is New York, which is close to being the only American city in which subways and trains make any sense at all.

I don't see how subways and trains can deal with suburban sprawl at all. Mass transit depends upon mass commuting: lots of people who want to go from point A to point B and back. In the burbs, I want to go one place, my neighbor wants to go somewhere else, the guy on the other side of him wants to go to a third place, etc., etc., etc. Trains just can't deal with that. The only obvious solution other than trains is that everyone work within walking distance of home and that strikes me as a worse idea. The company town was never a very successful experiment for either the company or the town.