The first new stop on the proposed light rail extension into Vancouver will be the subject of a public workshop next week at Jantzen Beach.
As several commenters on the story note:
WHAT PART OF 'VOTED DOWN TWICE' DON'T POLITICIANS UNDERSTAND?
'Proposed' . . . Proposed by WHO? This thing has been voted down over and over, and is not wanted! When are the politicians and the newspaper editors going to realize this?
Heh. Portland-area voters also voted light rail "extensions" down. Now we don't get to vote any more. You can attend the "public workshops" if you want to waste time, but the politicians have a love affair with expensive trains, and they really don't care what you think.
I cannot believe the people who still think there's some sort of inherent advantage to light rail. The argument that "we may not need it now, but we will by is absurd.
I mean, seriously, the MAX system is designed so that two cars is the maximum train length. Plus, the shared loop downtown pretty much limits the trains to 15 minute intervals on a line.
Now, does anyone seriously think that a lane of freeway carries less capacity than a single train every 15 minutes, especially considering that buses are allowed on the freeways last time I checked. They imagine some strange future where traffic gets so clogged that the vehicles (which are by necessity bumper to bumper) are moving so slowly that fewer people that can fit on a two car train pass by a spot in 15 minutes?
I mean, do the math! If the average speed is 5mph, and an average auto length is 15', then 352 cars can fit bumper to bumper in a mile... so take a hundred or so out for space... and figure about 1250 drivers can pass by a spot in an hour... or 312 in the time between trains. Add in passengers, buses and be ungenerous, and you're still going to end up with 350 or so folks creeping by in the auto lane.
A two car train, by the way has 128 seats... and supposedly can cram 332 passengers on board, but in all my time on the MAX I've never seen anything close to that number.
So, basically, a lane of traffic is going to have a lower end capacity of about as much as the highest capacity of the train system, a system that can NOT increase its capacity because of the way it is designed.
Posted by: Eddie | September 30, 2009 at 12:31 PM
Silly me, I used brackets and they vanished.
What I said at the start was supposed to read:
"I cannot believe the people who still think there's some sort of inherent advantage to light rail. The argument that 'we may not need it now, but we will by (insert future year here)' is absurd."
Posted by: Eddie | September 30, 2009 at 12:33 PM
TypePad has some "features" that I don't like, Eddie - and it appears you've stumbled upon yet another. I'll forward that bug to them; thanks for mentioning it.
Overall, you've expressed some of the issues that I have with fixed rail - whether light rail or streetcars - in that they are inordinately expensive and as implemented in Portland, lack any capability for actual mass transit.
The decisions to run them all through downtown Portland on surface grade were amazingly stupid, as Portland's small city block layout acts as a limiter to the number of cars a "train" can run. It will never be more than two. Billions of dollars spent on a "system" that can never run more than two-car "trains" because they all have to go through a place that nobody wants to go to - namely, downtown Portland.
What an incredible waste of transportation dollars!
Posted by: Max | September 30, 2009 at 07:31 PM
Well, there's the two-car train problem, and then the issue with having multiple lines all routed through the same congested downtown loop, meaning you can't increase frequency out to the ends of the lines.
My 5 year old has designed better systems with his Fisher-Price train set.
Posted by: Eddie | September 30, 2009 at 11:23 PM
Eddie, I hate to have to break it to ya, but your 5-year-old will never have a planning job in Portland if he keeps thos up.
Posted by: Max | October 01, 2009 at 05:05 PM
Yeah... I know. Plus, since he has a good grasp of the concept of personal property, he's already pretty much blown Portland politics as a career, too.
Seriously, though, if they just HAD to blow billions on a transit system here couldn't they have made it... oh... I dunno... forward-thinking? I could forgive a lot of the silliness if the system pushed the envelope, maybe a high-speed suspended rail personal rapid transit net, or a guided automated car system, or any of a number of potential future transit schemes.
It'd still probably be a colossal misuse of public funds, but at least it would serve as a tourism draw. These 80's era buses on tracks we call MAX can't even manage that.
Posted by: Eddie | October 02, 2009 at 08:34 AM
You've seen the personal transit systems? I've seen photos, and they look a lot closer to point-to-point than streetcars - plus, they don't impede traffic. As I recall, you can build 13 miles of them for the cost of one mile of light rail.
These buses on tracks are so 1880's.
Posted by: Max | October 02, 2009 at 12:10 PM
Yeah, I've loosely followed the PRT development for years. Unfortunately, the point-to-point concepts have never been fully developed because of a universal fear of new technologies by city governments, and the very heavy hand of the light rail industry.
The best that's been done are a few systems that work like a horizontal elevator on campuses, and a couple of airport installations, neither of which serve as a real proof of concept for point to point.
Personally, I'm still of the opinion that if we're bound and determined to keep adding trains in this town, we might as well make them fun. It'd be cheaper to put in roller coaster track than add to the Max line... and I'd much rather have a linear induced motor driven thrill ride over the Columbia than more Max line.
Posted by: Eddie | October 02, 2009 at 06:03 PM