Busses, Trains and Automobiles

I have long stated (during many transportation debates over at Anti-Strib) that I have no problems with commuter rail, but have huge problems with light rail. A couple of things hit my mail box last week that are starting to change my mind altogether on rail.

The first was an email from Rep. Mark Buesgens (R-35B).

The Governor vetoed a $70 million bonding provision for a part of the $900 million Central Corridor light rail line connecting Minneapolis to St. Paul. Let us assume that the cost of the project would not grow.
Even without a government discount or a bulk discount, one can buy a 36-seat transit bus (the CTS rear engine model from Champion Bus Inc. of Imlay City, Michigan) for about $120,000.
So for the same price for the 11-mile light rail line, you could buy 7,500 buses.
These buses are 38 feet long. So the length of 7,500 buses, rolling bumper to bumper, would be 285,000 feet.
The 11-mile route of the rail line is 58,080 feet long.
So you could have five lanes of buses cramming University Avenue, bumper to bumper for the same price as the train.
Or you could have one lane of buses headed in each direction, bumper to bumper, with 4,500 buses waiting in mothballs until they were needed.
Or you could have 100 buses headed in each direction of the 50-block route, with one bus for each block. That would leave you with 7,400 buses in mothballs. With a five-year warranty on each bus, it would take you 375 years to run out of buses.

The second was this Cato Institute Report (via Drew). It thoroughly debunks the "theory" that moving to any kind of rail transit will reduce pollution.

Far from protecting the environment, most rail transit lines use more energy per passenger mile, and many generate more greenhouse gases, than the average passenger automobile. Rail transit provides no guarantee that a city will save energy or meet greenhouse gas targets.
While most rail transit uses less energy than buses, rail transit does not operate in a vacuum: transit agencies supplement it with extensive feeder bus operations. Those feeder buses tend to have low ridership, so they have high energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions per passenger mile. The result is that, when new rail transit lines open, the transit systems as a whole can end up consuming more energy, per passenger mile, than they did before.
Even where rail transit operations save a little energy, the construction of rail transit lines consumes huge amounts of energy and emits large volumes of greenhouse gases. In most cases, many decades of energy savings would be needed to repay the energy cost of construction.

There is much more - you really should read the whole thing and save it!

I'll admit my bias toward commuter rail. Until I moved here, I had lived in cities with vast commuter rail systems (Chicago and in Europe). We simply did not drive unless we had to. My complaint about light rail has always been from that bias....light rail does not go from where the people are to where they want to go (suburbs to city center) but rather it covers territory already served well by busses! I started to convert to Rep. Buesgens way of thinking only after the 35W bridge collapse when I saw just how quickly Metro Transit was able to adapt their bus routes in order to bypass the bridge and to go to those routs hardest hit by the collapse - no rail service can do that!

Today my conversion is complete. After reading this Cato report and it's in depth look at bus versus rail and after reading Rep. Buesgens email, I am fully convinced that the best, most ecologically sound way to get cars off of the road is not rail....it is the good old fashioned bus.