A word about mass transit.

The Portland, Oregon area has a world class public transit system-light rail, bus and trolley-that has extensive coverage. My wife and I spent

But unlike when you drive your car, you only paid about 25% of the actual cost of building and operating that system. And chances are it worked well mostly because you were a tourist and most of these systems handle tourists needs a lot better then the needs of 95% of the people who live there. Last read up on their system, when they were thinking of expanding it and found out that they would have to foot the ENTIRE cost (instead of getting 70% of the money from podunk ciies in the other 49 states) they decided they didn't really need the expansion after all.

It's not time. It will never be time if this kind of high cost, inflexible rail was made to compete economically with other modes. The only way it ever works is for it to be HEAVILY subsidized to the tune of typically 70%. I don't think it's "fair" that taxpayers in cities all over the USA are forced to send their tax dollars to the 5 or 10 largest metro areas to subsidize the ride for those few million users. If it's such a good deal, let them pay the FULL cost themselves. There is not a single place in the US where the users of mass transit pay what it costs. Nor is there a single place in the US where Mass Transit has solved their congestion problem. All it does it allow Real Estate developers to make more money from the gvt subsidies to the transit system, which makes their RE more valuable.

In Portland OR, that would be Oregon Electric Railroad, and the rights of way still exist. I pick blackberries down there during the summer.

Most of those rail lines do not go where people want to go now because cities have changed in how they grow. The reason rights of way like the old OR Electric rights of way haven't been paved over with a street is because of this.

I've lived in Portland OR since 1975. Your right, it is world class - for the tourists. For anyone who actually lives here and needs to use it to get around it's stupid. It's also way, way overpriced. A few years ago someone did a study and for the amount of money spent on westside light rail, they could have manufactured all of the rails used in the rail line out of solid gold.

Portland has this system because the politicians here are too pussified to condemn private property to widen streets. So they vote in more transit money so they can claim the are doing something about the traffic congestion. There's a dozen spots in the city that are hell-holes. Interstate

Putting in a lot of public mass transit DOES NOT reduce road congestion. All it does is allow friends of developers who own property along the rail line to put in condos and make a killing. Then 50 years from now those condos will be run down hellhole tenaments. Transit proponents point to full trains on light rail and claim that it means all these cars aren't on the road. They conveniently forget that the cost-per-seat to put in light rail is ten times what it would cost to put it in by widening roads. As a result the transit only sucks off a small percentage of new growth on the roads - the roads are still clogged.

Portland is an excellent example of how mass transit proponents engineered a gigantic con job on a city. Portland would have been far better served by taking a tenth of the money dumped into rail and spending it on more busses and making the bus lines more extensive and frequent, then taking the rest of the money and widening streets. But, busses aren't as sexy as trains, so the trains won so a few dandified Yuppies from the Perl district can ride the train once a month and feel good about themselves helping the environment, while the rest of the teeming poor and illegal Mexicans can't find busses to take them to work on a daily basis, so they run out and buy beater cars and drive them without insurance, then abandon them by the side of the road when they break down and the city has to tow them off.

New York City has a world-class public transit system. If you want to see transit done right, go there.

Ted

In Portland OR, that would be Oregon Electric Railroad, and the rights of way still exist. I pick blackberries down there during the summer.

Most of those rail lines do not go where people want to go now because cities have changed in how they grow. The reason rights of way like the old OR Electric rights of way haven't been paved over with a street is because of this.

I've lived in Portland OR since 1975. Your right, it is world class - for the tourists. For anyone who actually lives here and needs to use it to get around it's stupid. It's also way, way overpriced. A few years ago someone did a study and for the amount of money spent on westside light rail, they could have manufactured all of the rails used in the rail line out of solid gold.

Portland has this system because the politicians here are too pussified to condemn private property to widen streets. So they vote in more transit money so they can claim the are doing something about the traffic congestion. There's a dozen spots in the city that are hell-holes. Interstate

Putting in a lot of public mass transit DOES NOT reduce road congestion. All it does is allow friends of developers who own property along the rail line to put in condos and make a killing. Then 50 years from now those condos will be run down hellhole tenaments. Transit proponents point to full trains on light rail and claim that it means all these cars aren't on the road. They conveniently forget that the cost-per-seat to put in light rail is ten times what it would cost to put it in by widening roads. As a result the transit only sucks off a small percentage of new growth on the roads - the roads are still clogged.

Portland is an excellent example of how mass transit proponents engineered a gigantic con job on a city. Portland would have been far better served by taking a tenth of the money dumped into rail and spending it on more busses and making the bus lines more extensive and frequent, then taking the rest of the money and widening streets. But, busses aren't as sexy as trains, so the trains won so a few dandified Yuppies from the Perl district can ride the train once a month and feel good about themselves helping the environment, while the rest of the teeming poor and illegal Mexicans can't find busses to take them to work on a daily basis, so they run out and buy beater cars and drive them without insurance, then abandon them by the side of the road when they break down and the city has to tow them off.

New York City has a world-class public transit system. If you want to see transit done right, go there.

Ted

Sorry, but drivers do not pay for the full cost and effects of vehicle use themselves. In Portland, there is a billion-dollar sewer project going on to control runoff-caused overflows that go into the river. It has been said that 40% of the runoff comes from roads, yet road- users are paying for none of it. Also, in nearby Washington County, road improvements are being paid for by property taxes (not an uncommon example). And this does not include things like "free" parking.

Overall they pay around 90% of the costs. And of the federal gas taxes collected from ROAD users, around 20% of it winds up going to NON road use. Transit riders rarely pay more then about a third of the actual cost of their ride.

In Portland, there is a billion-dollar sewer project

And I guess you think that if the roads weren't there the rain would not fall from the sky.

Also, in nearby Washington County,

As a proportion, the property owners are the same people getting the benefits to a much greater extent then the transit riders are paying the cost of their ride. You can try and spin it all you want, the bottom line is that transit riders are by far the biggest leaches on the face of the planet in terms of taking money out of other people's pockets who get ZERO benefit from the transit and putting it into their own.

Just for fun, why don't you come up with an example of property owners in one state who are paying property taxes that are then used to fund either road or transit construction in some other state. I suspect you'd be hard pressed to even find an example of this happening between two cities that aren't conjoined. Yet you have no problem with people in Bumfrick Nebraska being taxed on their gas and then that gas tax being sent 2000 miles away to Portland to fund the transit ride to work for eco minded snobs who think the rest of the country owns them nearly free rides to work.

If you like transit so much, why are you unwilling to have the LOCALs pay for it?

I agree. But this isn't the problem. The problem is in Portland that the rail transit lines do not go to where most people need them to go. They go to politically expedient locations, not practical locations. They follow routes that are far away from businesses because the land was cheaper there. They have far too frequent stops downtown (there are some rail stops that literally are within 3 blocks) and out in the remote ends of the line, the stops are very few and far between and do not have good bus service.

And in any case, for what was spent on MAX rail, many more people could have been carried on busses, and the bus lines made to run far more frequently.

Ted