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Chapter 1: Light rail, an evaluation

Light rail is increasingly being sold to cities as an answer to traffic congestion. It seems to be proliferating all over the world and any example of it, if enough information is available, can be used to extol its virtues and limitations. They’re all pretty much the same. The one I’ve chosen to use as an example is the Minneapolis/St Paul 6 mile line with 17 stations called the Hiawatha. They say it’s 12 miles long but it’s only 6, it travels from Minneapolis to the airport and back. (I wouldn’t however actually call it typical. I expected it to be much longer and faster). The area around Minneapolis/St Paul is pretty level without troubling obstructions that require special attention, like mountains or canyons. It does have a lot of lakes but they are no problem. That permits me to propose a simplified method of providing a transportation service that is considerably more efficient and cost effective. The Hiawatha has been in service since 2004, It’s very attractive and I assume about average in capacity. It has 24 cars, seating for 66 and 120 standing. It runs one car every 7 1/2 minutes from 6 am to 9 am and 3 pm to 6 pm which is its most frequent schedule. It can use a second car when necessary, it also has a less frequent nighttime schedule. Each hour during that period it can carry 528 passengers sitting and an additional 960 standing for a total of 1480 people per hour, (8 cars per hour), twice that when each train has a second car. The construction funding according to Metro Transit totaled 715.3 million dollars or 119.2 million dollars a mile. I didn’t expect that either, it seems pretty expensive; that is for 2 tracks however. I can visualize a few things that I believe will describe its characteristics, some general information and assumptions are helpful: it has to stop at each station for the same amount of time whether there’s anyone there or not in order to maintain the schedule, for several hours in the early morning or late evening the number of passengers is likely to be fewer than 10, after that there will be 5 to 30 passengers at each stop. During rush hour the seats will be filled in the first few stops, some people will get off, more will get on. By the one third mark, about 2 miles, there will be limited standing room, or none, as more people get on than off. Since not everyone wants to go to the end of the line the crowdedness will diminish with each stop after the two-thirds point. The trains, on average, probably run half-full, that is, less than 400 passengers per hour for its full 24hour period. Their web site says it has 34,000 boarding’s a day which would correlate to the people that boarded and left a few stops later and the space was filled by a later boarder. That also means that on average half the people were standing for their whole trip. The average trip length must be about 2 miles. The travel time with 17 stops in 6 miles and a top speed of 40 mph is 35 minutes or 10.3 mph. Not quite as fast as a bicycler but could probably beat someone on roller skates. For a distance of less than 1/2 mile between stations it will run at top speed for 19 seconds. The Metro says it will open up the area to new jobs amounting to 68,000 by 2020. I wonder if anyone can explain to me how a 3000 passenger per hour rail system will support 68,000 workers? It appears then there will be 11,000 new jobs every mile along this line, or 2 jobs per foot. If the new workers occupy all of the seats on the light rail that will mean 62,000 new automobiles in the area also. Do you ever have the feeling the taxpayers were conned? In an area where there are 3 1/2 million people this 715 million dollar project does seem pretty irrelevant.

Is this what people want? I doubt it; they’re just taking it because there is no other alternative that’s any better. Most are former bus riders who will ride anything regardless of the inconvenience. They are socially and environmentaly conscious and want to do the right thing. They would like to have other options to choose from: they probably want good service to their door, faster trips, not to be crowded in like cattle, to be able to sit down, to bring packages that can be conveniently set down during the trip. Many more responses to that question come immediately to mind but people can’t voice them because there has been no other choice; other than driving their car, which, by the way, has those attractive characteristics plus a heater, air conditioner and radio.

In my observation of life for the last 70 plus years there are things about people that have struck me as being quite relevant to the issue at hand. One of those things is that people’s awareness extends in about a 30-foot radius around them at any time. Walking down the street, driving their car, going shopping etc. This is to prevent their brains from being overloaded with extraneous junk and therefore leaves them relatively open to make decisions quickly in emergencies, for instance; in the case of a lion attack.

The downside of that is that it’s very difficult for them to visualize or understand the enormity of our civilization or the enormity of the problems...