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| Re: Study Re: Here comes Staten Is. Light Rail (268663) | |||
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Re: Study Re: Here comes Staten Is. Light Rail |
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Posted by WillD on Sun Jun 18 18:15:40 2006, in response to Re: Study Re: Here comes Staten Is. Light Rail, posted by Olog-hai on Sun Jun 18 14:24:04 2006. Don't you mean "pothead interns"?... Even worse, it's by URS Corporation—a government contractor that'll say what a politician wants them to say.No. I've worked with stuff from URS, compared to groups like Pennoni, Urban, and other firms they're damn good, right up there with Parsons and such. When I was surveying my boss loved the stuff they'd feed us and when I was with Philly water the contract drawings done by URS were among the clearest and best done drawings we had. This as compared to the crap we got from Pennoni which was cluttered and sometimes ambiguous. It's clear you have no experience with these companies, otherwise you wouldn't have stuck your foot in your mouth. (What the hell do they know about rail? I'd believe a foamer before them. Another strike against them, being based in SF.) Yes, San Fransisco, home to perhaps the best modernized trolley system and the worst heavy rail system in the US. However their numbers were based on SIRT and NYCTA's heavy rail figures, not BART's. As for what they know about rail, try their site. Next time you ride the F into Queens remember that the firm you labeled a 'Pothead Intern' designed the steel that keeps the few million pounds of dirt off your hollow head. Plenty of "reports" and "studies" that skewed things in favor of high platforms, remember . . . ? meanwhile, Metrolink out in LA and GO Transit in Toronto show that low platforms can indeed be equal, if not superior. Yeah, on the East Coast, because the PRR and NY Central couldn't settle on a standardized height and the second rate railroads like the EL and such didn't order actual level boarding low floor cars. Now with federal money the high platform is unfortunately winning out around here simply for standardization. But the rest of the country outside two lines in Chicago is pretty staunchly low platform, and you'll find few reports out there today that reflect the idea that high platforms are the way to go. They would be creating new crossings thanks to encroachment. They're trying to go the cheap route and avoid building a new elevated structure. Well no kidding. Why would they want to blow billions that could go elsewhere on grade separation for an area which is basically suburbia? Even the heavy rail alternative does not use a full elevated structure but instead goes for pedestrian overpasses to access the bike trail at certain points. Remember LRVs getting knocked off the track by dumptrucks at grade crossings in Jersey City? I remember one instance of that, and nothing else. However, in this case we're not dealing with a city growing up around the light rail line and the truck traffic that would bring. This would be just a few grade crossings which would cost unneccesary millions of dollars to eliminate which would really only see traffic going to the small shipyards north of Richmond Terrace. You'd spend millions building an elevated section to eliminate the crossing of a few hundred cars per day, if even that many. Subway surface is trolleys, not modern light rail. Further, look at the capacity to operator ratio, never mind capacity of vehicle. Start putting POP on your subway-surface, and watch headways get longer, longer, longer—look at what happened to the Newark Subway. (And the lovely "study" thereof distinguishes "streetcar" from LRT.) Fine, since you insist on splitting hairs, the Portland TriMet system runs headways of less than 4 minutes between Beaverton TC and Gateway TC, and the new Yellow line knocks that to less than 3 minutes through the center of the city. That being said you're comparing apples to oranges, since LRT systems built to this point simply have little need of Lexington Avenue-like frequencies. Even tremendously successful systems are still fighting an uphill battle against the car for ridership, and in some cases the population simply isn't dense enough. Either you accept that an established system like SEPTA or the MBTA's Green Lines is an example, or your argument is moot (and you also never said 'modern' LRT). Of course we could look at Europe and likely find plenty of modern LRT systems with headways lower than the Lex and ridership numbers likely even higher. But then why would you want to spend the extra money to build a heavy rail system for a location so clearly devoid of population density? The line can always be upgraded down the line, but while LRT might actually stand a chance of getting built if you insist on heavy rail nothing will get done since the politicians will look at the area and balk at such a boondoggle in the making. Why would they do that? Remember, they're pushing for the cheap version of light rail. With an estimated cost of 68 million dollars per mile it's not really that cheap an LRT system. It's more expensive than Phoenix, San Jose, Denver, Minneapolis, Charlotte, or Portland's systems on a per mile basis, and is equal to the cost of the St Louis Metrolink system, which included some tunnel construction in downtown. Now that's still a far cry from the 100 million per mile HBLRT system, so clearly folks have learned their lessons from that overbuilt system. However, crossing gates at the few grade crossings would likely run a few hundred thousand dollars per installation, so it'd really be a minor cost to cut if they were looking to save money and be 'cheap'. Yeahh, for $1 billion. If they had actually used people at NJTRO for the project instead of giving it to political hacks (they're only doing that now since the Comet V debacle), it would have cost a third of that, and they wouldn't even have had to buy the ROW from CSA 1 billion for 34 miles of rail through the most densely populated state in the nation is nothing to sneeze at. If NJTRO had taken the line without purchasing it from CSAO we'd have GP40PH-2Bs sucking back 8 times the fuel per trip and running every two hours on a schedule which may or may not get held up by a freight somewhere on the line. |
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