California Rail Boondoggle
A while back I wrote how the simplest reality checks demonstrated that the ridership forecasts for California high speed rail were absurd. A new study from Berkeley comes to the same conclusion, that the ridership figures are bogus, though they spent a lot more time and money coming to the conclusion than I did.
hunter:
The Houston Metro has squandered literally hundreds of millions of dollars on so-called light rail. All they have accopmplished is to build a system that costs lanes of traffic. negatively impacts flood control, is vulnerable to modest amounts of high water, and is ridden by far fewer people than predicted.
July 6, 2010, 9:42 amAnd this was done not only at the cost of huge amounts of money, but also at the cost of degrading what was once one of the nation's best bus mass tranist systems.
caseyboy:
We're doing the same thing in Florida, Tampa to Orlando.
It is not about ridership. There were probably a few political favors repaid with the awarding of contracts to build the system. Although I don't know this to be true, I'll bet the workers are union, another political favor repaid. If we keep giving up our money without demanding accountability there will be many more government boondoggles.
July 6, 2010, 2:22 pmfiftyville:
Our light rail doesn't go anywhere useful, like to the suburbs where highway commute traffic originates, or to the airport. It takes them years to put in a mile of track. Boondoggle squared.
July 7, 2010, 10:43 pm