City of Austin says $275M is needed to build first phase of urban rail network

Comments

• Why is urban rail better than buses???

  $275 million could buy a HUGE fleet of buses, which would have flexibility when routes need to be adjusted. Rail costs $100M per mile, and if the route has few riders, well, too bad! We'll just spend another $100 million to move the route....
  
  Using bonds to pay for it is selling our children into slavery, and taxation without representation, because no one represents the wishes of children too young to vote on how their future taxes will be spent. The will be burdened with paying for the trains or any other expensive toys that we buy with bonds.
  
  Recommendation: Vote against rail and call for buying more buses.

  Posted by Mark O. Hammontree May 25, 2012 22:17:34

• light rail not going to where the majority of people commute from???

  aside from the costs involved, it looks as if the progressive folks at city council will pass the next step in the light rail plan so lets see if their routes make sense. according to the numbers above, only 5265 people live in the mueller area and work downtown. now the train will of course pick up a few more people along the way. the soutwest side of town has 24,686 commuters to downtown. look at the map of future rail lines and you see nothing planned for the southwest side of austin. is it just me or does that not make a lot of sense? if the city is going forward with it's future plan of shiny trains running through this town, lets lay the tracks where the majority of people are going to use them to commute back and forth to work and hopefully reduce the number of cars on the roads during rush hour.

  Posted by Brock May 24, 2012 11:12:42

• More trains

  It's pretty rough to talk about a very limited rail system for sooo much money, just because someone sees some Fed money available to grab (which they can't really afford either right now). I would ask why we are still looking at the antiquated rail system when Shanghai, China is working hard with GM to put in the urban, all electric 'slot car' system in their city, which will end up more versatile, and handle more people on their own independent schedules. And why rail?- if the train is like the current one in use- very, very limited in capacity and destinations. I'd rather see an asphalt, two lane, medium and large bus sized, bus-only track that has more capacity and more flexibility, and could be driven by electricity, or natural gas. it would be more similar to a medium shuttle bus service, as one sees in cities like Las Vegas, but on their own, traffic free, roads for the long treks into, or through, Austin, then the shuttles can split off into regular traffic and drop folks off closer to desired destinations once in Austin. Once upon a time, the car-pool vans were said, by Cap-Metro, to be the only profit generating operation. Why are the big buses not used like a school bus for large companies like Motorola, Applied Materials, Apple, etc? Again, even starting that would take no construction revenue to get things started and see immediate results vs 2021 for a very high cost, very limited train system. I think the 'band wagon' needs to be closely looked at before jumping on and spending money. An idiot can do anything when given enough money, but the smart fellow is the one who does more for less. Return on Investment (ROI) should be a primary thread in any project- even when 'funded by the government' because in the end, it's being funded by the People, and I think the true majority wants a decent ROI. And I'm not sure, but, for the funding example mentioned, I figure by 2021, all the parking meter money would have already been allocated to other things by then- people in charge don't usually let revenue go un-used for very long, which means another cut to find elsewhere when the time comes. The object of this affection had better be able to pay it's own way- that should be a first level priority. When money flows, like in the dot-com days, care-free projects can exist, but when things get tight, some level of logic should prevail. And regardless of cash-flow, government should always work the tighter side of the line, and try to keep things as stable as possible in the ups and downs. Of course, some just see the immediate result of the construction that takes a long time creating jobs- but the real jobs will come if Austin does things that honestly produce, and not just give the look of doing good.
  Instead of status quo, and consultants, why not throw out a One Million dollar prize challenge to the engineering/economics team that can find a solution to the problem that meets the requirements of low cost, easy to maintain, etc?
  

  Posted by Small Business Guy May 23, 2012 17:15:23

• Urban Rail Too Expensive

  At $100M per mile this rail system is ridiculous. Expanding our bus system and adding express busses would serve more people and provide flexibility that rail cannot at a much lower cost. The annual operating costs are expected to be $16M but they anticipateticket sales to contribute only $2.5M or about 15%. How will this ever make sense?

  Posted by Richard May 23, 2012 16:33:32