 When I was living in Oregon there were several attempts by the City of Portland to build a lightrail system. Despite the fact that most people didn't want a lightrail, the City succeeded in getting it built. Now that I live in Arizona I'm running into the same problem. The City of Phoenix wants to build a lightrail.
I think lightrails are a bad idea pretty much all of the time. But lots of people don't really think about it. So maybe if I explain myself a little bit I'll convince others to dislike lightrail as much as me. And then maybe cities won't waste tax dollars on these things.
It all comes down to money and flexibility. In short, lightrail systems are too expensive to build and operate. And at the same time, they offer very limited service with almost no ability to react to changes in the community population centers.
I don't know the actual dollar amounts that were eventually spent to develop the Portland lightrail system. I seem to recall (but this has been a while) that the figure was somewhere around 4 billion dollars. Now the Portland metro area has a population on the order of 1 million people. So if you figure out the cost per person it is approximately $4000 per person. This seems extraordinarily high for what we get.
This doesn't count for the cost of opperating the lightrail. The Portland lightrail doesn't support itself through ridership fees. But I'm not sure that any mass transportation system could be entirely self-sustaining. Several years ago I worked at a company that was located near the lightrail line. In order to increase ridership, the transportation organization for the city was asking all employers near the line, mine included, to demonstrate a certain level of lightrail ridership. If the company was unable to show it they were fined by the city.
As bad as the costs are, maybe it's worth it in order to have a mass transportation system. But there are other problems with lightrail.
Riding the lightrail to get somewhere is very slow compared to driving there in a car. I've ridden the lightrail to destinations to compare the time against driving in a car. It is always at least twice as slow. It's true that during the ride I could be doing something useful with my time, like reading or working on a laptop, but honestly, I'd rather spend the extra time with my family. My commute in Phoenix is about 35 minutes each way. If there was a lightrail route that took 70 minutes each way I'd be losing over an hour each day that I could be spending with my wife and kids.
But maybe we shouldn't be so concerned with getting places quickly or spending time with the family. And since everyone doesn't have a family that they want to be with, maybe lightrail will still work for them.
There's still a problem though. And I think that this is the largest of all problems. A lightrail system simply isn't flexible enough to get people where they want to be. Consider the Phoenix metro area. It is approximately 60 miles square. Suppose a lightrail was built in a cross shape from top-to-bottom and side-to-side. That would be 120 miles of lightrail (a huge amount!) but what would it cover? We'll suppose that the farthest a person would be willing to walk to a lightrail is 0.25 miles. So the lightrail cross would be 0.5 miles wide and 60 miles long, times two. That covers 60 sqaure miles. The metro area, being 60 x 60 miles is 3600 sqaure miles. So the lightrail has a reach of around 1.7% of the total area.
So, spending about $1000 per person for a transportation system that only covers less than 2% of the area seems like a bad idea to me.
And once the system is built it's not moving. If people start to move away from some population center to another (which seems to happen about every 10 years in the city) then the lightrail gets left behind. Soon you have a lightrail running through parts of town where no one wants to live and no one wants to visit.
Personally, I don't like to drive. I think that driving a car is a waste of time and is pretty dangerous. I eagerly look forward to the day (hopefully in the next 20 years) when I don't have to drive to get wherever I want to go. But I can't possibly see how lightrail is going to be the solution I'm looking for.
I'm convinced that lightrail is a terrible idea because the expense is so high and it is so inflexible.
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