A light rail tidbit from KHOU-11:
These are the first cost and ridership estimates: The Richmond allignment [sic] in this section would cost $90 million to build, $9.8 million for property and generate 1600 riders; The so-called Clutterbuck alignment would cost $215 million, require $17.3 million for property and generate 700 riders. That’s more than double the cost of the Richmond alignment with less than half the riders.
I don’t think it’s clear where Jeremy Desel is getting these numbers from — there is a link to a pdf document that provides the numbers in the above quote, but doesn’t say what entity provided them. Metro Board Chairman David Wolff is quoted in the story, but not in giving those numbers.
If those are Metro numbers, it would be wise to take them with a grain of salt. As we know, Metro has a tendency to be dishonest when it reports ridership. If one person makes multiple boardings, Metro counts each of those boardings as riders. That’s how Metro comes up with fantastical announcements like this:
Sometime Friday, August 4, the 25 millionth passenger will board a METRORail train, marking yet another milestone in the history of the 2 1/2-year-old light-rail line.
And this:
MetroRail officials say they could easily use 15 more cars because Houston has reached its capacity, transporting about 12 million passengers a year. They didn’t expect to reach that level of ridership for another 20 years.
Using Metro math would get my kids an F in school.
ADD ON: Following up on Matt’s doing-the-math comment here, a big gripe of light rail proponents is the Katy Freeway expansion. But let’s do the math on that: if the Katy expansion cost is close to three billion dollars, and there are 220,000 drivers per day on the Katy, that’s a per rider cost of around $13,600. Using the figures (of unknown origin) in the KHOU story, Matt’s math says the Richmond line would have a per rider cost of $62,000.
Now, wouldn’t it be interesting if Metro had started off with two commuter rail lines — one along the Katy Freeway, and one along the Hardy Toll Road (with a little something that could service IAH), both ending at a transit facility near downtown. Riders would then take buses to their final destinations. That’s the type of rail I used when I live in the S.F. Bay Area, and commuted to San Jose. And that’s a rail plan I could support — getting serious numbers of drivers off the freeways, and putting a serious dent in congestion.
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