« Pork’s dirty secret | Main | Road Pricing Picking Up Steam in Virginia »
December 09, 2005
Number crunchin’ LA transit
Here’s Peter Gordon:
- L.A. County now has five recently-completed fixed guideway lines in operation. They include a $4.7 billion subway that carries slightly over 115,000 riders each day, three light-rail lines that cost almost $1-billion each just to build and between them serve 125,000 riders per day, and a recently opened busway that cost upwards of $350-million to build and carries approximately 10,600 riders per day.
These are all pathetically low numbers. The county's population is 10-million and the average person takes about four trips per day
My students and I recently applied a standard cost-benefit template to the five projects mentioned and found that, all things considered -- including generous assumptions about auto trips diverted and externality costs avoided, these five lines have a net cost to society of $560 million per year.
More here.
Posted by tedb at December 9, 2005 06:45 PM
