1. Many light rail riders – as much as a third in Dallas – were riding buses without complaint before the trains started. Their use of trains did nothing to reduce congestion or pollution.

2. Many bus riders saw increased commute times after trains started, as bus routes were rerouted to feed trains and increase reported train ridership.

3. Transit authorities count each one-way, unlinked trip as an additional rider, intentionally obscuring the fact that the number of people using trains is less than half their reported ridership.

4. Free parking at transit stations leads many car commuters to utilize teh last few stops as parking garages to avoid downtown parking fees. These “riders” are really car commuters whose parking costs are subsidized by taxpayers.

5. Pollution from heavy equipment used to build the rail lines will exceed many years of the reduction in commuter pollution.

6. Congestion around transit stations increases the overall pollution in a city. So does the traffic stoppage and traffic rerouting during both construction of tracks and operation of trains. Together with the heavy equipment increase in 5. above, the added pollution likely exceeds any “green” benefits of light rail.

However, I still use a car when going downtown in the evenings and weekends. Trying to use a car on a workday 9-5 is usually slow and expensive for parking.

In practice, it’s a near complete failure – ridership is nowhere near the projections used to justify the expense, and even with costs sunk, it’s nowhere near operational profitability. Economically speaking, of all the ways to transport people between cities, rail is perhaps the stupidest. Nowhere else do we see the confluence of extraordinarily high infrastructure costs (land, construction, equipment, facilities, etc.) and extraordinarily high operating costs (labor, maintenance, fuel, utilities, overhead, etc.) combine with extraordinarily low demand by commuters to produce such little tangible benefit. The bottom line: rail sucks.

Just a thought – once you get the numbers (and win the bet), maybe you could use the proceeds to sponsor this mass transit initiative….

Rubber-tired buses are also preferable; cheaper, better economies of scale, need less capital investment, can reroute around obstacles, and can go anywhere. Even dedicated busways make more sense than light rail, although I’m not convinced the capital investment makes sense there either.

(Incidentally, much of the point of this line was lost when the MTA caved to political pressure and did not connect the Green Line with LAX airport directly. The pressure was from airport parking, car rental and taxi interests. Tourists and visitors are a constituency most likely to use public transport if it’s good enough. It also did not connect with the I-5 and the Metrolink trains on the other end of its run as originally envisaged as well)

The Blue Line runs on streets at both ends of its run (Downtown LA and Long Beach, respectively) but runs on what was once the Pacific Electric dedicated right-of-way for most of the rest of the run. The Red Line also has its own dedicated right-of-way, underground for the first half. The Gold Line to Pasadena runs on railroad trackage as well.

Thus Los Angeles experience is not comparable at all with street-running light rail, and is a more desirable (albeit, I’m sure, more expensive) system.

LA also has an extensive urban population who use transit extensively. It’s still notable that bus riders, the Bus Riders’ Union, sued the MTA to halt rail construction and use the money on less expensive and more widely-used bus service improvements.

-Ridership is low.
-It screws up surface streets – they couldn’t be bothered to elevate, excavate the rails or suitably adjust the streets. They share and that sucks.
-It is slow relative to auto travel (see above about streets). If you want me to use it, it has to superior to my current solution, a car. I used it now and then, when I was attending San Jose State and worked along the line. This is when I learned that I could regularly “beat” the train when going to school.
-Schedules suck. The subway is useful because the wait time between trains is not bad. This is due to decent ridership – which we don’t have.
-IT DOESN’T PAY FOR ITSELF. I should have said this first and left it at that.

Again, municipal rail systems suck without high ridership, which is engendered by high population density. It is something for bored transit and urban planner folks to do.