It’s the only way to force toy trains on people that otherwise wouldn’t want to pay for them. Force the above mentioned government mandates, and you artificially create a crisis. People are only willing to fund something this big, if there is a crisis. If energy prices were low like they would be in a free supply and demand society. We wouldn’t be wasting our money on these trains. Instead, we would be spending it on alternatives that actually show promise
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Thanks for a very well thought-out analysis.

However, I happen to think we’re in big trouble as far as oil supplies, and if a major oil crunch comes, light rail will be more useful in many cities than it is today.

Other Midwest cities do not have this advantage, including cities like St. Louis, Milwaukee and my native Minneapolis. The difference is striking. In the Minneapolis-St. Paul region, we will soon see the opening of the Northstar commuter rail line linking the Minneapolis CBD to the northwestern suburbs. Minneapolis has a much smaller downtown employment level, somewhere in the range of 140,000 to 150,000. This is reflected in the poor ridership numbers forecast for the service. The latest forecasts estimate between 5,200 and 5,900 boardings per day, even less than the Milwaukee proposal (despite costing more: $320 million). Worse yet, many of these boardings will simply be former bus riders from eliminated or drastically reduced express bus service. I predict that the impact on traffic will be nil. I also estimated the total subsidy per boarding to be around $18.

In debates about rail transit subsidies are a major issue. Rail proponents get defensive when the large per-rider subsidies are mentioned. They often respond that public transit systems should not have to be profitable, after all highway networks aren’t, right? Leaving aside the problems with public ownership and finance of roads, I agree tentatively that profitability need not be the end result. Yet the further a project diverts from profitability, the less likely it is to yield net social benefits, since most benefits derive from actual use. This is also the case with most new rail systems, since they are often sold in terms of benefits of avoided auto use.

A good way around this is subject projects to standard benefit-cost analysis. Yet this is no guarantee that a sound decision will result. If the results are unflattering, public officials are usually able to ignore them and continue on, as in the case of Minneapolis’ Hiawatha light rail line (B/C ratio: 0.42). Or, as in the case of the Northstar Line, they can continue to fudge the numbers until they get something they are comfortable with. To the best of my knowledge, Northstar has been subject to three separate B/C analyses. The first two came in well below 1. The third, using some questionable methods and assumptions that ranged from unconventional to fraudulent, ended up at 1.15. One of major differences was that the third evaluation added benefits for improved highway speeds, with increases of up to 8 mph by 2020. Needless to say, none of this will come to pass.

The moral of the story is that in cities where the CBD is no longer primal in terms of regional employment, efforts to build fixed rail systems will be essentially useless. Also, because of their low demand, their effects on issues like energy consumption, pollution and climate change will be negligible. If you choose to believe that peak oil will be a catastrophic event for the U.S., suit yourself; but whether we have fixed rail systems or not will probably be immaterial.

But that has absolutely no bearing on any other city. You might say that, as Sunsword and Dan have argued, the rail pulled cars off the road. But that’s because there was a lot of pressure on the road. And in places where there isn’t that pressure, like nearly everywhere else, the effect of rail is going to be much less beneficial. If someone can adjust their commute by 15 minutes and see a big reduction in traffic (like in most places) then that’s a lot easier than driving to rail, changing modes, and then doing the same on the way out.

There’s no Rails of Dreams. It’s not a case of ‘if you build it they will come’. In some places, if you build it, people will see it’s better than the alternative. But in most places, it won’t be. And those are the boondoggles, an almost cargo cult mentality of ‘big successful cities have rail mass transit, if we make a rail mass transit system, we’ll be a big successful city.’ Places like where I live in Baltimore, with a heavy rail system that fills up the parking lots yet is still empty for 9 out of 14 hours of operation per day.

Chicago has an advantage in that it is a rail hub for the country. Rail freight runs through Chicago between East and West. So there is already a need for a rail infrastructure. And yes that freight does run on the Metra tracks too. So Chicago didn’t need to build rail just for passenger traffic.

The advantages of passenger commuting by rail in the Chicago metro are many:
(1) Don’t need to pay $20/day to park in the Loop.
(2) Each rail passenger is one less person clogging the road net during rush hour. Chicago metro rush hour is one of the worst in the country — it can take 60 to 90 minutes to travel 30 miles. Dump that extra 100,000+ people per day on the roads and you would see multi-county gridlock.
(3) It is pretty cheap. It IS subsidized but doesn’t need to be. I pay less than $150/month for monthly ticket plus parking. But if I drove my monthly costs would run north of $600/month for parking, gas, tolls, and auto maintenance. So I would pay more for the train — happily.

Many cities have designed their freeways like that, in an effort to privilege downtown at the expense of the suburbs. Free movement from suburb to suburb means many people will rationally decide to avoid urban downtowns entirely, something which smart growthers hate, as do city managers, since that means taxes are going elsewhere and their city is reduced in relevance and prestige. Thus old, powerful urban areas have a big incentive to resist and sabotage transportation plans that move goods and people around them rather than through them.

Go right ahead. Heck, draft a law cutting off federal funding for highways – I’m with you. The more private tollroads we have, the better.

If we did succeed in building numerous copies of Chicago’s Metra system around the U.S. in different cities,

Going by what your fellow Chicagoan, sunsword, said, you can’t duplicate the success that Chicago in other areas. They’re not Chicago and won’t work on a hub-and-spoke system.

Most of the growth in the Milwaukee area is happening north and west of the city. The only purpose I can see to this system is to increase the rate of change of the former industrial cities of Racine and Kenosha into bedroom communities for Milwaukee and Chicago.

In short, it’s a propsal to use 21st century money to provide a 20th century solution to a 19th century problem.

Salt Lake City added one a few years ago, but it seems that it’s one very thirsty, (for money), item. Even though ridership seems to be pretty good, I don’t think it has effected traffic all that much. That is really a SWAG as I only go there about once a year. But SLC continues to grow and sprawl across the Wasatch front so one might have to consider more people to move each day.

Conceivably, a lot of the goods I buy come through Wisconsin on trucks that use those roads, which would justify my having to pay taxes for them (although the interstates were originally designed with civil defense in mind). But if I could prove that few or none of the goods and services I use are dependent on Wisconsin roads being in good shape, couldn’t I argue that there’s no reason for me to pay for those roads?

If we did succeed in building numerous copies of Chicago’s Metra system around the U.S. in different cities, and those rail systems resulted in keeping many cars off the roads (saving wear and tear and also making trucking faster and more economical) as well as in less energy use, lowering gasoline costs for everyone, isn’t that something we should all feel comfortable paying for?