One of the reasons that was promoted was that we were gonna have a shitload of people from Europe show up in Houston for the games. Europeans are all used to using trains, so therefore we gotta have a train.
The vast majority of people in government are fools. The clownshow that runs the Houston MTA were too dumb to get jobs anywhere else.
The mass-transit haters would certainly not have funded a monorail.
Houston drivers have gotten much better at avoiding the train–most of them are really not that stupid. The guy in this video really had to go out of his way.
How many businesses on Fannin did go bankrupt? Name a few…
Las Vegas’ monorail is a great example of what not to do for a city the size of Houston. Not only is Houston much, much larger geographically, it has a vastly larger population and projected ridership.
Take a look at cities that have sections of both - Tokyo or Seattle might do. Tokyo might actually be the best, since it has just about every possible public transportation option available. There, monorail is used for comparatively little of the total ridership and track lengths. Mostly for short, specialized segments where installing light rail or subways is ill-advised (actually, mostly within amusement parks). The vast bulk of Tokyo’s rail options are full passenger rail, light rail, and subways. That is a city where every square inch of real estate is ultra valuable and one that explores every possible public transportation options, yet in which light rail is preferentially used. Do we need to re-learn a lesson they figured out decades ago?
Even in Seattle, the monorail is a short section of track connecting two heavily touristed points (no real commuter traffic) compared to the much, much longer light rail sections for regular transit.
Las Vegas? Monorail is used to connect a fairly small portion of town that is the most heavily trafficked (by tourists, at that) and already built up. It’s not really designed for the local population.
The same things are true in all these examples. Monorail is used for relatively short segments that connect at most a few heavily frequented locations and for which a full rail system may be prohibitively expensive for the gain provided.
So, sure, it might work within the Medical Center itself, with perhaps a spur to Reliant Park. But it’s ill advised for any length bit of track designed for most long distance commuting.
When did Houston turn into a live action version of the Simpsons? Do we need a shyster singing us the monorail song? Should we rename the city Ogdenville or North Haverbrook?
And meanwhile, the downtown core is being revitalized, due in some part, to the light rail and the improved access it brings. Funny how that works, isn’t it?
It helps when there’s already an existing monorail track built.
And the daily fare is 1.25/Houston vs. 5.00/Las Vegas
So the city government thinks that Europeans use trains, but only if they are at ground level. Now I can’t stop imagining crowds of French tourists throwing down their berets and surrendering at the sight of a monorail.
Yeah, to me it’s like blowing past a crossing guard telling you to stop, or driving around a stopped school bus that has its stop sign extended. I’m having difficulty interpreting the action any other way than an intentional act of selfish assholery or unimaginable stupidity. I can’t believe people have to be fucking trained to interpret flashing red lights, bells, and a goddamned gate blocking your path as meaning “do not proceed.” Besides laying down a spike strip or actual vertical steel bars popping out of the pavement to inhibit your progression, I can’t see how much more of a clue drivers need.
Then again, I live somewhere where I can get stopped multiple times a day on major streets by trains, so maybe it’s practice rather than common goddamned sense.
This article doesn’t mention the locations but six businesses did fail but it’s uncertain how close to failure they were when construction started.
Wow. Welfare and socialism in Texas.
But it’s OK because it benefits business owners and not those government teat sucking poor.
Does that mean undergrounds all over Europe are getting shut down? :eek:
Houston’s toy train only connects downtown to the Medical Center.
The major objection that I have, and still have, to the concept of rail in Houston is that our population density won’t support it. Houston is huge. There just aren’t enough people per square mile to make rail feasible. And yet the braindead zombies at Metro keep telling us about how much we need more rail. They’re hard at work setting up three more lines in order to kill more businesses and cause more collisions.
I rather doubt the main objectives are to kill business and drivers.
As of 2010, Houston was losing about $3.67 per ride on the toy train.
I just saw some new tracks on North Main last weekend. I’m not sure where the tracks were coming from or where they were going to, though. If one were driving 45 north, exited North Main and turned right, the tracks were just a mile or two up the road and looked similar to the Med Center tracks with covered stops, benches, etc.
Dammit, will you all quit with the facts about light rail and monorails? Can’t Clothahump throw out unsubstantiated and unfounded claims in peace?
Lies, damned lies, and statistics. This is one of the most misleading statistics imaginable.
Profitable metropolitan transportation systems do not exist. They are all subsidized to some extent by government.
Take a look at this wiki page and find me a single example of a city with farebox recovery near 100%. It’s particularly bad in the South (lower population density).
At a 32% farebox recovery rate, Houston leads Texas. We’re actually “more” profitable (really, less unprofitable) than Dallas’ light rail system, which nobody seems to complain about to the extent Houstonians complain about theirs.
As a matter of fact, Houston Metro operates one of the least expensive overall systems per passenger mile traveled. The service isn’t so great, but that’s the tradeoff for lower operating expenses.
And for somebody who keeps calling light rail a “toy train”, it’s laugh out loud funny your alternate is a monorail, which is much closer to a toy system everywhere it is deployed. Case in point: Las Vegas, where farebox recovery is only 56% even at $5 fares.
This whole line of argument is idiotic. A better argument is saying that no public transportation (bus, rail, or other) should be operated at all, since none of them are even close to profitable. I can understand that, even if I disagree with it wholeheartedly. But singling out light rail profitability when it is no more or less profitable than the Houston bus routes and more profitable than light rail in most other American cities is just stupid.
I don’t like tossing around arguments about right wing blindness, but this here is a big, Texas sized example of a right wing talking point getting the better of what the numbers plainly say.
Too bad Houston never planned and implemental passenger rail lines to get commuters in from the suburbs. I would’ve taken advantage of a line from my area into the Medical Center (they have this Park & Ride thing that seems to work in other places).
Instead of building commuter rail routes they’ve spent lots of money on highway construction and light rail for the city core. I don’t think traffic congestion and energy use have been eased much.
Remember, any business failures along the light rail route only might have been related to the lengthy construction. Any new business development along the routes, however, surely is due to light rail and never would have occurred otherwise. :dubious:
Yeah, I admit being kind of curious is calculations of light-rail profits take into account the economic benefit to the city overall. Personally, I’m almost inclined to view mass transit in the same vein as fire departments and cops - they don’t generate profit, but they make it easier for others in the city to generate profit.
Yes, these idiots complain about the cost of mass transit. Meanwhile, they sit in their cars, bumper-to-bumper, listening to Rush Limbaugh and others even more stupid them him, while failing to acknowledge that they are being taxed out the ass on the gasoline they are wasting while stuck in traffic. That gasoline tax is used to maintain a 1950’s system. Subsidies? Get a grip on subsidies. The gasoline tax is the biggest subsidy in all of transportation. You think those highways got built and maintained themselves for free? Get on the train, read a paper or play solitaire on your iPad and enjoy your commute. Oh, I forgot, it’s much more difficult to masturbate when you are on the train. That’s why you need your car. Don’t forget the Kleenex. Better yet, keep going around gates, signals, whistles and bells. Darwin will eventually catch up with you.
Well, since I haven’t been doing that, I guess I should complain about you smoking crack before you post bullshit. But I can’t be bothered.
The sad thing is that that might have worked. We had two rail lines already in place, out I-10 and out Westpark. What did we do instead? We tore them up, widened I-10 and built the Westpark toll road. And don’t get me started about how much dope they had to have smoked when they designed the Westpark toll road and bottlenecked it down to one lane just after the SW Freeway. In rush hour traffic, it’s faster to take Westpark Drive with the traffic lights.