The key for us US tax payers is that we are going to pay only once to obtain a 10 year free system. We don’t float no bonds, we don’t pay for tickets afterward, we don’t deal with no political mumbo jumbo, and we just enjoy our new toy.
In Missouri this would add $1.44 to every gallon of gas until the project is paid for including construction and ten year operation costs so metrolink ridership is free for ten years. $1.444.5B gallons1 year=$6.48B enough to pay for STL and KC metrolink expansion and operation. We will have paid the entire cost in one year of high fuel taxes.
Side note–an old filling station down the street is being refurbished, and evidently they’re going to sell hydrogen.
To generate a national supply of hydrogen fuel, couldn’t we eventually take advantage of all the geothermal activity around Yellowstone? Just while we’re waiting for it to blow up, I mean.
The trick, you see, is to redefine “First Class” as “standing room only”; which is preferable, of course, to “Steerage Class” in which large and well-armed robots shrink wrap and then pack commuters into train cars as tightly as physically possible. It’s all part of the Next Five Year Plan.
“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
Another minor nit-pick with your plan is that politicians are notorious for not being able to save money. Some will see that 2 billion sitting there, and would not resist the urge to grab it for some other project or program.
Let’s see, St. Louis has roughly 3 million people living in the greater metro area. Let’s be generous and assume that only half of them need to go to work every day. Why, that’s only 7,400 people per car! See, the trick is to leave the tops of the cars open. If we assume a 60’ x 10’ train car and an average person size of 6’x2’x2’ (a bit generous, but that’s what makes it First Class), you only have to pile them 300 feet high. The moans from the bottom of the pile will probably be a little irritating, but that’s why you have the noise-canceling headphones!
203 cars are required to have the same capacity as the St Louis freeways at any instant in time during rush hour. Not the entire working population
I and another poster were brain storming how we could attract the commuter target market and we hit upon large 1st class style seats.
As long as the Metrolink system expansion cost does not exceed about a three year payback from fuel not purchased by commuters then it is a viable plan and you can do what ever that budget allows.
Without doing the research and detail math let us assume that a metrolink car cost $1m each then quadrupling the number of cars to 806 cars. Then spending $609M additional on more cars and remembering we have $4.5B per year * 3 years = $13.5B to spend we should go for it.
But travel by car is different than travel by train, in that you don’t have a continuous flow of people on and off the train like you do on a freeway. So to estimate your ridership, you’d need to integrate the number of commuters by the average total length of a round trip train ride.
Besides, isn’t your final goal to have the majority of the working population of the city using public transit? It seems like capacity should reflect that.
The freeway delivers x workers into the city over a two (or three) hour time period.
If one million workers need to commute into St. Louis between the hours of 7AM and 9AM (two hour period), then that is what your rail must do.
Assuming 60 people per light rail car, you need 16,667 cars to travel in (and debark the passengers) in that time frame. That’s 138 cars per minute. Hmmm… For a three hour period, it would need to be (16,667 / 180 =) 92 cars a minute. That sounds like a lot. I guess if you have multiple track spurs…
If you reuse the rail cars at twice an hour, you need (16,667 / 6 = ) 2777 cars on the tracks, cycling back and forth.
But your call for 203 (light rail) cars (at 60 passengers/car) carries only 12000 folks.
How many people were you expecting to need to move per hour?
Do all this design gives me a brain ache from time to time. Thanks for the hilariously comical respite.
I would like you for my shrink wrap buddy. (I am a newbie… Please don’t take this for anything other than a attempt to also introduce levity)
Re: “passenger classing” on a public transportation system. When I used “1st class” I meant luxury.
If that is the beef: We now support a class of people with fuel taxes that don’t pay them and those people are bycicalists. Oh fudge this element of the design ts all in the politics and I don’t want to deal with it.
Ooh, please hurry up and implement this! We, the approximately 4.8 million Missourians who don’t live in STL, SPR, or KC, simply cannot wait to subsidize those three cities in their mass transit. We are especially excited about providing each user with free iPods, on-train murphy beds, noise canceling headphones, and pony rides.
He’s also missing that commuting patterns have changed. Instead of a massive flow of people from suburbs X, Y, and Z into city A in the morning and back at night, you have some going into A, some from X to Y, from Z to X, some even from A to Z, etc., etc., etc.
I hope I’ll be allowed to walk to work. 90 seconds, 180 seconds if it’s wet and I have to stay on pavement. I will, however, still accept the free liquor.
Again the train capacity must equal the freeway capacity. the train repalces the freeway. Think about the number of cars on the freeways and assume 1 person per car and do the math that way. Of course by design the system must also have the same valumn rate of flow.
It sounds outrageous but if implemented in all the major metros in the US the price of your gas would go down precipitously because there would be significantly less demand for fuel.
One could come up with a number of how much a price drop by merely back tracking the fuel supply demand curve of the last few years. (I think?)
Swagging it, What would you think of the idea if after it was all said and done your fuel only cost $1.5 per gallon? (Admitedly, with have to ignore geopolitics and OPEC in this first cut analysis)
