So basically, we have this enormous ring of 40 km and 27 stations in the southern Madrid suburbs, that took 3 years and a billion euros to build. In the meantime, my city (about 3/4 the size of Madrid) has been dicking around for 17 years and has spent a similar amount of money to build five frickin’ kilometres out to Laval.
What is WRONG with us?! We need some Spaniards over here, stat!!
And if I lived in Madrid right now, I’d be spending all day riding the thing and having fucking spontaneous orgasms all the way round. GodDAMN I’m jealous.
Wow!! I want to ride those trains!! Read in the presentation, it was the largest civil infrastructure work done in Europe (recently). About 20 miles of track!
This Torontonian stands in the corner in shame… we got half a new subway line, only 6.4 km and 5 stations, late last year after seven years and 950 million Canadian dollars. To ride it end to end takes about ten minutes.
Now they’re talking about maybe being able to build two stations a year, if new financing arrangements are ever put in place. At that rate, it’ll take ten years to extend the line to the point where it connects its natural endpoints and becomes really useful.
At least they’re going to put more money into regional trains and buses around here.
A BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) extension from Colma to San Francisco Airport (SFO) has consumed $1.5 billion for 8.7 miles of track and four stations. Construction started six years ago. At least the SFO station will be spiffy when it opens in a few weeks - it’ll be intermodal, meaning it will link BART, CalTrain SFO’s AirTrain and buses all on one platform.
Around 30 years ago when BART was first built, it had the then-staggering cost of $1 million per mile. Hmmm… sound like a bargain compared to this extension.
Listen, at least you have a metro to your airport, rather than a commuter train and lots o’ buses to the commuter train station and then a stupid fucking bus to the terminal that comes every HALF-HOUR. The fuck?!
(Oh, and Madrid has a new metro line to Barajas Intl Airport too, complete with luggage check-in at the downtown terminus of the metro line. :eek: )
Not an inch of track repaired, not a single rivet purchased, just useless advice from an ever-growing army of lawyers, managers and consultants who, I regret to say, as of last Friday, now do control the London Underground.
After reading the above, I don’t feel so bad for living in L.A., where we now have a 59 mile system on three lines, one of which is the 17-mile heavy rail subway. I’m grateful we’re doing something at last, but there are no plans to put anything out in the direction of West L.A. and Santa Monica–the area where I live.
The subway, especially, was expensive, so much so that my fellow voters decided to ban any more subway construction. The MTA has plans on the drawing board, but the law would have to be overturned first. At least it doesn’t ban light rail construction, and another line to Pasadena is scheduled to open this summer. We have in L.A. a bus rider advocacy group which has managed to convince the L.A. Times that the rail lines are white man’s transport while the buses are overcrowded with working people of color, and that has been a public relations disaster, as well as being completely untrue. So any time the rail system someone talks about expanding the rail system, the bus riders’ group pickets.
Not that the buses don’t get crowded, they do. But I’ve never been in any city that didn’t have crowded buses. I think the goal should be to build up rapid transit systems so people don’t have to stand on the bus for such a long time.