‘Viable’ key word for any future plan

I recently received the latest newsletter from the Spokane light rail folks. In it, they show five alternatives from downtown to Liberty Lake plus a “do nothing” sixth. Four of the five alternatives involve diesel railcars or diesel buses, or a combination thereof. As far as I’m concerned, a smelly diesel bus is a smelly diesel bus, even if it does run on rails. Thank you, but no thank you.

That leaves the electric trolley/interurban option. I’d love to see it. I’m a model railroader with an interest in “traction,” another name for electric rails. Nothing would please me more than a viable electric interurban from downtown, through Spokane Valley, to Liberty Lake. Or even on to Coeur d’Alene like the old ones. But “viable” is the thorn in the rosebush. I just don’t believe it’ll be anything but a drain on the taxpayers, local, state and national.

Portland has a great light rail system. Ridership is more than 100,000 a day, some of which can be attributed to the fact that in a large area centered in downtown, including a 36 block long “transit mall,” riding is free: no fare for bus, trolley or interurban. A cursory search turned up nothing on the latest year’s budget figures, but in 2001 revenue from fares was $15.7 million and subsidies were $24 million. So fares only provided about 40 percent of the $39.7 million total revenue.

The BART system in the San Francisco area has more than 300,000 riders a day, some of the highest per mile fares in the country, and still only derives about 58 percent of operating costs from fares.

The rest comes from subsidies, which include a surcharge on sales taxes.

These figures are from operating budgets and do not include recovery of the considerable capital construction costs.

The construction costs for the latest extension of the rails in Portland came in at $26 million per mile. The estimate given for a system here, in 2008 dollars, is more than $41 million a mile. That’s either allowing for a lot of inflation or a lot of pork, or we’re going to have the Taj Mahal of light rail. And then there’s the question of ridership here. Unless my memory is faulty, there was a report a year or two ago that said ridership wouldn’t be anywhere near enough to justify the system. Other studies have claimed that light rail riders in other cities are mostly drawn from bus riders, with little reduction in auto traffic.

I’d really like to see interurbans speeding through the Valley, with only the quiet hum of the electric motors and the hiss of the trolley on the wire. I just don’t feel justified in asking the taxpayers to finance my enjoyment.

I did run across what seemed to me to be an unbiased assessment of light rail, given by the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank. If you’d like an opinion with more authority than mine, take a look at: http://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/br/2003/d/pages/2-article.html.