Proposal: Light rail along 275 downtown to Tampa International

[USFMikeB]

Will never work, and will end up a money pit.

[Guest nybullsfan]

Never say never.

As gas gets more expensive, and folks start moving back into the central cores of cities, mass transit will make more sense.

Once the population density gets high enough, it's faster, easier, and cheaper to get around on mass transit.

Gasoline is on its way to $10+ per gallon, and electric vehicles will only be a partial solution.

Suburbia is doomed!

[USFbulls0208]

You have to be sure you're going to have enough ridership to make it work.  In the 4 years since I've been here in Atlanta, I've heard all kinds of complaints saying that no one rides MARTA (bus or train).  I live about 30 miles NE of ATL and our county has its own bus system, but every time I've been on the train, unless I'm right in downtown, there's no one on it.  MARTA goes through some pretty rough neighborhoods and would be extremely dangerous at night. 

Here's the latest issue with MARTA per the Journal-Constitution: http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/marta-loses-riders-after-778226.html

If Tampa does a light rail, they need to be pretty sure that the route it takes will attract riders.  How does HART do there? 

I've ridden MARTA at night. Not an experience I would recommend. Ha.

I hope they could get this done. It would make it a helluva lot easier to go from campus to downtown. I would enjoy that

[macphisto]

Trains are a money pit that do not adapt easily and have no simple system to pay for their maintenance.  The beauty of the gas tax is that it is supposed to pay for roadway construction and maintenance.  A big problem with it is that so often the Feds and the state divert the money to other modes of transportation such as trains.

If there's a population shift, trains do not adapt very easily.  Roadways adapt more easily.  Roads also allow more individual freedom and have a sensible funding system.  Few rail systems can ever pay for themselves nor do they provide the fastest transport due to the need to accommodate so many passengers and potential passengers.

Los Angeles has spent a fortune building a metro system that no one rides.  People look at Charlotte as a great example, yet even Charlotte's ridership is not impressive nor does it pay for itself.  A light rail system is just one more thing that taxpayers have to subsidize because it does not pay for itself.

Gasoline is not likely to hit $10 a gallon.  If it begins to climb then I'd expect the US to open up its coal reserves due to voter demand and begin coal liquification - turning coal into gasoline.  We did it during WWII and it's much cleaner now.  Our coal reserves are so large that we could power all of the world's current energy needs for over 1,000 years if all the oil wells dried up globally.  If gas climbs too high then it will happen.

The solution long term is the hydrogen economy with fuel cells and combustion engines as part of the solution.  Trains need to be subsidized in Europe where people love them.  In the US where people prefer more personal freedom of movement and don't like to adhere to set schedules they will need to be even more heavily subsidized.  The only way a rail line can pay for itself is if it is used for commercial and industrial transport.  If you can couple that to a mass transit system then it could be profitable.  If not, then not so much.

The expense of getting the TB Area on rail would be enormous and the benefit would be minimal.  Everyone would clamor for stations and no one would ride it.  We'd see no real reduction in traffic and would instead be saddled with big bills associated with rail.  It's such a crazy boondoggle that politicians and a few select people love.  The general public won't ride it.

I've been on MARTA.  I've been on the DC Metro.  I've been on the Rapid in Cleveland.  The only one I was thankful for was the Metro because traffic in DC is a nightmare - but the train didn't correct that.  MARTA doesn't even go up into Cobb County - the Marietta area.  It took about an hour to get from Dunwoody to downtown in Atlanta last I road.  It took me 15 minutes by car to get there via I85 and parking wasn't hard to find.  It cost me $2 each way (plus fee to get a fare card), or more than the gas I would have had to buy to get there and back.  So I lost over an hour of my time riding the train and saved no money.  That's what trains do.  And if I actually had to pay enough in fares for MARTA to break even?  As it is it is largely funded by sales taxes.  Fares cover only about 30% of the cost to operate MARTA, so they'd need to charge around $6.50 for a one way trip in order to break even without taxpayers.

So how does paying $13-14 to go from northern Pinellas to USF and back sound?  Granted, that is about a 40 mile round trip for me, so about 1.3 gallons of gas in my car, so $3.90.  That rate INCLUDES the taxes used to pay for Federal, state, and local roadways.  Now if both Pinellas and Hillsborough tack on an extra 1% for sales tax it would work but be heavily subsidized and probably end up with a 35% fare funding while the average joe would be paying an extra $100 per every $10K spent locally per annum.  

[Grateful Dad]

The expense of getting the TB Area on rail would be enormous and the benefit would be minimal.  Everyone would clamor for stations and no one would ride it.  We'd see no real reduction in traffic and would instead be saddled with big bills associated with rail.  It's such a crazy boondoggle that politicians and a few select people love.  The general public won't ride it.

I agree.  And even then, intracity routes make more sense than intercity routes.  This high speed rail thing between Tampa and Orlando will be an albatross.  People are not going to ride the train to Orlando just to arrive and have no car.  That is not our population here.

Looks good on paper, but...

[RickUSF]

Have any of you guys been to Phoenix?  great example of a Light Rail.. people use it to go to Diamondback games, Suns games, Coyote games, as well as Arizona State University

people need to stop being so narrow-minded.  Tampa and Detroit are the 2 worst metro areas in terms of public transit.  How sad is that.

[Apis Bull]

I ride high speed rail from Orlando to Tampa.

[macphisto]

Have any of you guys been to Phoenix?  great example of a Light Rail.. people use it to go to Diamondback games, Suns games, Coyote games, as well as Arizona State University

people need to stop being so narrow-minded.  Tampa and Detroit are the 2 worst metro areas in terms of public transit.  How sad is that.

And they began with ridership of only about 33,000 a day and most were not using it to commute to work.  Two lanes of interestate traffic through a downtown area like Tampa or Phoenix will handle over 120,000 vehicles a day.  An eight lane highway often will see 1,000,000 vehicles a day.  And that's only a segment of the highway.  Couple in all the other routes and you have a mechanism that can easily support a city the size of Phoenix.  The light rail serves less than 1% of the population of the Phoenix metro area and about 2% of Phoenix proper if it is restricted to just the city limits.  All that for about $1.2 Billion to build it with only a 25% farebox recovery.

So that means Phoenix's rail can't break even and never will.  It is a money pit that will be subsidized by tax payers, most of which will never ride it.  It will likely get money from car drivers via the gas tax instead of that money going to improve roads as it should.

Charlotte, the city Tampa loves to point to for light rail, only runs about 20% recovery.  Only two systems generate enough revenue to pay for themselves - Seattle's system (not including the Puget Sound rail - that's a huge money loser, just the downtown stuff) and the Vegas monorail.  That's only for operations.  They cannot pay for expanding the lines or even pay off or pay back taxpayers for building the system. 

But the Vegas system costs $5 a ride, pushing most people into the $12 all day pass or the $28 three day pass.  And it is limited to only seven stations.  The Seattle monorail has two stops and charges $4 for the round trip to go 1 mile each way, so $4 to go 2 miles.  If you have a car that can get 20mpg that trip would cost $0.30 in gas.

Bigger light rail systems would have to charge substantially more than they do to pay for themselves, but if they did that then no one would ride them.  If states passed laws forcing them to pay for themselves then most all the light rail would shutdown.  No US light rail system can pay for itself.

Now, the Hong Kong system does do so, but it can cost up to $6 for a one way fare to go 20 miles on the longest line, but it is run by a private company that wants to make money.  Lease MARTA to a private company that wants to make money and see what happens to fares. 

[USFMikeB]

Now, the Hong Kong system does do so, but it can cost up to $6 for a one way fare to go 20 miles on the longest line, but it is run by a private company that wants to make money.  

Hong Kong has a population density that is 16 times the population density of Tampa.  The point I'm making with that is Tampa doesn't have the population density to make a light rail system work.  Atlanta has a 50% higher density than Tampa, as well as a more centralized downtown workforce, and it doesn't work there.  You have to have the population to make mass transit work financially, and Tampa doesn't have it.  Money pit.

BTW, for those that want to understand the math, Hong Kong has a population density of 16,400 per square kilometer, and Tampa has a density of 2,700 per square mile.  There are 2.6 square kilometers in a square mile.

[macphisto]

Hong Kong has a population density that is 16 times the population density of Tampa.  The point I'm making with that is Tampa doesn't have the population density to make a light rail system work.  Atlanta has a 50% higher density than Tampa, as well as a more centralized downtown workforce, and it doesn't work there.  You have to have the population to make mass transit work financially, and Tampa doesn't have it.  Money pit.

BTW, for those that want to understand the math, Hong Kong has a population density of 16,400 per square kilometer, and Tampa has a density of 2,700 per square mile.  There are 2.6 square kilometers in a square mile.

Very true and great observation.

The most cost efficient way to fund transportation in Tampa is via the road system that is funded by the gas tax.  It makes sense because those that use the roads pay for gas and thus pay for the roads.  I'm not opposed to having good bus systems, though both PSTA and HART would not qualify as good bus systems.  Both need to be subsidized heavily.