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Is this your idea of a good place to wait for the bus?
If you could not see to get off the bus, would you get on?
Are you a dedicated transit user and think that your system could be better? Do you have an opinion that you would like to share about how it is? Do you know how to make your system better? THEN here is your chance to tell it like it is. Are you a transportation manager, driver, supervisor? Then what is your view of the industry in which you work?
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Click picture for larger Is this your idea of a good place to wait for the bus? If you could not see to get off the bus, would you get on? |
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In large metropolitan areas 100% of the daily commuters are transit dependent. Whether they board a subway train, city bus, paratransit vehicle, drive their private automobiles, cross water on a ferry, or even take a taxicab, they are fully dependent upon the functioning of the mass transit systems to make it possible to arrive at work at all. Those people who feel that they |
should not fund mass transit projects with fuel taxes because they drive their own automobile erroneously discount the value of not having the hundreds of thousands of other commuters on the highway competing for "their lane space" and their parking space at the office. Consider this: the 200,000 daily rides that the Long Island Railroad carries into and out of |
Mahattan every day would require an additional 12 lanes of freeway along with 12 lanes of tunnel or bridge, in each direction to accomodate the same volume of people carried on the three tracks that cross into Manhattan. Let's try to pay for that with fuel taxes and see how long it would take to complete that "big dig." |
| Commentary: On April 25, 2004, The Sun in Baltimore, MD ran a piece titled "Easing Beltway traffic with no room to grow" by Stephen Kiehl. In this article the author cites a brief history of the Bwltway as being started 50 years ago and encompasing a length of 52 miles. He further describes a few of the widening projects that have been undertaken. Each of these phased "improvements" have failed to meet the demands of the motoring public, has further degraded the air quality of the region, and made living near to the pavement less desirable. Eventually only persons who are deaf and cannot smell will be able to enjoy their proximity to the convenient, albeit slow, access to the world. |
The Box Thinkers
Award goes to those people who believe in steadfastly holding on to the
antiquated idea that you can pave your way out of conjestion. At the price of
around $1 Billion we can make a temporary fix by adding lanes to the Beltway
from I-70 to Frederick Road interchanges and from Harford Road to the I-83
interchange. The box thinker says that about 178,000 vehicles per day use the westside loops at Frederick Road and that you can divide the costs by that number to see how many people will benefit from it. If we take one-half of the billion dollar cost and assign it to the westside projects, and we use the real number of beneficiaries, we get a much higher cost per vehicle. |
Only about 2,000
vehicles per lane per hour can traverse any section of highway assuming that
there is no accidents or breakdowns. With a 2 hour peak period, we have 4,000
vehicles to benefit from the addition of a single lane of pavement. The true
cost per vehicle is $125,000 or $48 per day for 10 years of weekdays. Weekends
are discounted because the existing roadway will handle Saturday, Sundays and
the non-peak hours. Conservation is the key to saving money and our lungs. If one in five people used transit or carpooled, the need to build more lanes would go away. But we continue to coddle motorists and ignore the adverse impacts on our environment, and we are to blame for the problem. More |
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