No Light Rail in Vancouver!
Another Day, Another 2 Million Dollars
Rail transit construction is so farking expensive that the people overseeing lose all sense of proportion. Take Denver’s FasTracks program, which is supposed to build about 119 miles of rail transit over eight years for $6.2 billion. That’s more than $2 million a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year.
So its not surprising that Denver’s transit agency, RTD, would casually spend $15 million on land it doesn’t need. That’s $50,000 an acre for land that is pretty similar to other land in the area that normally sells for $10,000 to $15,000 an acre.
RTD agreed to buy the land from the Union Pacific Railroad as a part of a deal in which the UP would relocate some of its facilities to get them out of the way of RTD’s new rail lines. The rest of the deal fell through — UP is not going to relocate — but RTD is still somehow stuck buying the land.
Easy come, easy go.
Meanwhile, Portland’s transit agency, Tri Met, condemned someone’s land and spent
$3 million buying it and planning for a park-
Your first question should be, “If there won’t be enough ridership to justify a $5
million park-
The actual cost is likely to be even higher. The original cost estimate was based
on a direct crossing of the Willamette River. Since it was made, Oregon Health Sciences
University (OHSU) — the hospital that built the aerial tram — began lobbying for
a much-
As former Portland mayor Vera Katz says, “it’s about time we stepped up to help the
city’s largest employer,” meaning OHSU. I suppose she doesn’t consider the $289 million
the city is spending to subsidize OHSU’s South Waterfront campus (see “North Macadam,”
p. 4) to be “help.” When you are spending one-
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Reprinted from The Antiplanner