John Schneider

I doubt you'd be dealing with a lot of cities to start - half a dozen maybe, the best targets of opportunity. Once the ball got rollling, I'd expect other cities to join in.

Dear KJP, May I use some of the pics above when we (soon) rebuild www.protransit.com -- the site of the Alliance for Regional Transit. They are really good. Thanks, John Schneider

We’re not framing the structure of regional transit in the right way. In fact, the way we’re going about it is counter to how regional transit is valued. Counties – at least in this part of Ohio – aren't the logical building blocks for public transportation. Transit is an urban amenity. Counties and townships are all about getting away for the city, from city-scale services and especially from taxes. It may be a long time before residents of northeast Warren County and eastern Clermont County feel the need to tax themselves for public transportation. A little known fact: several small cities, including Lincoln Heights, Wyoming, Mariemont and Woodlawn, voted for MetroMoves by greater percentages than Cincinnati did in 2002. A few others including Amberly Village, Blue Ash and Indian Hill were not far behind. My guess is that Montgomery and Springdale would like to see more transportation choices too. Were that same vote held today, you might see most of these cities voting in favor of it. And so here's what I’m thinking: that we ought to ally ourselves with some of our progressive neighboring cities in Hamilton County and perhaps beyond – Mason and Middletown come to mind – in a unique partnership for funding better regional transit. All of them can levy earnings taxes. Keep in mind that only one other jurisdiction is needed to establish a post-SORTA transportation authority that could receive Federal funds. Blue Ash would be the most logical partner. Failing that, maybe Wyoming or Mariemont. What would be in it for them? After all, most of these cities already have suburban to downtown service. Well, for starters, I’d ask them where else they would like to go. Blue Ash to U.C. – certainly. Mariemont to Blue Ash, probably. What about Wyoming to Norwood and Oakley? Some of these jurisdictions would want express service, others line-haul service. But, for sure, they are collectively more transit-friendly than Hamilton County as a whole or any of the surrounding counties. Transit could be run as a city-sponsored utility much like the Water Works. It could have an independent board like the Park Board and the Recreation Commission. I believe our city has a lot of competence in transportation projects and that Metro sans SORTA could find a happy home in the city. We today have an absolutely unique asset in Metro, and I think Cincinnati should deal from strength in extending Metro’s services to the region. A totally fresh approach is needed, some original thinking. To me, John Cranley’s idea is a non-starter because it relies on outlying counties to come up with a dedicated funding source. It's not going to happen anytime soon. Appreciate others' thoughts.

I don't think counties are the logical building blocks for a regional transit system, which is inherently urban. To me, it seems more logical for Cincinnati to ally with other cities that have an interest in better public transportation. Wyoming and Mariemont both supported MetroMoves in 2002 by higher percentages than Cincinnati did. So did Woodlawn and Lincoln Heights. Blue Ash comes to mind. Norwood should be in the mix too. The payoff for these cities, which already have routes to downtown, would come in the form of suburb-to-suburb routes and perhaps more frequency and hours of service for their citizens. Over time, this could morph into a complete regional network. Right now, I don't see the residents of northern Warren and eastern Clermont Counties jumping on the protransit bandwagon.

Yeah, except that the exurban counties may even be less supportive of the streetcar. Consider where all the negative streetcar letters in the Enquirer have been coming from. For sure, because of union rules, Metro's drivers -- whoever they are working for -- will be driving the streetcars. I could imagine that the streetcar could actually fare worse under a new arrangement for regional transit.

Here's the problem with the subway tunnels: * You wouldn't use them for the Central Valley LRT (I-75) to, say, Tri-County. It's more direct to use the Northeast Corridor (I-71) line to Xavier and branch north and a little west from there to the Mill Creek Valley. The old Idlewild railyard -- love the name -- at Xavier could also serve the Eastern Corridor along the Wasson Line. * So that leaves the tunnels to be used only by the Western Corridor aliong I-74 to Green Township via, say, Northside. Looking at the votes from 2002, I really wonder how soon Green Township is going to want that service. So I'm not for filling them in. I just don't see a use for them anytime soon. Plus, I think transit is usually more city-friendly when it runs at the surface. But times change. We'll see.

^ All four Cincinnati-area TV stations have had video of Portland's modern streetcars for at least a month. Channel 9 uses it.

Biggest problem is, the old rails are in the center of the street. To conform with ADA and provide level boarding into the cars, you almost have to install them nearer the curbs. Plus, they're bolted rails -- not seamless, welded rails -- so you'd get the clicketty-clack sound when the streetcar passes over the section-ends. And finally, old streetcar rails and the base beneath them might not support the weight of modern streetcars.

A couple of interesting facts learned at the Cincinnati Streetcar Forum today: * Portland's total electric bill for its four-mile, double-tracked streetcar line is around $150,000 per year -- about as much as power as 50 to 100 houses with a total population of, say, 200 to 300 people might use in one year. But that $150,000 worth of electricity moves 3,600,000 people per year on the Portland Streetcar. Kind of puts it in perspective. * Nine percent of the passengers on the Portland Streetcar have nontraditional mobility. They are in a wheelchair, on a motorized scooter, pushing a stroller, pulling a shopping cart or luggage, or they have a bicycle. * Before Tacoma opened its streetcar in 2003, a diesel bus served the very same route. The annual ridership on the bus route was 178,000 passengers. The ridership on the Tacoma Link streetcar traveling the same route today: 800,000 passengers.

One of the things the guy I was talking to mentioned was that Cincinnati had a period of transition in public transit. He said it went old rail streetcars to electrified buses to diesel buses. He said that he thought the electrified buses were better. It may have been the case that the rubber-tired buses which replaced the vintage streetcars were an improvement in ride quality because the old streetcars used bolted rail, not the welded rails used in modern systems.

I don't know of any North American cities that are considering a new system of electric buses if they don't already have them. Seattle has some, San Francisco has pretty many, and of course Dayton. Ironically, what some people see as the defect of the streetcar -- the rails in the street -- is what makes them superior operationally to electric buses. Because city streets are always rough in this climate, the jarring ride of the bus due to potholes and uneven pavement gets transmitted through the bus to the overhead catenary, which really takes a beating as a result. They can be really high-maintenance vehicles. Now consider the rails in the street. They are seamless and provide a super-smooth ride, which results in less catenary maintenance. Plus, the streetcar or light rail system fully covers the cost of maintaining its right-of-way, i.e. the rails, while buses tear up our streets. Note all the large concrete pads being installed at bus stops all around Cincinnati where the buses make ruts in the pavement. But there's another reason. The return current for rail transit is returned through the steel wheels and the rails to complete the circuit. Because buses are grounded by their rubber tires, the return current needs to travel by a second set of overhead conductors, thus making there be twice as much wire to have to look at. Cincinnati was one of only two cities in the country to require its streetcars to return their current through a second overhead wire rather than through the rails because city leaders then worried about stray currents from the rails corroding water pipes and other metal objects near the line. Which can be a problem if the rails are "booted" with rubber jackets to prevent it. This is why you see such a mess of wires whenever you see pictures of old Cincinnati streetcars. It didn't need to be that way.

Chances that the first streetcar will roll in 2011: better than 75%.

^ Wouldn't it be funny if The Big One leaves Kenwood and moves back to Cincinnati in the next year or so? What would they say then?

^ This is so true. Had a beer with a college friend tonight who has been in the corporate rat-race for years. After the breakup of his marriage, he moved downtown, finds he doesn't drive much anymore and generally feels like a kid in a candy shop. He doesn't miss the big house at all.

^ Fewer riders than you'd think. Maybe 2,000 per day. And that was estimated when the CVG hub was a much larger operation. Surprised everyone.

Also Chris Bortz and Brad Thomas will be on 55KRC (AM550) Sunday night, June 1st, at 7:00 - 8:00.

^ The irony of that does occur to me when I post meeting notices, but I always include parking info because most people will drive, and I want the most people to come. On the transit side, I'd advise people to take any bus downtown and then walk east on Fourth Street through Lytle Park to OKI on Pete Rose Way. Probably the best walk in downtown Cincinnati.

Dear Transit Supporter, No surprise: we're driving less -- about 4.3% fewer miles than last year, the first annual decline since 1979 and the largest yearly decline on record. On the other hard, public transportation use is now at its highest level in fifty years, with rail systems showing 6% year-over-year gains. Our region is not reacting to these trends aggressively enough. Let me explain. The Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council of Governments is now updating its 2030 Plan, a document that guides investment in transportation projects here. Ohio and Kentucky will be spending about $4.4 billion over the next couple decades on new and improved roadways, transit, bike and pedestrian programs, freight and information technology systems. Another $2.5 billion will be spent on the operations and maintenance of our mobility systems. Kentucky expects to invest $1.4 billion on roadway projects compared to only $22 million on transit -- fully 63 times as much on a mode of travel that is declining nationwide compared to one that is growing. Ohio's program is a little more balanced. Projected spending for roadways is $2.3 billion. While transit is nominally slated to receive $509 million, about $410 million of this sum is for the Eastern Corridor rail project which, in my view, has little chance of ever getting built. If it does get built, the numbers show that it will be a very poor performer. So that leaves about $99 million for all other transit projects for the next couple of decades. It's still heavily lopsided in favor of roads -- in Ohio, we'll spend about $23 for highways for every $1 spent on transit. I don't blame OKI's planners for this. They reflect the political will of the elected officials of our region. After all, Hamilton County voters defeated the 2002 MetroMoves ballot issue by a large margin. That's the reality. But oil prices have risen 500% since then, and I believe people are now looking for more choices in their transportation options. They are looking for their leaders to stay ahead of the curve. OKI will be receiving public testimony on its 2030 Plan this Thursday, May 29th at 5:30p. The hearing will be in OKI's offices at 720 East Pete Rose Way, Suite 420. There's a big public parking lot right across the street. Here is a link to the 2030 Plan: http://www.oki.org/index.asp Hope you're enjoying this beautiful holiday weekend.

^ I agree, the City needs to lead by example on this issue.

"To put it another way, a new producing area equivalent to current annual production from Iran (OPEC's second biggest producer) needs to be brought on line every year just to keep global production from falling." [ARTICLE FOLLOWS] http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2008/05/oil_price_funda.html

What I want to know is, will there be a thousand pages of "Cincinnati streetcars and light rail" postings before the first streetcar rolls? And the other thing I want to know is, whatever happened to Cheryl Crowell?

^ Good advice.

You've probably all heard of Randal O'Toole, who travels around the country and lectures and writes voluminously against any new rail project, often seizing on the latest topic of the day to find a reason to criticize light rail or streetcars. Lately, he's been claiming that rail transit uses more energy than almost any other form of surface transportation. So Bill Becwar, an engineer from Wisconsin who knows a lot about this stuff, took the time -- and I mean a lot of time -- to completely contradict O'Toole's argument. I've been waiting for someone to do this. It's a long post with lots of links that you really should read. We'll hear this argument in Cincinnati and will need to counteract it. O'Toole is an excellent writer, but he's an ideologue. He cherry picks the "facts" and make heroic and obtuse assumptions and linkages to support his basic argument that any kind of passenger rail is bad. He calls himself an economist, but he's really just a forestry studies grad. He's dangerous because he sounds so reasonable. [bECWAR'S POSTING FOLLOWS] It is no surprise that Randall the anti-transit troubador would come calling to Milwaukee again. The only surprise is that otherwise intelligent journalists believe his lies after all the crazy claims he has made over the years. His carbon claim is only the latest in a long line of half-baked analyses that fall apart once you figure out where he slipped in the ringer. Someday you really need to ask him about the study that "proved" how small a part of the population the Portland light rail serves by including the entire Portland advertising ADI in his calculations. Places such as Vancouver, Washington, which is not only many miles from any light rail line, but in another state on the other side of the mighty Columbia River. This is like claiming that the MCTS #30 route is unsuccessful because so few of its riders are from Sun Prairie. He is widely known as Randall O'Foole outside of his own little anti-tax, anti-transit circle. The claim that transit is less energy efficient is just one of the latest, but a far better question that never gets asked in interviews is why O'Toole is so well published at right-wing think tanks and blogs and so poorly published in peer-reviewed journals. Reality; his stuff is crap and he is a con man with a built-in agenda. He cheats. And not even very well... Why, you didn't even check Wikipedia to verify Randall's math: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_efficiency_in_transportation Let's start with his energy claim. It took me a while to figure out how he got the values he did, but by reading his junk science blogs in detail and furiously berating his accolytes, I was able to figure out what he did. It turns out that O'Toole calculates this value by taking the potential energy in coal (rated at around 26 x 106 BTU / ton), then subtracts all losses of heat, magnetism, electrical resistance and inductance along the way. Then he wizards that result backwards into a different kW-hr number than generally accepted in engineering manuals for the conversion. And presented in BTU, so the average schmoe has no handle on what the hell he's talking about. This is, how you say, not kosher. I can win any marathon you like, out of shape as I am, by simply changing the rules as I go along and redefining what it means to be first. OK, so you don't believe it. Check his website: http://www.ti.org/vaupdate59.html where he specifically choses 12,000 BTUs for a kiloWatt-hour. He says, "The report assumes that one kilowatt-hour of electricity is equal to about 3,400 BTUs. According to pages 260-261 of the U.S. Department of Energy's Transportation Energy Data Book, after accounting for generation and transmission losses the real figure is nearly 12,000 BTUs." What this is, in effect, doing is calculating in the potential energy of the coal and subtracting all possible losses in transmission to you, but then comparing it to the BTU value of gasoline AS SITTING IN THE TANK. What happened to oil drilling, pumping, transporting, refining, storing, transporting again, pumping and evaporation losses? See the problem with O'Toole's magic numbers? Take a value that you don't like, grab a different value that was calculated for a completely different reason, merge them, then work backwards to prove what you set out to show. A number that Randall simply pulls out of his caboose is substituted for a reasonable number found in any engineering handbook. Just Google "+convert +kwh +BTU" anytime to see the accepted number from a wide variety of sources (it's that same 3,413 BTU per kWh that he so airily dimisses). Simply to make sense as a reasonable comparison, the energy of gasoline in the tank should be compared to the energy as delivered, something Randall's invented conversion does not do. And, actually, this approach is completely invalid simply because of the vast difference in rolling resistance between the two modes. 100,000-pound boxcars in level rail yards have often been set rolling by the wind, because the rolling resistance of steel wheels on steel rail is so low. A far more valid comparison is how much energy is actually used to propel the vehicle passenger per mile. On the basis of his massive numbers for losses in electrical generation and distribution, you would be lead to believe that electricity is extremely inefficient and unworkable, with unsustainable losses. Were that really the truth, our entire power generation and distribution network would be nothing but a giant space heater, and would quickly melt into slag. So I have to assume he writes these things by candle light using his kerosene-powered computer. Let's go the other way once, to see how his magic works. According to the EPA [ http://www.epa.gov/oms/rfgecon.htm ] "gasoline has energy content of 114000 btu/gallon." That's 437.8 hp-hr at the usually accepted conversions. Assuming a horsepower of 150 and steady speed of 60mph for one hour, that "proves" that an average automobile in the US is very efficient because it gets 175 miles per gallon. See, we proved it using absolute facts! All you have to do is completely ignore heat losses, mechanical losses, road friction, wind resistance, lubricant viscosity and a few thousand other factors of the sort that O'Toole has stacked into his electrical magic conversion value. Aren't numbers fun? Think maybe this is just another ad hominem attack on poor Randall O'Toole? His extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, especially considering his poor track record. Everytime one of his phantom number sets is exposed to public ridicule by factual data, he shifts to a new matrix of doom. When a schlub like me, who is by no means a transit professional, catches a self-proclaimed guru like O'Toole in so many easily debunkable howlers, it becomes kinda hard to trust anything he says. If he said the sky is blue, I'd want to see an up-to-date report from the National Weather Service and a Pantone Color Chart. My point on mentioning his lack of peer reviewed articles in any respected publication is that he really impresses only those who are already financially, politically or socially inclined to his views, even though his data is pretty shady. In his current example, O'Toole used only highway mileage performance for automobiles, comparing that to the heavy urban performance of rail transit vehicles. I had to email him to get that; it is nowhere in his study. Now if I compare my little Scion XB (33mpg) stuck in traffic to a Ford Explorer on cruise control on an empty highway in the middle of Kansas, it is certainly going to "prove" that the Explorer gets far higher gas mileage. Does that even pass the smell test? How is that not misleading to the point of an outright, concious distortion? O'Toole also includes the energy cost of construction for the light rails, but tacitly assumes that the highway is already there and lasts forever. At $1 billion for the Marquette Interchange alone, is there some proof that freeways come free? How much junk did the construction vehicles there emit over the past three years? And won't we have to do the whole show again in another 40 years? Even his claim that the rail vehicles are impractical because they last too long is ridiculous. This is an advantage? Requiring an all-new vehicle every few years is an energy savings? Not likely. The energy used and CO2 emitted in the manufacturing process alone greatly outweights any supposed savings there. Steelmaking, transportation, plus everything right down to heating the factory and transporting the finished vehicles all adds up. O'Toole has said that a rail line could never quite make up the CO2 emitted in its construction. Like I-94 can? When it has to be rebuilt every 20 years? Go to YouTube and watch the streetcar mechanic in Kenosha change the trucks (the entire pair of motor and wheel assemblies) on a PCC car [ ], which took him a whole two hours, working alone. If someone develops newer, more efficient motors, its no trick at all to put them on in nothing flat. And that's on older cars, which are far less modular than the new ones. San Diego upgraded all of their propulsion control units during the mid-life rebuildings in 2000-2002. To do this, you put a key in the door under the front passenger seat of the car, slide out the control box, and slide in the new, high-tech replacement so it plugs in. You could do that job now with no further instruction. His talk of hybrids is fascinating. It conciously ignores that streetcars were the first vehicles to use such technology, and that this was developed in the 1930s and used on nearly every car since. I cannot believe that he does not know this, so I have to assume that it is more dissembling. Kenosha's half-century-old PCC have had this feature since they were built in 1951, and Chicago's CTA elevated cars have had it since the late-1940s. In fact, because of the lower rolling resistance of rail vehicles, they recapture far more energy than a Prius, which has to store what it can in a battery at far lower efficiency. Yeah, rail's supposed lack of flexibility. That's been argued so much by the antirail crowd. One of the absolute downfalls of the late downtown shuttle in Milwaukee is that no one knew where the heck it went. On one memorable occasion, my son had to tell the driver what the route was. I-94 move anywhere lately? Hasn't been re-routed in decades, even as traffic patterns have shifted wildly - around it. Better: State Street follows the old Indian trail west of Milwaukee along the Menomonee River. To the foot. 175 years later, it's paved, but the same path. Flexibilty means adding to or subtracting cars as needed, giving up to 600 additional seats, without even changing the scedule. And still with just one operator. You cannot do this with a bus, not even the heavily promoted Bus Rapid Transit, which has been a poor substitute everywhere it has been tried. Houston completely dropped plans to expand BRT for more rail after trying both. I'm an engineer, and prefer the real world to such mathematical houses of cards. According to the American Public Transit Association Factbook for 2007 [ http://www.apta.com/research/stats/factbook/index.cfm ] , in 2005 (latest year available) all of the light rail vehicles in the US consumed a grand total of 570,718,000 kWh of electricity for that year. The same reference says that total ridership on all light rails in the US was 17,000,000,000 passenger-miles. That works out to 0.336 kWh / passenger-mile travelled. This is not theoretical, but actual power paid for, actual miles travelled and actual passenger counts, which are gathered from Federal Transit Administration numbers. You go to federal prison for lying on those forms. According to those tables, a typical light rail vehicle in the US consumes about 7.5 kw per mile, and compares pretty favorably to an average US bus, which gets about 4 mpg on diesel fuel. At the current $4.36/ gallon, the bus burns $1.09 every mile, and at the WE Energies retail rate of $0.09 per kWh, the LRT runs on a whole $0.675 per mile. This stuff starts to add up when you go a few million miles a year. As seen above, gasoline is generally accepted to be the equivalent of 114,100 BTU/gallon. At the accepted conversion of 3,413 Btu = 1 kWh, this implies that 1 gallon of gasoline equals 33.431 kWh. So, if a car gets 35mpg in the city, which is pretty darned good, that's 33.431/35, or 0.955 kw/mi. Oh dear... You mean Randall's numbers are crap? Yup. To equal the rail vehicle, a car would have to do 2.8 times better than 35 mpg, which is 99.5 miles per gallon. When one of those cars goes on sale, let me know. It is sure as heck nothing any Prius can manage, unless the car is being pulled by a train. It's the same for O'Toole's bald assertion that the people on taking the train used to take the cheap old bus (which suddenly doesn't look so cheap). Twin Cities Metro Transit ridership surveys found that 2/3's of riders would have driven alone, and 40% were new to transit of any kind. More than half (57%) rider the trains five days a week. Ridership on both buses and trains has increased, with average daily ridership on the light rail there topping 29,000 riders. So - no surprise - O'Tooles pontification that mode doesn't matter is also an empty assertion. On opening day in Minneapolis, riders waited in a four-block-long line downtown to take a ride to Ft. Snelling. Metro had parked a fleet of buses there to spare riders the long wait in the unshaded parking lot. Buses that ran empty all the way back downtown as riders waited patiently for the train, walking right past the buses (now THAT was inefficient!). The Millennium Celebration in Salt Lake City had precisely the same phenomenon, with riders walking between rows of empty buses to crowd onto trains. This drives the anti-railers just nuts, so they simply deny it. Since I have criticized the derivation of O'Toole's numbers, let's look at some facts. The Hiawatha Line in Minneapolis carries passengers at a cost of $0.36 per passenger mile, and the same agency reports that a bus there is $0.80 per pass-mi. (2006 FTA report - http://www.ntdprogram.gov/ntdprogram/pubs/profiles/2006/agency_profiles/5027 pdf ). Surely Randy would say that's a bogus number, reported just to make the rail look good. Sorry, all-bus Milwaukee is $0.96 for the same year, and Racine is well over a dollar. For the year, the light rail carried 8,957,912 unlinked trips (the standard measure of transit ridership) to Metro's total ridership of 73,356,649. And there are only 24 LRTs to 702 buses in the Twin Cities. It cost Metro $18,725,334 to operate the light rail, out of a total operating expense budget of $226,974,595. The light rail also provided 52,584,623 passenger-miles of service to the bus total of 261,745,530, but, since every mile on the bus costs $0.44 per passenger-mile more, carrying those 52 million rail rider miles by bus would have cost an additional $23,137,234.12 per year. On that single basis, even without any of the other well-proven benefits, the entire $750 million price tag for the Hiawatha Line would be paid off in 32 years, 5 months - faster than many home mortgages. It is the same logic that has people buying high-efficiency furnaces over cheap old gas burners; because they pay off in the long run, even though they cost far more to buy. Look hard at those numbers for Minneapolis again: that one, 12-mile long light rail line, operating solely in Minneapolis, provides 12.2% of all transit trips in the entire Twin Cities metro area on 8% of the operating budget and using just over 3% of the transit vehicles. Is it any wonder that a concrete-carrier like O'Toole would be scared to death of that? Check around the country... [ http://www.ntdprogram.gov/ntdprogram/links.htm ] The numbers for Portland and San Diego are quite comparable. There were about 5 light rail systems of any kind in the US in 1979, now there are about 40 different cities with some form of light rail. The anti-transit whiners like Wendell Cox and O'Toole have been fairly successful at delaying first lines where there is no rail, but they have had a notoriously poor record of stopping additional lines and expansions when any rail operation is already running. You can't lie to people twice, no matter how hard you try. Charlotte recently voted to keep the transit tax to pay for more lines as their first line was opening, and liberal old Denver voted to increase their taxes to pay for more rail faster. On the seventh such vote, Kansas City elected to put in a line, and both Seattle and Phoenix will be opening in a year. Dallas and dozens of others are expanding. More telling, maybe, is that that O'Toole is based near Portland and Cox in Belleville, IL; both places that have added light rail lines over those antirailer's strenuous objections. Not only can't Wendell and Randall stop other places from adding more rail, they can't even convince their friends and neighbors. Obviously, all forms of transit have their place, and rail is not suitable for corridors where there is little ridership, but as a transit concentrator, acting as the spine of a comprehensive network of trains and buses connecting places that already have traffic, the real-world numbers are unbeatable. Those lies certainly do come home to roost. In the Twin Cities, both the furiously anti-rail state legislator Phil Krinkie and the transit-hating mayor of St. Paul were on the unemployment line at the very next election. That is when both the NorthStar commuter line (their KRM line) and planning for the light rail to connect the Twin Cities started in earnest. On opening day, Phil hilariously expanded on one of Wendell's earlier themes, saying that it would have been cheaper to give every rider a brand new SUV. Fortunately, his constituents were not impressed by such obvious, hollow grandstanding. It is even the same in Kenosha, where the mayoral candidate that promised to "shut down the trolleys" was creamed this April in an all-time record landslide of 70% / 30%. How long do light rail vehicles last? When one of the Cincinnati anti-railers demanded that answer, I had to admit that I did not know. Not that I don't have a grasp of the facts, or know where to look up the data, but that there is no such complete data as of yet. Calgary and San Diego (1979 and 1980, respectively) are still running their original light rail cars. Portland, Danver, Dallas, St. Louis - all originals from opening day, but with newer cars added for additional service. Kenosha does daily service with their 57-year-olds that came second-hand after millions of service miles in Toronto, and New Orleans is running only it's 1927 and earlier Perley-Thomas streetcars after the newer ones were all destroyed in the flooding. The South Shore (NICTD, Chicago to South Bend) is still running on the Kawasaki cars they bought in the 1970s. "So," I told the anti-, "when we wear out a few light rail vehicles, I'll let you know." On average, a $750,000 bus lasts about 12 years. How long does the rail last? It depends, but I can say that the freight line north of Kenosha, which carries all of the coal trains to Oak Creek Power Plant as well as heavy construction rock trains from Racine quarries, the rail was installed in 1937, and the heavily-used CP rail mainline west of Milwaukee just replaced rail from 1947. If roads lasted anywhere near this long, we wouldn't have had to pave I-94 until 2015, instead of being on the third reworking of that road surface. More bad news for rail opponents. Check out the recent reports that homes near functioning transit have been holding their value pretty well, while the sprawl-fest houses an hour out have been dropping like Bear-Stearns stock. NPR had this a short while ago: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89803663 Economics weighs in where good sense fails to prevail. Milwaukee, with its barely functional transit system, does not fare well in this. No one is denying that power plants could and should be cleaner than they are. On this, O'Toole has it both ways, a right-wing president who has specifically exempted existing power plants from required upgrades, and being able to blame that polution solely on transit. Yes, light rail vehicles do use about 570,718,000 kWh annually. That's a lot of power. But the US generates over 16 trillion kWh annually (i.e. 16,000,000,000,000), so the amount used to run light rail trains is a whopping 0.000035% of the total. For comparison, one reputable source [ ttp://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/09/the_electric_gr.php ] estimates that US computers currently use 868 billion kWh a year, or 5.3% of US annual generating capacity. Even if it is a tiny fraction of the whole US power consumption, any pollution from electric rail vehicles is conveniently located at the power plant, where cleaning it is at least feasible, rather than spilling out of a million tailpipes, at least some of which are going to be far dirtier than average. This is not the first time the Journal has blown this question. Accepting O'Toole's bogus assertions without really understanding where he fooled you is just the latest in a long line of such slips. Point of fact is that I cancelled my subscription to the Journal Sentinel when there was not the slightest mention of the opening of the light rail line opening in Minneapolis in June, 2004. When I questioned this, Sandler said it wasn't relevant to Milwaukee. Really? A controversy that has its very own state law? Other newspapers disagreed, and I traced the AP story in the Phoenix Sun, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, The Detroit Free Press, and the Edinburgh Sunday Telegraph, among hundreds of others. That's Edinburgh, as in Scotland. NPR and all the networks also had it, as did two of the local TV stations. The Hiawatha Line finally made the Journal in a passing reference in Eugene Kane's column about six months later. I have to figure, if the paper could miss that, how could I ever trust them to cover some subject that I do not know so well? Yours, Bill Becwar Wauwatosa, WI P. S. For a look at the other side, though far more balanced and supported than O'Tooles websites, check: www.lightrailnow.org The myths section provides a pretty good analysis of the antirailer's outright lies.

Also a regional transit system that doesn't take you directly to the airport is ridiculous. I understand that there were difficulties to doing this, but that strikes me as being first priority- intracity to intercity. OKI estimated the daily ridership to the airport, and it was very low, like 2,000 boardings per day. Surprised everyone. It was mainly airport workers, not passengers. I'm sure it's even less today. If the hub goes, it would be much less. Plus, it's unconstitutional in Kentucky to pass a local-option tax to fund transit projects. TANK survives by contributions to its budget from the three Kentucky counties; it has no dedicated funding source. There was, and still is, no realistic way to fund a light rail link to the airport.

Here are the early action items from the Uptown Transportation Study a couple of years ago. Anyone see anything in here calling for an Uptown-Downtown Streetcar? TRANSIT • Uptown Shuttle Service • Add shuttle connection at Peebles Corner • Add Uptown Circulator • Metro Service • Add bus shelters with route and schedule information at major stops • Install new bus stop signs • Select bus trips on Clifton, Vine and Reading will skip stops to improve bus travel times • Create an Uptown transit map