Lots of banter about transit in Pittsburgh these days. Lots of optimistic projections about ridership, revenue, etc. Well, let's see how it's playing out in in other cities. From today's Baltimore Sun:
An article with the [1987] photo described expectations for the system. It would be built at a cost of $290 million and carry an estimated 34,000 riders a day. Fares would pay 60 percent to 70 percent of its operating costs.
In the ensuing two decades, rosy expectations have wilted.
Cost overruns drove the price tag for the original system to more than $470 million, with double-tracking and other upgrades bringing the total to about $680 million.Weekday ridership has never approached projections, peaking at 29,003 in 2002. Last year, with the closings at their peak, ridership was off more than 40 percent at 16,610.
Before the double-tracking project got under way, fares were paying about 22 percent of operating costs. That figure dropped during construction.
Spurs to Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport and Penn Station were added in 1997, but talk of further extensions died out. Downtown merchants complained that construction of the light rail killed businesses. Many who survived say its completion failed to deliver the shoppers the MTA promised.
So why such an open discussion of the system's failures now? Well, because it is time to celebrate the fact that they just got finished dumping another gargantuan pile of money into the cursed thing, of course.
See, those rosy projections were wrong before. But the new rosy projections--made by the same agencies and interest groups--will be right on the money. Sound familiar?
Balls.
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