Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Commuter Rail Delays
Lines opening up in Portland and Austin are being delayed. Both lines have been dogged by vehicle issues with Capital Metro having to secure the fuel tanks to get an FRA waiver while Portland has seen manufacturing issues with its supplier Colorado Railcar. Capital Metro has been approved for FRA waivers that were given to similar lines in New Jersey and Oceanside California but will open later than scheduled in March while the WES line in Portland will open in February. I'm intersted in seeing the results.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
The Portland project would be the first time that those Colorado Railcars are the sole rolling stock for some operation, right? I'm very curious about how that works out -- I've read mixed reviews of the performance of the FTA test units in Miami.
Seems to me, the Bush Administration is trying very hard to make it tough for cities to build rail projects.
The danger in Austin is that the trains will be full - thanks to overwhelming demand for the existing express bus operations (people may elect to ride the train just because CM won't buy/run enough buses for the better one-seat ride), thus making it look like it 'succeeded' (with 2000 passengers/day), thus eliminating momentum for light rail on Guadalupe (46,000 passengers/day).
Or, it 'fails' (1000 passengers/day) and we end up fighting against "we tried light rail and nobody rode it", thanks to the asswipes at CM calling this thing "light rail" when it by any reasonable metric in the universe is a commuter start (moreso even than the RiverLine, which is marginal).
Sigh.
Post a Comment