Baghdad Subway

We've seen this before in the OPEC states. In Baghdad they are building a subway. Where are they getting the money? It seems they are giving it the ole PPP. From the Guardian:

"This is one of Baghdad's most important projects and we hope that investors will join it," he said. "We have called for tenders from them and we have some money to contribute from the government. We are planning to start work as early as next year.

"This has been postponed so many times because of war and chaos but this time we are sure it will happen."

It will likely connect in to a national rail network that already exists and will allow dense Baghdad to move a little easier. But the biggest discussion is on security. I understand the fear of bombings, but I don' t see why that should lead to not building something beneficial. This will be a huge construction project that will get people to work, I don't know why we didn't start building it earlier with all that money we sent over for reconstruction. Seems to me that by putting people to work, that's less people to get angry over conditions.

What If...

Today there was an article in the New York Times discussing what people could do with the $1.2 Trillion dollars that will be spent on the Iraq War. Well what if we spent it on fixed guideway? If spent in Capital projects alone, (there would have to be more funding for service) we could build at $30 million per mile 40,000 miles of Streetcars and Light Rail. Of course this is an oversimplification since some areas would be good with BRT and others streetcars and some would need to be in Subway but that is an awful lot of transit. If limited to the 100 largest cities, that is still 400 miles of rail per city.

Also lets think about return on investment and TOD. Imagine if it were all streetcars and we got 500% of our investment back in development. That would be $6 Trillion dollar economic boost. Of course again its oversimplification but you get the idea. There are other issues to deal with as well including TOD infrastructure, ped improvements, steel costs from such a large infusion in cash but if it were all under the buy America act, we could mass produce streetcars like the PCC streetcar in house and make TOD the standard instead of the rule.

As noted by Ed Tennyson this money that we are spending on the war didn't likely exist anyway but we can always dream…but lets dream of a world where we wouldn't even have to go to coal mines at home instead of oil fields afar to get our energy to move people until of course a better alternative energy source came along.