What are the five best talking points against commuter rail? Randall O’Toole.

1. Commuter rail is extremely expensive. The Parsons-Brinckerhoff Transport 2020 study of commuter rail found that it would cost three times as much as improvements in bus service throughout the Madison area.

2. Only a few people will have the opportunity to ride it. While the bus improvements mentioned above would serve the entire Madison area, commuter rail would serve only one corridor.

3. Even fewer people actually would ride it. Most new commuter rail lines in places like Seattle, Dallas, and San Jose carry only a few thousand riders a day.
In 2007, Seattle’s carried 4,000 round-trips per weekday; Portland, ME about 500; Ft. Lauderdale 550; Nashville
264; Dallas-Ft. Worth 4,450; San Diego 2,900; Stockton-San Jose 1,400. Any respectable bus route can carry that many people. (B.R. addition: One lane of a highway can carry more people 24/7, 365 days including weekends and holidays)

4. Buses are safer: commuter rail kills more than twice as many people per passenger mile carried than buses.

5. Buses are more flexible and don’t require intrusive land-use regulation. An accident shuts down rail service; buses can drive around. Because rails are fixed, rail transit agencies promote land-use regulation that greatly restricts what people can do with their land both near rail stations (where they promote higher densities) and far away (where they want to limit development so that everyone has to live near the rail line).

Portland ’s new mayor, for example, says he wants to put ALL 300,000 new residents that Portland expects in the next 25 years within a quarter mile of a rail station. Sounds just like Kathleen Falk doesn’t it?

6. T2020 says you “can’t build more roads in Isthmus due to the geographic restrictions- narrow Isthmus surrounded by lakes.” These same reasons apply to adding trains that cross 60 existing roads 8,000 a day between 6 a.m. and 11 p.m. It only makes it 60 times worse than without the trains. Trains will cause instant and continuing gridlock at all those RR Crossings. The existing RR Tracks are not underground or elevated. They are at the same grade as the roads and were built for Freight in the 1850’s long before most of the roads that are there today were put down.

7. If you move all the existing Freight trains to 12a.m to 4 a.m. to accommodate commuter rail between 6 a.m. and 11 p.m., you will have the noise, train whistles and commotion of trains DAY and NIGHT!

8. With buses, you can try them out in a new area or to a nearby city with little cost to lease or run buses for a trial period. If it works, you can add on for little cost. If it doesn’t, you can adjust the areas served and see if that works. If it doesn’t, you drop it and you haven’t lost much money or time.

9. With commuter rail, you must invest a billion dollars or more over 4 or 5 years to build the infrastructure, equipment and skilled people for the line before the first passenger steps aboard. You cannot predict how many people will ride the rails, and once put down, can never change the route. If it turns out poorly and you shut it down, you must repay all the Federal funds you received and return the equipment that is portable and deal with all that is not portable.

10. Liability insurance for buses is not cheap – unless you compare it with insurance for commuter rail. Across the U.S. the Freight train owners have negotiated a no-fault agreement with their rail sharing partners – commuter rail – so that even if they are the cause of an accident, they are not liable for any damages.

Example: CAL Metro accident in Sept 08 could run as high as $1 Billion in damages that will be paid by the taxpayers, not the Freight train owners. (The at-fault party was CAL Metro also)