This is a test comment.

Of course it would take a newspaper from California to tell people on the east coast not to use their trains. O'Toole, who makes his living getting paid to spew anti-transit propaganda, puts out Great Rail Disasters every year, and every year a Canadian organization puts out a response the very next day (http://www.vtpi.org/railcrit.pdf). I haven't read either Disasters or the response this year because it's all stuff they've both said countless times before, but if you're interested there it is.

Anyway, a few meandering thoughts in the great debate:

• If you don’t believe in the land-use aspect of transportation planning then Metro is indeed a gigantic waste of money. Poor people will ride a bus if that’s all there is and any weirdo suburban commuters who don’t want to drive to work can be handled with MARC-type commuter trains leasing space from the freight companies at little cost. Making the investment in Metro or light rail is really all about land use. If you want a dense, vital inner city, you build rail. If you don’t care about the inner city, you don’t. Wilson Boulevard would look like Columbia Pike if it didn’t have Metro.
  
• Keeping with the land use theme, it's well documented that buses have no effect on surrounding property values, while trains greatly enhance them (except in cases where you have elevated tracks next to your property and no station nearby). For every dollar spent on Metro several dollars worth of real estate development are generated. Without Metro Wilson Boulevard would look like Columbia Pike (Columbia Pike, for the record, has some of the best bus service in the region) and downtown Bethesda would look like Rockville Pike.
  
• Generally speaking (and this is *very* rough), Metro costs as much as an Interstate-grade highway, light rail costs as much as a suburban “parkway” (think Fairfax County Parkway), and streetcars cost as much as a large arterial street. Sure, the trains get more expensive if you elevate or underground them, but then, so do roads.
  
• Trains are more expensive to build up-front, but maintenance is less expensive that buses (certainly on a per passenger basis if not in raw numbers), particularly on high-ridership routes where one train (with one operator) can do the job of several buses.
  
• Few buses last much more than a decade before they have to be replaced. That doesn’t mean they’re a bad investment, only that using vehicle replacement as an argument against trains shows a serious lack of understanding about transit issues.
  
• Buses and cars run on gas. Trains run on electricity. I won’t get in to the whole peak oil debate except to say that anything that runs on electricity is going to be an increasingly better investment as gas gets more and more expensive. Of course, trolley buses do exist, but in few places.
  
• It’s disingenuous to try and shock people with big-number rail subsidies without mentioning that highway subsidies are at least an order of magnitude greater. If your argument is that transit should pay for itself then OK, but you had damn well better be arguing for cars (and airlines, for that matter) to pay for themselves as well.
  
• It’s likewise disingenuous to say Metro’s share of commuters is 9%. That includes commuters whose jobs are nowhere near Metro lines. It’s like me arguing against building a new highway in Florida because commuters in Connecticut won’t use it. Metro is responsible for nearly half the commuters in to downtown Washington. Compare that mode share with cities that only use buses, then imagine the throngs of new drivers filling up our already over-crowded highways if Metro wasn’t there.
  
• The editorial is simply wrong when it says only three cities are still building rail lines. Only three cities are still building third rail lines. Dozens of cities are building commuter and light rail systems, some to the tune of more than a hundred miles. More and more cities are increasingly finding rail to be a good investment.
  
• Their last paragraph is also blatantly misleading for the same reason. They completely ignore light rail, which is the fastest growing transit mode in the country by ridership. In fact, every last one of the cities mentioned with fast growing bus networks is also building or recently opened new rail lines. Austin is in the process of planning MARC-style commuter rail, Raleigh is building a hybrid commuter rail / light rail line, and Las Vegas just recently opened a brand new monorail and has been considering light rail.

At least when the Post attacks Metro it is with well-informed stories about real problems. The Examiner editorial is not worth the ink used to print it.

Oops. Didn't mean to say the Columbia Pike thing twice. Spun that second paragraph off from the first and forgot to delete parts of the first.

Sorry.

Considering that auto manufacturers and dealers, road construction contractors, auto supply and parts dealers, and insurance companies to name a few, all have a deep financial interest in keeping people in their cars, it is easy to see why so many "experts" play to the anti-railtransit crowd. Luckily, their audience is shrinking.

Talking about "Playing to the 'anti-transit' crowd" and saying that such an "audience is shrinking" represents a serious misunderstanding of public opinion and what shapes it.

The vast, vast majority of people still love being able to turn the key in their ignition and be in "control of their destination" if you will.

So many more people use roads than transit. Headlines about the cost of public transportation are more potent than ones about highways because of Americans' so-called "love affair with the automobile."

Accordingly, there is a substantially more profound need to strategically develop a political constituency for transit spending than there is for roads.

For clarity, I am a staunch transit advocate.

If you find all pro-smart growth discussion on the web to be shrill, you're just not looking in the right places.

Want level-headed? Start here:
www.vtpi.org and read "Evaluating Rail Transit Criticism"

How long would it take for the cost of running buses carrying a load equivalent to that of rail lines, to equal out the cost of those rail lines, if ever? Might not the cost of paying off the bonds for Rail Transit be more than enough to sustain buses for the foreseeable future? How about the free market unthinkable...reducing or even (gasp) eliminating fares?

Newer buses and buses in the future will not be running on gasoline.

Please don't do me any favors. As long as I live in my home, I don't want its value (read, taxes) to increase.

Which is more responsible planning: Putting in a rail system and then using the pressures created by that rail system to foster development; or, putting in place a transportation system that is flexible and responsive, over time, to the needs of the riding public ? Another way of asking the question is, "To whose needs/demands are the planners acceding?"