Last April, Raleigh officials visited Denver to witness all of the great things happening there with the hope that they can be reproduced in Raleigh, especially Denver’s light rail system.
The group toured Denver’s light rail system and got a firsthand look at the city’s downtown area, City Councilman Russ Stephenson told me this afternoon.
Apparently they forgot to invite Cato’s Randal O’Toole. He demolishes Denver’s light rail system here as well as Portland’s and the one proposed for Detroit.
The Rocky Mountain city is planning six new rail lines at a cost of $7 billion — or more than half of the region’s transportation spending for the next decade. Denver planners admit that all these trains will take just one-half a percent of cars off the road. Denver could relieve more congestion by simply coordinating the city’s traffic signals, which would cost less than one mile of light rail.
“The rail expansion tax of 2004 will likely go down in Denver history as the greatest swindle ever perpetrated in Colorado,” says Jon Caldara, president of Colorado’s Independence Institute and former Chairman of Denver’s Regional Transportation District. “And given Colorado was a gold-rush state, that says a hell of a lot. The project will drain money from real transportation projects for decades to come.”
Nor is light rail good for the environment. Nationally, light-rail operations use slightly less energy, per passenger mile, than the average car. But building light rail requires enormous amounts of energy that will never be repaid by the annual energy savings.
Light rail’s big selling point, that it promotes urban revitalization, is also a Big Lie….
Randal also wrote the 2010 JLF report, “Public Transit in North Caroling” where he found that taxpayers pay $20 every time a person boards the Charlotte light rail system. In other words, Raleigh will never become a”world class city” until taxpayers are forced pay at least $20 every time a citizen boards the soon to be built Triangle rail system.
