Free Republic

For almost a decade, transit ridership has declined across Southern California despite enormous and costly efforts by top transportation officials to entice people out of their cars and onto buses and trains. The LA County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the region's largest carrier, lost more than 10% of its boardings from 2006 to 2015, a decline that appears to be accelerating. Despite a $9-billion investment in new light rail and subway lines, Metro now has fewer boardings than it did three decades ago, when buses were the county's only transit option. The decline suggests that Southern California policymakers are falling short...

A $137 million three-mile train is coming to a nearly deserted avenue in a bankrupt city. Growing up in the 1940s, Robert Fogelson remembers banging on the typewriter and peering out the window at his father’s office in a Manhattan skyscraper. Then "[my dad] would take us for lunch to a nearby Schraft’s, a chain of restaurants that was popular with housewives like my mother, who regularly went downtown to shop…to socialize ...or to meet my father for a play or a movie." Fogelson hadn’t decided yet what he would do with his life, "[b]ut I took it for granted,"...

The Department of Transportation (DOT) announced that $1.55 billion in new federal tax dollars will be allocated for the first-ever Hawaiian Transit Rail system on the island of Oahu, which will serve downtown Honolulu, at a total federal and state cost of $5.1 billion.The train circuit will be 20 miles long, with 21 stops on an island that is 30 miles wide. … An additional $4 million has been obligated from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the “stimulus”), and $209.9 million is coming from other sources within the DOT. Both the $1.55 billion and the $209.9 million are proposed...

Just how many new riders would jump on a train to one of Silicon Valley's most desired destinations? About 200, it turns out -- and it would cost taxpayers up to $175 million to build the rail line to Los Gatos. The new projections come from the Valley Transportation Authority's updated forecast for a long-envisioned light-rail extension. Still years from reality, the Los Gatos line would be one of the least-used light-rail extensions planned in the nation -- and would reduce South Bay vehicle traffic by a mere 0.01 percent.