Comment 37084

By seancb (registered) - website | Posted January 17, 2010 at 19:08:01

To those of us who understand math, building electrified rails makes much more sense than building greater bus capacity.

Have you seen the pavement underneath busy bus routes, especially at major stops? Repaving is required quite often, even yearly in some really bad areas. Rails last decades.

But beyond that, tying the transit system to the volatile price of oil is a recipe for constant future debt. You may not believe that we are running out of oil, but even if you blindly believe in the power of money markets, you can't escape the fact that political instability alone will continue to drive the prices of oil upward - and future scarcity will make it even worse.

By building electrified rail, we will be making an investment that will allow us to apply future technological energy advancements to our transit systems.

Or we could do it your way, buy a ton of oil-consuming buses that will get more and more expensive to run every year, until we reach the point that we have to replace the entire fleet prematurely with electric buses (or more likely, electric rail vehicles). Now that's money well spent!

My vote goes to doing it right the first time.

I vote down for offensiveness and up for humour. I cast no votes based on my level of agreement.

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