A Thousand Per Inch

If you've ever driven Hwy 101 from Marin County to San Jose, attempting to take a freeway south through San Francisco, you'll be forced onto city streets to get through. There was enough resistance in the past not to fillet San Francisco like a salmon with a freeway. This doesn't mean they've stopped traffic. No, far from it. All thru-commuters (and there's thousands of them) get to navigate the stoplight madness of Van Ness in any attempt to get through SF. And thousands of SF residents get to deal with these thru-commuters daily. The same with the 710 through Pasadena...enough resistance (from wealthy landowners, I'll add) to stop any freeway from being built.

Imagine the cost, imagine! of trying to build a freeway through these places today! It would be in the low billions!

And wouldn't you know it...it's gonna cost hundreds of millions, two hundred and seventy million to be exact, to build a 4.3 mile extension of light rail into Elk Grove. Indeed, it doesn't even reach Elk Grove with this new extension, it just gets 4.3 miles closer (set to open by 2012). The costs are astronomic precisely because our city is a fully paved-over automobile slum, and now to shoehorn in a set of train tracks as an afterthought over existing suburban sprawl is ridiculously expensive.

4.3 miles is ~22,000 feet. And at 270e^6 dollars, that's about $12,000 dollars a foot to build, or a thousand dollars per inch.

A thousand dollars per inch! And come on, when was the last time you heard of a major transportation infrastructure project coming in under budget? This thing is going to cost a third of a billion dollars once it's all said and done.

If RT didn't have to screw about with buying rights of way, building sound walls, building parking garages, and building grade separations to manage the traffic fiascos that will ensue with four-lane collector road widenings and crossings, this would be so much cheaper...and would likely have already been built. No. Elk Grove was too myopic to plan for public transit as they built out. Elk Grove was too stupid to understand that they've added nearly a hundred thousand more motor vehicles in the past twenty years (because living here is impossible without one) and to now add a light rail crossing would cause traffic to stack up a quarter mile while waiting for two trains to pass. Elk Grove was too near-sighted and allowed the suburban building of hundreds of homes right up against a proposed transit right of way that now requires noise mitigation (i.e., a big blank wall).

I'll bet light rail never, never! comes to Elk Grove. Just like light rail never came and never will come to Calthorpe's Laguna West. They said it was too expensive. It's too expensive now! Then they'll sell off the rights of way to brownfield developers and build more suburban slums and then light rail, instead of being just too expensive, will be absolutely impossible. So everyone will just have to continue to drive. And when gasoline is a steady 4 bucks a gallon, then 5, and Elk Grove commuters have no other options available to them...well, fuck 'em. They'll get what they deserve.