They might be completely and utterly wrong, but you’ve got to admire their delusions
When waiting for the bus home, I struck up a conversation with someone who is either a member of the Cascade Policy Institute (motto: autos über alles) or a fellow traveller on their road towards More! And! Bigger! suburbs. I could tell that they were a CPIoft because when I mentioned that I wished that Tri-Met would build a trolley line to SE Portland, they launched into the traditional (and now thoroughly discredited) arguments that I'd heard a thousand times or more when Tri-Met was bungling the S/N trolley line proposal to the point where even the residents of the City of Portland were unwilling to pull the [Y] lever at the voting booth. It was sort of an amusing blast from the past,with the claims that
trolleys are more expensive to operate than busses (Tri-Met is not the most efficient operating agency, but last time I checked they couldn't reliably meet that standard; The Overhead Wire claims that Tri-Met spends 23% of its operating budget on trolleys, but gets 32% of its ridership from them. So, unless by more expensive you mean cheaper, I don't really see how that follows, unless you slide construction costs into the "operating budget" and try to pass that off as the Gospel.)
trolleys are slower than busses, with the Hillsboro extension of the east-west interurban as the stated example. Oh, sure, it is slower than the busses were, iff you:
- didn't try to ride the busses ANYWHERE NEAR rush hour, and
- were lucky enough to get downtown near the departure time of the once-every-45-minutes-or-so express bus.
(I was working at 156th and close to the #26, so my trolley commute was #19->Hillsboro train->shuttle bus, or about 1hr10min, which was longer than my best-case bus commute of 45 minutes of #19->perfect connection to express bus. This was made up for the too many to count #19->wait 30 minutes->express bus 1h20 min marathons that ended up enriching the local cab companies when I decided that I'd rather wait 45 minutes at home for the cab to arrive.)
And, of course, it costs 10x as much to build a trolley line as it does to operate busses. Now, I don't have many arguments here, because trolley lines that should cost US$10million/mile (INCLUDING the ones that Portland builds) are being priced at US$150million [including a US$20million/mile constractor fee to Parsons/Bechtel/Halliburton] for no reason except graft, but this particular argument was comparing the cost of a trolley line to the cost of a dedicated busway, which costs 95% as much as a trolley line. And, particularly with the Hillsboro interurban, a large chunk of the westside construction cost was to build a huge tunnel and underground station because some (well-connected, of course) homeowners objected to the original plan of building the line on the surface. You can just imagine how they'd react to a busway that would have to see 10x the number of vehicles that would be needed to provide even close to the level of service that the existing trolley line provides. (fill in the blank here -- a snowflake's _____ in hell)
The pièce de résistance, presented triumphantly as if there was no way to refute it at all, was that the only reason people ride the trolleys is because the bus system is cannibalised to force people onto the trolleys.
This is, of course, absolute nonsense. The ridership on the west side went wayyy up after the trolley started running, to the point where even if every single rider on the line had to use a tri-met shuttle to complete their commute (which they don't. The Hillsboro interurban goes right through the Tek campus, right alongside at least one big Intel site, and within a 5 minute walk of Nike) the ridership would have stil gone up. And it's kept going up since then.
As a coda, there was a bit of the "people should walk!" (the classic anti-Portland Streetcar argument)/"people will not walk!" (the classic anti-/N argument) blast of incoherence, because it's BAD that the Portland Streetcar is running because it's healthier for people to walk (it's difficult to claim that the 8500 or so daily boardings are the result of cannibalisation when there was no mass transit along that route prior to the construction of that trolley line) but it's BAD that people have to walk further to get to the stations along the /N line (the trolley line has stops on 5-6 block headways, compared to the 2 block headways the now-demised #5 bus used. The ridership is up, of course, and the cancelled bus line followed the same route as /N does, but not as much as on the Portland Streetcar, so the only argument left is that it's Tooooooo Haaaaard for people to walk further to get to a stop. The ridership figures would seem to indicate that the people who actually ride the cars don't care, but they're not members of the Cascade Policy Institute and thus don't count.
I mentioned the additional teeny detail that not building trolley lines, but instead buying and staffing lots of busses (one of the CPI-style arguments against the Hillsboro line was that it would have been sooooo much better to spend the US$1billion buying more busses) would eat up any "savings" instantaneously because bus drivers don't work for free. The first time I heard this argument I ran the figures and worked out that it would cost an additional US$50million/year to operate and maintain half a billion dollars worth of busses. That's would do a pretty good job of completely eating up any "savings" that you might get from implementing this stupid idea (and I'd ran the figures when diesel fuel was still <= US$1.00/gallon, not the US$2.25 or so a gallon that it costs these days.)
(One distressing coda to this argument is when I was looking up figures for this point, I ran across several people claiming that despite the increase in bus service along the #33/#32/#31 route, the ridership there has only gone up about 15%. If this is true, it pretty much means that if you want to do a reasonable rapid bus scheme you need to do private ROW, at which point you might as well just put in track and overhead wire, then run the service with [cheaper to operate] streetcars. I didn't mention that to this CPAoft I was arguing with, because it would have been adding insult to injury.)
I guess that if you're shameless enough it doesn't really bother you to regurgitate arguments that have been comprehensively pounded into the ground. How fortunate it is for the rest of us that these arguments make the lies of the B*sh junta look convincing.