BillHobbs.com is a frequently updated blog of original reporting and commentary by Bill Hobbs, a longtime Nashville journalist and media relations adviser. I am currently serving as communications director for the Tennessee Republican Party, a job I began on Oct. 29, 2007.
The Music City Star - the Nashville-to-Lebanon commuter train that ought to be renamed "Clement's Folly" - is a money-loser that, statistically speaking, nobody rides. And even if every seat was full on every run it would take such a tiny percentage of cars off the parallel stretch of Interstate 40 that it would have no significant impact on traffic congestion or air pollution. So, what do the supposedly smart people running the city's public transit system want to do? Spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build new road lanes reserved for city buses - as a stopgap before spending billions of dollars to build a light-rail system.
Is it asking too much that they prove they can run a single train route successfully before looking for ways to tap taxpayers for huge new sums of money to build yet another transit system?
The two stories linked above were both in the same edition of the local paper. You would think the first story would be a big red flag in front of the second.
Maybe they just wanted to get the bad news out of the way so they could at least pretend that the facts were given to the public.
Trains can never match the efficiency of cars or buses because they can not pass and if there is only one track, they can only go in one direction at a time. Furthermore trains can not negotiate severe grades because of the limited steel to steel friction required to move and stop the train. They can not negotiate sharp turns. They can not do articulated trips. A single lane of cars can easily accommodate 1800 to 2000 vehicles per hour as long as most of them are cars.
My suggestion is to bulldoze the tracks between Lebanon and Nashville and making it a one way single lane road with inbound Nashville Traffic in the morning and outbound traffic in the afternoon. The additional cars accrued in downtown Nashville would be parked at a parking garage at the site of the cancelled convention center. This would save at least $650 million dollars.
Just to get the $38 million start up costs back in 20 years at 5% interest, 625 people per day would have to pay $13.35 per trip and have to promise to ride it every day including Xmas and their birth day. On a five day schedule that would raise to $18.70 per round trip. Operational costs would be extra and above the $18.70 per round trip ticket. Most commuter trains get part of that by charging people to park at the train station.
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