Wednesday, June 18, 2014

M1 Rail To Nowhere Looking For More Of Other People's Money

Light Rail is nirvana for the SWPL folks.

It's apparently such a draw that you can cancel it, but it keeps coming back again.

Even at 3 miles it's supposedly the little engine that could bring economic development to Detroit, just by existing and going up and down the three mile strip.

Even this crazy expensive light rail to nowhere is considered awesome. It's backers were all ready to go until they re crunched the numbers and realized they didn't get all the federal money up front they thought they would receive and were short $12 million out of the $173 million:

The Detroit News: Detroit's M-1 rail project in jeopardy without millions in new fed funding

The $173 million dollar, three mile light rail project on Woodward, down from the originally planned 8 miles of rail at $371 million just realized that they're short about $12 million in initial start costs and need it from the Feds to get the project started.

At $8,000 a foot, 57.6 Million per mile, it's costing about ten million more per mile to build the smaller system than the original 8 mile system. Expect the inevitable cost overruns to jack it up even more.

The Woodward Light rail project is looking like a case of the politician's syllogism:


We must do something mass transity to show what a cool place we are.
The M-1 Rail project is something mass transity (for all of 3 miles and an unknown amount of riders with millions of annual subsidies to be determined).
Therefore We must build it.

Another Detroit project that goes nowhere yet will be subsidized forever.

2 comments:

Old NFO said...

Yeah, Detroit, circling the drain and they want THIS??? WTFO???

Aaron said...

Yep, the quest for something new and shiny rather than the hard work of fixing the fundamentally messed up urban cesspool that is Detroit is attractive to the SWPL types.

That $173 million could hire a lot of cops, but that's not SWPL-worthy.