Return to Nicholas Johnson's Coralville Rain Forest Web Site
 
 

Note: All links last visited December 15, 2005.

There have been countless studies of light rail over the past 25 years. San Jose, in the early 1980s, offered pie-in-the-sky benefits and ignored excessive costs. When it was actually built, ridership was a disaster. [Vanishing Automobile update #32, "San Jose Case Study Part Two: Light Rail," undated; original at http://www.ti.org/vaupdate32.html.]

Here's a web site that details the fraud with Charlotte, North Carolina's light rail scam, along with links to other failed systems. [The Charlotte Capitalist, "Charlotte Light Rail Fraud," September 25, 2004; original at http://charlottecapitalist.blogspot.com/2004/09/charlotte-light-rail-fraud.html.]

Light rail failed in super-lefty and super-crowded Austin, Texas, in 2000. ["The Austin Monorail" Web site at http://www.austinmonorail.org/.]

There is a huge amount of evidence that light rail is nothing but an expensive disaster. [A Google search on "'light rail' expensive" produces 324,000 hits.]

We suspect that proponents will offer up a whitewashed, fluffed-up report like Rochester, New York, did. [Wilbur Smith Associates, "Rochester Light Rail Transit Economic Development Feasibility Study" (March 1998), at http://www.ggw.org/rrtc/execreport.html.] Probably something akin to the lies that Con Man Oman, Filthy Ray, Weasel Grassley, and all the other fraudsters offer up to the media about how the stupid rainforest can be built for $180 million and will get over a million visitors a year by being placed anywhere in Iowa.

posted by Editor at 8:11 AM