There are 27 cities in the US that have rapid transit systems.  Here the term ‘rapid transit systems’ is meant to include subway, elevated, surface-level and off-street trolley or light-rail lines.  It excludes suburban commuter trains and buses.  The following cities are the ones that Wikipedia lists in this respect: Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Jacksonville, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Morgantown WV, Newark, New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Portland, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, San Juan PR, Seattle, St. Louis, Tacoma and Washington DC.  Some of the systems, like those in Houston, Seattle, Las Vegas, Jacksonville, Detroit, Tacoma and Morgantown are very skimpy, mere tokens.

Construction costs have varied.  Naturally subways are far more expensive than trolley lines.  Also, the systems were built at different times, when wages and the cost of materials varied tremendously.  A worker who made $1 an hour in 1930 might be making $30 an hour now.  So there’s no way of to sum up the costs meaningfully.  At any rate, I don’t have access to all the figures.

But let me take the Los Angeles Gold Line, shown here, as a perfect example of what a rapid transit line should be, in my opinion.  The 13.7-mile light-rail line, which opened in 2003, when I was living in LA, was built at a cost of $859 million, which comes to about $65 million a mile.  So this is a fairly current and comprehensible figure.  Eventually the Gold Line will be lengthened to 37 miles, but let me disregard that for now. 

The total length of all the rapid transit systems located in the above cities approaches 1700 miles.  At today’s construction costs, if all 1700 miles were light-rail lines like the Gold Line, the grand total would be $110 billion.  That is to say that for $110 billion, the US could double the size of its overall rapid transit system, if the Gold Line is representative.

So if the Iraq War had not been waged, and the money squandered on it had been diverted to building rapid transit systems instead, the US could almost have quadrupled the systems now operating in some of the major metropolises.  The cost of that war is $417 billion as of April 12, 2007.  This amount would have paid for about 6400 miles of light-rail lines.  The expansion of these systems, which is going ahead full-steam anyway, only proves their desirableness and utility.

One advantage of rapid transit systems is that they are powered by electricity rather than gasoline.  Abundant reserves of coal and uranium, as well as hydroelectric potential, make such systems an excellent way to conserve petroleum. 

I read an interesting article the other day which said that, back in the 1930’s, General Motors and Standard Oil engineered the decline of streetcars, which were the forerunners of light-rail lines.  GM and Standard formed a holding company to buy up and dismantle the streetcar lines, also run by electricity, in order to promote the sales of cars, buses and gasoline.  The power companies were legally ineligible to own streetcar lines at that time, or they might have responded to the challenge from GM and Standard.  It goes without saying that if power companies had been eligible to own streetcar lines, modernization would have gone along with it, and rapid transit systems, as we know them today, might have been much more extensive. Apparently, this is more than an empty conspiracy theory, because the companies were found guilty in lawsuits of many of the antitrust charges involved. 

Anyway, can anyone with an ounce of intelligence still believe that the present administration had any good reason for invading Iraq or has any good reason for remaining there?  I certainly would have liked to see those vast sums spent on putting Metros in transportation-poor cities like Phoenix, Houston, San Antonio, Detroit and Indianapolis.   Even Chicago`s CTA/RTA, the nation’s third largest system, is only skeletal, and much of it is antiquated.

So again, we are witnessing the triumph of folly over wisdom.

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