What stimulates the engineer's brain?
In many cities all over the USA, the bureaucrats are trying to get the area residents to vote to tax themselves an additional billions of dollars to build Light Rail systems. All of these systems would consume millions in studies before construction would begin. When eventually completed in typically 6 to 10 years, the bureaucrats typically claim Light Rail will carry 30,000 to 60,000 people per day. (They never mention that auto traffic will have grown by 10 times those daily amounts in the same period of time.)
Phoenix, Arizona is an interesting example. They want to build a 35 mile Light Rail system at a cost of $1.35 billion ($38.6 million dollars per mile). If the average trip in Phoenix was 10 miles long this would represent 600,000 passenger miles per day. This number is 2.4% of the current (not the year 2010) Greater Phoenix Area's daily commuter traffic of 25 million passenger miles (600,000/25,000,000 = 2.4%).
Newspaper articles brag that even with stops every mile that the Light Rail would average "almost 20" miles per hour (17 mph in reality). This is barely a healthy bicyclist's cruise speed. Definitely not something to brag about.
Sounds pretty useless, doesn't it? Can we use our brains to come up with a simpler, much lower cost, faster system?
Step 1:
Research amusement park Kiddy Train ride technology.
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Learn that $1,000,000 can buy a complete 1-mile system with train set that has a cruise speed capability of 25 mph.
Footnotes:
Check out Custom Locomotive in the Chicago area at: www.customloco.com They supply many variations of amusement park trains.
