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Originally Posted by CountyLemonade
Hmm. Imagine if we put $1 billion of that money toward transit. Heck, imagine if we put $500 million toward transit! I'm sensing that we're not using a balanced approach in road/transit expansion, to be honest.
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Well, considering that the just on-going construction of rail transit totals one and a half billion and that we have invested about 3 and a half billion over 15 years, that`s an average of about $250 million/year over that time period. That represents about 6% of the amount invested in roads. I agree that rail and other mass transit should represent more of the transportation budget. However, you do have to realize that substantially more people use roads than tail transit in Utah. Even road infrastructure supports many mass transit options such as buses, suttles, taxis, car-pool, school bus, etc. Rail isn`t the only good form of mass transit.
I think a reasonable figure (for now) would be 10-15% ($400-600 million/yr) of transportation spending be spent on rail transit, the remaining 85-90% on roads. As trends continue and it becomes more economically feasable to divert larger amounts of funding from roads to rails, great! We are deffinately going in the right direction - even if we have a long ways to go still. I am optomistic that current trends will continue and that more money will be allocated to mass transit development.
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Originally Posted by s.p.hansen
If anyone cares to fact check me, this is my inventory thus far concerning the level of transit investments in the Wasatch Front Metro.
It looks like UTA's LRT, CR, BRT, and Streetcar projects put the Wasatch Front Metropolitan Area (2.2 million people) at about $3.5 billion in transit investments since 1997...
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