🚀 go-pugleaf

On Fri, 17 Nov 95 04:56:57 GMT, 71054.527@compuserve.com (Rock Miller)
wrote:
: A single busy subway line can carry 50,000 people per hour in one
: direction. The next time you're in a traffic jam on the Triborough
: or in the Midtown Tunnel, think about what it would be like if an
: additional 50,000 people were added to the jam. Then reflect that
: the bridge toll that you pay might just be a bargain in terms of
: the time it saves you sitting stuck in traffic.

Indeed, there are certainly cases in which the most cost-effective form
of road "construction" is to build a transit line to divert traffic away
from existing roads.  Consider the extension of Boston's Red Line to
Braintree, built in the late 1960s.  To achieve the same traffic
carrying capacity by widening the Southeast Expressway would have been
prohibitively expensive, would have seriously diminished (through land
takings and additional pollution and noise) the quality of life of
people living along the route, and would have dumped hundreds of
additional automobiles into downtown Boston and Cambridge every day.  It
probably would have been a bargain even if it had cost as much as
widening the road, which it certainly didn't.  And in New York you
couldn't physically build, at any price, enough bridges and tunnels
across the East River to make up for the absence of the subway.
-- 
   ___            _                                           -  Bob
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Robert K. Coe ** 14 Churchill St, Sudbury, MA 01776-2120 USA ** 508-443-3265