City Council Minutes 1992 07 08 - Laserfiche WebLink

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will also be reduced. The original "MAC" Project that is currently under construction is expected to cost $68-$70 million. They can get three miles of extension for approximately $30 million more. Davidson called for any questions or comments. Mayer: What's the difference in cost between two lane bus only thoroughfare and light rail? What are the relative benefits and deficiencies in each one? Baskett: Mayer: The difference in construction costs is the difference of almost a factor of 2 in a corridor. It costs about twice as much to build light rails, as it would cost to build "bus only". The biggest problem you run into when you get into a "bus only" system feeding into an urban court area, is what do you do with all of the buses? You start to get them downtown. You get them back. They start to jam up. You can't get the buses in and out of the downtown core to be able to make the second trips. Instead of 2 carrying 150 people per vehicle, you're carrying 40. A typical bus will cost approximately $200,000.00 and last 12 years. A light rail vehicle will cost about $1.5 million and is expected to last between 25 and 30 years. Concerning propulsion, you have diesel power on the buses and electric power on the trains. The more traffic congestion you have, the worse your "brown cloud" gets. Have you thought about converting any buses from diesel to natural gas? Baskett: We have done quite a lot of alternate fuel research. We had five methanol buses that have now run over 500,000 miles. By keeping track of the maintenance and operating costs of those vehicles, we found that they cost approximately 3.5 times as much to operate as a diesel bus does. We're 4