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Comment by darrenkopp | Hacker News Reader

Have you seen the public transportation in Utah? We got a commuter rail train in 2002 for the olympics, which was pretty much limited to a small area in downtown Salt Lake, and then a straight line down through sandy. Then a few years ago we got Front Runner, which is a somewhat fast commuter train between Ogden and salt lake, but which costs somewhere around $250/month last time I checked.

Buses are OK, about as good of a system as you would expect buses to be, but if you are looking to go from where I live to salt lake you are probably looking at an hour to an hour and a half, which seems pretty good when you consider that it takes 45 minutes - 60 minutes on Front Runner (30 miles).

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A monthly premium pass (for riding buses, Trax, and FrontRunner) is only $190 per month, which seems fairly reasonable.

If you are commuting to/from downtown SLC, public transit is actually somewhat reasonable - I live in the southwest end of the valley and it is only maybe 50 minutes vs 35 to drive in ideal conditions. The bigger problems are:

1) The trains don't run nearly often enough. If you happen to miss one or need to go at a non-peak time, it is going to be really inconvenient.

2) Not only does much of our population live in suburbs, a large amount of jobs are located outside of downtown, too. In that case, a 20 minute commute by car can easily be a 1.5 - 2 hour public transit commute - I can drive to work in about 25 minutes, but according to UTA, the most optimal route by bus/Trax would take 1:30.

The way we've situated things here is pretty hostile to mass transit, but I'm glad we're at least making slow progress.

I'm just curious if you're aware how much money beyond that 250 a month is subsidized by federal money? You seem to imply that the cost is outrageous to expect people to pay, and I'd agree, yet the irony is that few things are as insanely subsidized as FrontRunner and TRAX (Utah's light rail system). TRAX has a per rider subsidy, if you factor in construction cost and maintenance, of 6-7 dollars. So if the people were actually paying full price for just ridding the light rail they'd be dishing out about 22 dollars for a two way trip. If they were smart they'd never have built light rail, but rather have taken that same money and quadrupled the whole bus system in Utah to actually give us a transit system that was actually responsive to the transit needs of our population. They would have moved more people, displaced more cars, and not have an absurdly 'tightly coupled' infrastructure where a single technological failure shuts down entire valley transit lines. But people see electrical trains, feel and see a smooth ride that can accelerate really fast and, to the best of their discernment isn't 'dirty'. And since they're protected from the real cost of the system they have illusions about it's capacity to cure traffic woes and save the planet. Never mind that when Utah was growing full tilt the number of new cars on it's roads replaced what TRAX's entire network managed to replace after hundreds of millions of dollars of investment.

Here's another interesting fact. When I looked into Front Runner's costs (which relative to other faster trains is relatively inexpensive) and did the math to spread it over the population for whom it was moving their commute off the road and found that the costs equated to over 50,000 dollars per rider. That's to say that we could have bought everyone a nice hybrid and we would have done likely a better job for the environment, for less money, and not have had to extend a rather limited and fragile infrastructure.

Trains make no sense, not even in Japan nor Europe. Look at the actual numbers, whether it's the fiscal costs or the total environmental costs of the system and it's support systems compared to their equivalents in a trainless world.

Not even in Japan or Europe? Have you really done the math, or are you extrapolating from a single data point? The costs of building rails and running a train are called fixed costs...cost per rider is inverse to the number of riders. That means that with higher ridership, cost per person decreases.

Don't believe me? The Calgary CTrain has costs not much different than TRAX. Operating costs, including depreciation, are $0.30 per rider...making the system profitable enough to subsidize the more suburban bus system. Why? Because they have 5x the ridership.

Don't be obtuse.

I'm saying that $190 is a decent amount of money for a lot of people along the wasatch front, especially when comparing it to just driving, ergo why it is likely that you see so many people driving instead of using public transportation which is the response to the root comment.

You don't know how pricing infrastructure works.

Just because Utah doesn't know how to run public transit doesn't mean no one else can and do so with decent financials.

I'm pretty amazed someone would claim that Trax is only limited to a small area of downtown Salt Lake.

Indeed. +darrenkopp missed the Mid-Jordan line, the West Valley line (both currently operational), the airport line (opening in April) and the Draper line (also opening in 2013). These are mostly east-west lines. Also not included is the Sugar House street car line.

SLC mayor Ralph Becker says, "by the end of 2013, we will have witnessed the largest expansion of an urban rail system in the nation." [1]

"70 miles in 7 years" seems pretty ambitious to me. [2]

[1] - http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/55680450-78/salt-lake-beck...

[2] - http://www.rideuta.com/mc/?page=Projects-Frontlines2015

It is. The only cross line is up 4th South. I mentioned there's a fairly long straight line down through sandy, but stations are more sparse, and misses the majority of salt lake.

Aerial Map: https://www.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&msa=0...

True that the Wasatch valley isn't sufficiently dense enough for public transit to be very effective, but they sure are trying! If you live in SLC and commute to the U, you are good to go, and I hear the airport line will be open (finally) soon enough, but I haven't been back in 7+ years.

The valley really needs to build up some density to make transit really work, but its difficult with all that land available + a conservative Republican state government (along with the people who vote for that government).

If you're looking to go to SLC frequently, perhaps living so far away is part of the problem thoughtcriminal is speaking of. Nothing on you personally, this is a society-wide problem.

That's the problem: I don't go to SLC very often. I work in Centerville which is 15 miles away from my house. The inversion does not affect just Salt Lake; it affects the entire Wasatch Front.

All the pollution from the entire area just aggregates into a massive inversion.

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