A Little Math: The Cost of Transportation.
Alex Pope has written a great blog entry on the cost of local transit projects. Anyone who lives in the Vancouver Lower Mainland and either drives or pays property taxes should read this! Great work Alex!
Below is a excerpt and a link to Alex’s Blog and the complete posting
There is lots of discussion and complaints recently by various parties about taxation for the purpose of developing transportation networks. Depending on their point-of-view, there are people who support or complain about one or more of highway, transit, and cycling projects. A lot of financial information has been publicized but I haven’t seen any comparison of what these projects will cost in real dollars out of my pocket. So I thought I would do a little bit of math and share the results. I’m going to purposely ignore inflation and interest payments in these calculations to make them easier to follow – just recognize that the results of the calculations are estimates in today’s dollars. Where I have needed population estimates, I used the 2010 population estimates that I found in this document (pdf) on the Metro Vancouver web site.
Golden Ears Bridge
The first transportation project that springs to mind is the Golden Ears Bridge. The “Capital Cost” for the bridge was $808 million which we will be paying over 35.5 years through a usage toll, which just increased on July 15th. So this year, someone who is commuting by car (at $2.90 per trip) twice a day (based on 200 workdays in a year) will pay $1,160.00 in tolls.
Read the whole posting A Little Math: The Cost of Transportation.
Allen LaRose 