RedCounty, quoting economist Mark Perry, from the University of Michigan:

The other day, Phoenix trumpeted that its daily light rail ridership had reached 37,000 boardings per weekday. Since most of those people have two boardings per day (one each direction) we can think of this as 18,500 people making a round trip each day.

Well, if we bought each of these folks a brand new Prius III for $23,000 it would cost us just over $425 million. This is WAY less than the $1.4 billion we pay to move them by rail instead. We could have bought every regular rider a Prius and still have a billion dollars left over! And, having a Prius, they would be able to commute and get good gas mileage anywhere they wanted to go in Phoenix, rather than just a maximum of 20 miles on just one line.

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Tags: light rail

This entry was posted on Monday, May 25th, 2009 at 10:14 am and is filed under Local and Regional. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.