What Does $600 Million of Provincial Transit Funds Get You?

The City of Ottawa just received confirmation that the Province will kick in $600 million to fund the city's light rail transit exansion. What will they get out of that? A Twelve kilometer extension. Yes, that's right. For the price of 1000 state of the art hybrid buses, they get a measly 12 kilometers added to the light rail line. Sorry. I lied. They don't even come close to getting it for $600 million. The total price tag is $2.1 billion, and that is before the inevitable cost overruns. In other words, for the price of tripling the number of buses in the OC Transpo's fleet, they're getting a glorified monorail extension.

Taxis as Public Transit?

Bentonville, Arkansas, home of Walmart, has come up with an innovative strategy to solve mobility problems for low income citizens. As a town of less than 34,000, it would make little sense to invest heavily in public transit infrastructure. Instead, State Senator Kim Hendren successfully lobbied to reinstate a program that subsidizes taxi cabs. The program provides 25 $2 coupons to low income individuals to lower the cost of taxi rides. The program costs a mere $25,000. This is the kind of innovative program that small municipal governments should experiment with, rather than automatically opting for expensive conventional public transit options.