21 thoughts on “The Metrocrat Butcher’s Bill”

1. Perhaps they could wire the corpses to the front of the offending train. As a warning to others. The carrion birds taking flight when the train left a stop would serve to attract the attention of the public and add kind of a neat ‘goth’ aspect to travel on the “black line.”
   Gotta differentiate yourself from Omaha somehow.

2. There’s nothing “light” about a light rail train when it strikes a human.

3. Does anyone know the all time tally?

4. “all time tally?”

   I think this is nine or ten, all time.

5. They told us there would be blood running in the streets.

   Oh, wait – that one wasn’t about the trains.

6. There is nothing wrong with light rail another billion dollars cannot fix.

7. Yea, Big.

   Maybe they could install “human guards” on the front of every train.

8. 11am. I would have anticipated problems in the wee hours when people are coming out of the bars, but this is another part of the FMEA, so to speak.

   To be fair, if indeed the woman was jaywalking, she also could have been hit and killed by a car or truck, I guess, but even those have the advantage of rubber tires, which have a much higher coefficient of friction than does steel on steel.

   Why we’re doing light rail (50 tons per carriage vs. 10 tons per bus, BTW) when a bus can run the same routes as fast, with far less infrastructure, and can change its route is beyond me. Especially beyond me is why they’re doing light rail with overhead power lines. They’ve had trouble with that configuration since the 1920s.

9. The Met Council’s own advisory boards recommended Bus Rapid Transit over LRT, at least they had before the smart people stopped being apart of the process. Diversity of opinion was not appreciated.

10. “when a bus can run the same routes as fast, with far less infrastructure, and can change its route is beyond me. Especially beyond me is why they’re doing light rail with overhead power lines. “

    ***IF***

    And this is a big “if” , Uber gets the Uber bus thing perfected, it’s going to ***destroy light rail***. It will just be a flexible layer over the bus and Uber system.

11. I love it that they turnstile jumpers, because they can’t afford turnstiles. How many man hours is that going to eat up? Fools.

12. I think it’s a design flaw. The stations are on the wrong side of the intersections.

    The Eastbound train roars through the intersection at Snelling Avenue at 30 mph to make the light, before braking for the station on the East side of the intersection. If they ran the trains on the other track, England style, then it would enter the intersection at 5 mph when the light turned green.

    Still might need taller fences and fewer crossings to block morons from jaywalking, that’s a separate set of design flaws.

13. I see the Blue line hit another person today. I see people, especially on bikes, going in front of blue line trains all the time. Perhaps it is Darwin candidates.
    As far as Green line deaths….my experiences in that neighborhood are that there are a lot of people who don’t have the best common sense skills. The kind that don’t look both ways before crossing a street.

14. Apparently this latest victim was a two-time casualty in the bikes vs. train wars.
    http://www.startribune.com/bicyclist-killed-by-blue-line-train-was-29-year-old-minneapolis-man/361669771/
    Given the Out-sized Political Juice the Bike Nazi’s, er, uh, the Bicycling Community wields in Minneapolis (certainly much more than the general citizenry and common sense would dictate) things will change. It will be expensive, but…reasons.

15. Seflores, there’s something different about what happened to the cyclist from the jaywalker and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps legitimacy in terms of – not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say okay, he’s dead because he was a cyclist. The jaywalker death was absolutely indiscriminate.

16. Boss: Maybe we could hire some of the unemployed Somalis to help the Christians and Jews cross the tracks safely. Problem. Solved.

17. Militant? I doubt it. What about “reckless”? Looks like a lot of drivers are having trouble with the concept of “don’t drive in front of a moving train”, too.

    http://lrtdoneright.org/blue-line-and-green-line-accidents/

18. The Left believes that everybody loved light rail and streetcars until after ww2 when the evil oil companies shutdown the light rail and the streetcars using their magic evil powers. Suburban sprawl, the source of all evil, ensued.
    The truth is more prosaic. After WW2, American cities experienced rapid growth. Fixed rail and street car lines were abandoned in favor of the automobile and the bus.
    Light rail and street car mass transit, in the US, is not economical. Buses can do the same thing at a fraction of the cost. Buses have a smaller environmental footprint as well.
    But city planners love light rail and streetcars because they allow the planners to play Simcity with the lives of real people. Politicians love light rail and street cars because the opportunities for graft are awesome.

19. Bento Guzman nailed it.

20. FWIW, they say the suburbs are subsidized. I’ve never seen a good explanation of that, though.

21. TFS: they’re referring to the money spent for the interstate highway system and mortgage interest deduction, I believe. I’ll set that against the trillion we spend every year on welfare programs any day.

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