Milwaukie light rail will cost up to $1.4 billion

TriMet releases cost, rider numbers
Milwaukie light rail will cost up to $1.4 billion and carry as many as 26,000 new trips

This is a 6.5 mile Light rail line, divide that by $1.4 billion and that’s only $215 million dollars a mile. Using Tri-Mets numbers and not counting operating costs and or cost overruns!

The Milwaukie line will not carry 26,000 new riders. Tri-Met counts trips not riders. The new line is projected to carry 26,000 new trips. A trip is every time a person boards a light rail train or bus and get off. So if this person needs to transfer or stop along the route and hops off and on the train or bus or just return back to where they started. One person can become between 2 or more trips in one day, but they are only one person.

Using that, 26,000 new riders (or trips) should be divided by 2 or 13,000 people, at the high end. The new line will carry 13,000 people, if they don’t transfer to another train or bus. If all of the 13,000 people makes one stop, the ridership could drop to 6,500 people a day. Then on top of that, more than half of the trips will be former bus riders.

So my question is, are we going to spend 1.4 billion dollars to have between 3,250 to 6,500 new people riding this line?

We don’t have enough money to replace the Sellwood Bridge which carries around 30,000 cars a day, some with more than one person in it. Why are we told we need a new tax for the Sellwood Bridge but we seem to have plenty of left over money for the Milwaukie light rail line