Comment 103218

By AnjoMan (registered) | Posted July 14, 2014 at 19:30:31 in reply to Comment 103138

Yes but because the capital and operating costs come from different budgets, the 'time to recoup' is theoretical. What does it really mean? The province can't say that they recouped their initial investment since they won't be operating the line. The city can't claim they saved on the capital cost since they are not paying them either way. Furthermore, the costs fit into budgets that are different by several orders of magnitude. A one time cost of $400M to build LRT instead of BRT is relatively small compared to the provincial budget, and even to the total planned spending by the province on transit projects in the next 15 years. Meanwhile the operating costs of a rapid transit line are pretty high relative to a city's budget. RapidReady estimates $14.5M per year, and BRT could be double that- but the financial impact that would have on the HSR and the city of Hamilton would be much larger than the impact on the province of paying for LRT. Lastly, while you might pay provincial taxes, so do 12 million other residents of Ontario. There are only 520,000 in Hamilton, so the tax bases really are not comparable. So actually i would say that 'time to recoup costs' isnt that meaningful.

Comment edited by AnjoMan on 2014-07-14 19:34:25

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