Lightrail Is A Good Idea :: essays research papers

     The installation of a cloudless school transit body in Austin would be a step in the focal point of progress for Austins traffic problem. Austins usher traffic situation is atrocious. There seems to be no real externalize on how it will be fixed and paid for. The Capital thermionic vacuum tube buses be the only form of mass transit in Austin. The buses rush for college students and go around campus and move out campus. The buses that only travel on campus neer have a very high ridership, where as the buses that go off campus always tend to be overfull. This is where decrepit plain comes in.      Light raceway is a term that come into being only in the destruction thirty or forty years. It refers to an electric railway system, constructed in the mid-seventies or later, characterized by its ability to operate single or seven-fold car consists, trains. It travels along exclusive rights-of-way track at ground level, on aerial structures, in subways, or in streets. It can board and rout passengers at station platforms or at street, track, or car-floor level. Light rail can also refer to an electric railway with a "light volume" traffic capacity, as opposed to heavy rail. Light rail may use shared or exclusive rights-of-way, high or low platform loading and multi-car trains or single cars. Also cognise as "streetcar," "trolley car" or "tramway.      Opponents of Austins proposed light rail system usually say that a better tooth root to Austins traffic problem is to tally more lanes to the highways and add more miles of road. They also say that the city needs to maintain the present-day(prenominal) streets better. Houston is a good example of what good roads can do to help traffic problems. Houston Metro, Houstons transit agency, spent $700 million on 88 miles of carpool lanes in Houston. Carpool lanes, or high occupancy fomite(HOV) lanes, are lanes that are separated from the main highway by barriers and require that a vehicle be carrying at least two people to use them. The spare HOV lanes have cut downd Houstons overall traffic congestion by sestet percent. In Katy, southwest Houston, the HOV lanes have reduced congestion by 14 percent.      Houston has done a good job with improving their highways, just now there are some downsides. Even though the HOV lanes have helped to reduce traffic congestion in most places by up to six percent, they are now carrying more people than designed for.