What Ben said, in his thorough fisking of Michael Ennis’s misleading anti-transit guest column in today’s Seattle Times. (Light rail is going to electrocute the I-90 bridge? I mean, really? Could the folks at the Washington Policy Center get anymore ridiculous?)
And… um… I don’t tell Ennis how to build Enumclaw’s transportation system, so why’s he telling us how to build ours?
Is there any requirement that ST pay the state for the middle span? Couldn’t the Gov. just have the DOT head sign a transitway agreement giving ST the right to use it?
Put differently, the legislature could not require that ST pay a billion dollars or whatever to the state, isn’t that correct?
Ya know, I saw that too, and I thought: “what the f*&k are they talking about?????”
@1 If there is, it probably has to do with the bridge being built with dedicated highway funds, and it being against the law to use those funds for other purposes. If so, that would create a legal requirement that ST reimburse DOT for the cost of accommodating light rail on the bridge.
Here’s the proof Michael Ennis is an antitransit hack.
The damage is unseen but the effect can be major. A 1-ampere current discharging continuously from a steel pipeline will remove approximately 20 pounds of steel in a year…
This kind of thing delights LRT opponents, who like to play up the danger that “ravaging corrosion” from light-rail systems will attack utility lines, roadways, bridges, and water-supply systems and generally, as one critic put it, “electrocute the infrastructure.”
@3
That law doesn’t apply here. The bridge was built with mostly federal funds, with an agreement that the center bridge would one day be converted to transit use.
There actually was and maybe still is a problem with stray electricty in Portland from their light rail system. Once on awhile there will be an article in the paper about the problem. People with dogs notice it when the dogs react. This doesn’t help the blind at all.
Light-rail systems are bonded– that is to say, all of the parts of the system are joined together to provide a grounded path so stray electrical currents will stay in the system and not wander off.
All large structures (and even ourselves) are, however, affected by the electric potential in the atmosphere, ground, and bodies of water. What we see as a lightening strike is actually ground electricity rising to the very highly polarized potential of storm clouds where water droplets have become ionized because of their movement past one another.
In a structure like the Hood Canal Bridge, the natural ionization of salty water blown into waves and droplets will provide a ‘galvanic current’ causing corrosion. That’s why they are replacing segments of the bridge that most assuredly have never seen a light-rail vehicle.
LINK as no intention of letting electricity ‘leak out’ of the system. Not only has this problem been understood for over a hundred years, but this would be a problem for modern signaling, control, and propulsion of the trains.
Ennis’s comment is on a par with James Thurber’s aunt, who believed that if you did not keep a lightbulb in an empty socket, the electricity would leak out.
@7
Thanks for that.
Gee whiz…if ‘lectricity’s such a problem maybe we should go back to steam.
It’s painful to watch rural cow-tipping anti-guvmint types try to weigh in on big city public policy issues.