Light Rail Jacksonville

My Rhapsody Playlist

A Finished Skyway? Just imagine the possibilities!

Who Would Ride If We Finished The Skyway and Linked It To Rail?

Everyone!

Skyway lines in Blue

Park and Ride, Garages, and Transfer Facilities, in Red

Editorial by Bob Mann

It's certainly easy to sit back and make light of the Skyway, everyone seems to be guilty at some point. I confess that I was without a doubt the number one enemy of the whole project back in the 1970s and 80's. Guilty not of simply burning the Skyway in print and television, but rather guilty of taking a blow-torch to it. I would never have built it in the first place, but the only thing worse then building any fixed transit system is half-way building it.

In the case of the Skyway, I find that the City leadership and myself have completely swapped positions. As a transportation professional, the worst thing we can do is sit on the Skyway as-is and hope for the best. This is done by a well meaning political machine that doesn't want to appear irresponsible for the stewardship of the City's limited budget. They feel they would appear irresponsible as the media has continued the attack I started on the Skyway in 1980, without pause to consider the fallacy of attacking our only green, fixed, clean, electric, traffic free source of transportation in a world of soaring gasoline prices.

Was the Skyway too expensive? Certainly, for the actual route miles we have running, the cost per mile was one of the most expensive in history. Wouldn't expansion, even modest expansion, just continue the hemorrhage of red ink? No! In fact every inch of expansion would bring down the cost per mile of the entire system. Please understand the real expense in the original building and the conversion to monorail accomplished two major goals. The facilities and signals, computers and shops, are State-of-the-Art, with little to no more investment, they could handle the needs of a system 20 - 40 or 60 miles long. The money quite simply was spent up front to give us the ability to expand quickly and cheaply in any direction. The conversion to monorail from the original system gave us untold flexibility and off-the-shelf purchasing power. The final big piece was the St. Johns River crossing on the new Acosta Bridge, certainly not a cheap undertaking even if we would have built a bridge for pogo sticks.

At the request of certain friends on City Council, I have been all over the Skyway with my transportation supplier and contractor friends. The last one while walking asked me, if we can expand it, where do you want to keep the costs? I must confess even I was jaded by the bad press and said something stupid like "well we like to keep it under $30 Million a mile."

My friend almost choked to death right downtown at Central Station. "Bob, I hate to hear numbers like that, my gosh man, this thing could expand and not even approach $15 Million a mile..." Trying to recover, I rather sheepishly said, "Yeah, I guess I knew that all along, why not shoot for 9 or 10?" The conversation and the inspection picked up pace, "Sure 9 or 10, I think it's doable."

So we have this fantastic Skyway, a wonderful super system that frankly the city hasn't caught up with. Every mile we add for $10 or even $20 Million will bring down the overall cost-per-mile of the finished system, and raise the passenger count.
But City Hall, DOT and perhaps even JTA have cold feet. Like an angler that went over the top for the most expensive rod and reel in the world. He now has the tools to bring home the really big fish, but he spent so much on the basics, that now his wife won't let him buy any line... "You've already broke the bank, I'll be darned if I'm going to let you add one inch of new line or one dollar in cost, just get out there and figure out how to make it work just like it is!"

Well as it is we have 2.5 miles that cost us $184,000,000 Million, or about $73 Million per mile, though most of it was a Federal UMTA grant. So if we added 8 miles of new line for $15 Million per new track mile, our cost for the entire system would just top $300 Million, but our cost per mile, for the entire 10.5 mile system would fall to 28,952,380 about the same as BRT or LRT. If we added 23.5 miles of new track at $15 Million per new track mile our new construction costs would be $352,500,000 Million. Add that to the $184,000,000 Million that we have already invested for 2.5 miles and the system comes up to 26 miles in length. 26 miles for a grand total of $536,500,000 finished and operating over the streets for about 1/2 the cost of 26 miles of new diesel bus quick-ways that JTA has successfully pitched to the city as BRT.

We already have everything we need for a first class Skyway system that works.  Add in a few miles of streetcar, commuter rail and BRT throughout the region and we would join the world's big league cities with a transit system second to none.

Bob Mann

The Jacksonville Skyway, A Love - Hate Story: