The light-rail wayback machine

The more things change, the more they stay the same and then almost change again. In his "Move It!" column, the Chron's Rad Sallee looks at a failed 1983 plan for a southwestern rail transit line, nothing that the Metro of 20 years ago ruled out street-level light rail as a transit mode and Richmond Avenue as a route because of "severe traffic disruption on major cross streets and ... relatively low speed." It's theoretically worth noting, of course, because Metro is now considering a light-rail line totally or partially running along Richmond between UH and Uptown.

Metro's proposal in the early '80s was for a heavy rail line that would have begun near Crosstimbers and Hardy on the north side, then would have run through downtown as a Main Street subway and resurfaced south of the Pierce Elevated, where it would have followed Travis to the Southwest Freeway and run betweeen Westpark and the since-removed Southern Pacific tracks to the Beltway. In all, it would have been an 18-mile line costing $2.35 billion (or $4.6 billion in 2006 dollars). Between downtown and Fountain View, the line would have been almost completely elevated.

Though Metro ruled out street-level rail back then, it also nixed the ideas of a totally elevated and an all-subway system, saying elevated rail was too disruptive and a subway was too expensive (especially considering all the times water would have to be pumped out of it). Voters turned down the final proposal, the combination subway-elevated line, 62 percent to 38 percent and Metro started building HOV lanes to solve all our traffic problems. And it's worked, right?