The Columbia Pike streetcar, conceptual drawing only.

The website Trains for America picked up a story from the Lynchburg News & Advance about a State Senator from Harrisonburg criticizing VDOT for VDRPT’s new Lynchburg-DC-NY train (you know, the one BeyondDC posted about yesterday). Clueless anti-transit Republicans in rural Virginia aren’t really blogworthy, but the article did include one interesting nugget: A State Delegate from Lynchburg, while defending the new rail service, pointed out that the cost of the Lynchburg train is less than the $20 million it costs to design and build a one-mile stretch of new road.

$20 million for one-mile of road!

Obviously that’s a generality, and it’s not clear what kind of road the Delegate was speaking in regards to. Probably not a small local street, since developers usually build those rather than the state, and certainly not an Interstate-grade highway or anything like one, since the per mile cost of the ICC is $143 million. Most likely the Lynchburg delegate was speaking in regards to an average surface arterial street, something like Glebe Road or Stringfellow Road.

To put that number in context, the Columbia Pike streetcar will cost $27 million per mile according to Arlington County (including the cost to tear the street up and install tracks). That means it costs only marginally more to rebuild a mile of street with a streetcar than it costs to construct a mile of typical street in the first place. That of course implies that if you do it all at once, the streetcar cost turns out to be only a small percentage of the total.

Consider the thousands of miles of arterial and collector streets in the Washington region. Consider the transit system we could have, if only we cared to have it.