[ music ] Up until now, the systems we've looked at have not
been particularly widespread. In this episode we're going to change that and look at the most common
form of urban rail transit in the United States. If you live in an American city large enough
to go head-to-head with like, Minneapolis, then yours is probably one of many that have
built light rail in the last few decades. [ music ] Unlike other forms of transit we've talked about
before like metros, inclines, legacy streetcars —probably modern street cars too—the era of light
rail isn't over yet. After 40 years light rail is still under active development across the United
States. One reason for that is it's much cheaper than alternatives. At an average cost of 100
million dollars per mile it comes in a lot cheaper than heavy rapid transit which cost about 500
million dollars per mile in the same time period. Even though it's still more expensive than most
high quality bus projects there is just a sort of je ne sais quoi to having a train gliding through
your city that attracts new development around stations, which then attracts local political
support. Since 2010 light rail has received more federal transit funding than any other category
of transit, but light rail has proved more popular with planners and the Federal Transportation
Administration than with the public. Even with all this new infrastructure light rail has only picked
up 30 million new riders since 2010. In contrast just 26 new miles of heavy rail metros built in
the same timeframe gained 174 million new riders. While light rail might be cheaper to build per
mile, if you instead measure the cost per new rider suddenly it's the more expensive option. So if it
costs more per rider, why aren't we just building that sweet sweet heavy rail? What even is light and
heavy rail? Does one train weigh more than the other? Light and heavy rail just refer to how much
traffic the mode of transport can carry. Heavy rapid transit in North America is what we would
colloquially call "subways". Large, electric trains, running completely separate from road traffic like
the New York City Subway, Chicago L, or DC Metro. Defining light rail is difficult. One of the better
definitions out there is from the independent government advisory Transportation Research
Board: "a mode of urban transportation utilizing predominantly reserved but not necessarily grade
separated rights-of-way. Electrically propelled rail vehicles operate singly or in trains. Light rail
provides a wide range of passenger capabilities and performance characteristics at moderate
costs". Like many definitions of light rail this one is broad and big enough to include a lot
of transit that is definitely not light rail. Most of the modern streetcar systems that I covered in the first Failure and Success video, and the legacy street cars that predate light
rail both fall into this definition to some degree. So what does define light rail? I have some common
characteristics but you're going to see there are a lot of exceptions. Light rail is flexible in
nature so sometimes you just have to apply a Potter Stewart Test and you know when you see
it. To help show what is light rail let's bring in Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to play "Do You Know Light Rail When You See It". I'll tell you what sets light rail apart then show you a picture
of a system and then Justice Potter Stewart will tell us if it's light rail or not. Let's go! Light
rail generally has dedicated lanes whether they're underground, elevated, or on street level. So Justice
Stewart is this light rail? Yes! That's correct, this is Portland's MAX light rail in a dedicated
lane. Okay, Potter Stewart, is this light rail? Correct! That is not light rail that is the Salt Lake City S Line streetcar which runs only on dedicated tracks but it's still a street car.
Dedicated lanes alone do not define light rail. And what about this Justice Stewart, is
this light rail running in the street here? That's righ! It still is; it's Sacramento's RT
light rail and like many light rail systems it has short portions where it mixes with car traffic but
it's still light rail. Light rail will generally have larger stations with more infrastructure than
streetcars, so Justice Stewart is this light rail? That's correct! This is Seattle's Link light rail
in one of its downtown subway stations. So what about this one? That's right! This is not light rail
it's one of Philadelphia's subway surface streetcars that pre-date light rail and have large
underground stations. Okay, Justice Potter Stewart, this one is tricky: which one of these trains is
a light rail train and which one is a streetcar? Correct the Siemens S70 on the left is Charlotte's
Blue Line and on the right is also a Siemens S70, the most popular light rail vehicle in America, but it
is Atlanta's streetcar. Vehicles used by light rail and streetcars are almost always interchangeable.
So with this much overlap what really sets light rail apart? The best metric that we have is
overall route length and distance between stations. Light rail systems are designed for intermediate
distance travel like commuting whereas streetcars are extremely—oftentimes painfully—local. Most
modern systems are only a few miles in length with stops spaced similarly to bus stops. So what
does a light rail system look like in practice? Introducing the city of Washburn's light rail
system: WARTLink. Why do so many light rail systems have link in the name? I honestly don't know the
answer to this one, I think it's one of life's great mysteries. WARTLink is made up of three
lines total with 22 stations serving the city, so how was the system developed and what would make
a city choose to invest in light rail? What are the differences between this and the other forms
of rail transit that we've looked at for Washburn like a metro system? Let's take it back
a few decades and dig into that history. Light rail is an indirect descendant
of historic streetcar systems. I did a video last year about the early history
of streetcars that left off around 1920. I'm planning on doing a follow-up to it about the
decline of streetcars—the great part about YouTube is that you say you'll make these videos one day—remember to like the smashing subscribe bell. This light rail video could be thought of as a sequel
to the video about the decline of streetcars I will maybe, someday, probably, make forming
a sort of life, death, and rebirth of the form. In the united states in the 1960's the last
stragglers of the streetcar era were shutting down and it looked like there wasn't a very
bright future for transit. At the same time though, engineers in this country were obsessed
with the hottest European fashions in trains. [ music ] In 1962 Henry Dean Quinby, a transportation
engineer who had worked for the firm Parsons Brinckerhoff on new heavy rail rapid transit
projects like BART in San Francisco and the Skokie Swift in Chicago wrote into an academic
transportation journal called Traffic Quarterly with an article titled "Major Urban Corridor
Facilities a New Concept" in which he proposed a new concept for facilities along major urban
corridors. During the 1950's Quinby had traveled extensively through Europe observing mass
transit operations and when he came back, Quinby participated in the long American tradition
of telling everyone all about all the cool trains he saw and how easy it was to go places in
europe and how we need to be a bit more like that. [ static ] Quinby observed that American cities
essentially had two forms of urban transit: slow decaying local bus routes and high-speed, high-capacity, heavy rail transit. He proposed that there was a missing form of
transit in between these two that would be higher capacity and faster than a bus, but cheaper and
shorter in distance than a heavy rail metro. To fill that purpose, Quinby proposed that American
cities adopt what he called "rapid tramways" that were being developed in Western Europe,
primarily in the Rhine-Ruhr region of Germany. In the post-war period European cities had
struggled with the same transportation issues that American cities had faced in the 1930's.
Car ownership was increasing and the existing streetcars that ran on roads were being slowed by
traffic which began the spiral declining ridership. In American cities, streetcars were almost
always replaced with buses that continued to lose ridership, and again I'll cover the extinction
of streetcars in the future. Was it General Motors? Was it highways? Was it Judge Doom? But in many
European cities, there wasn't the same decline in streetcars and Quinbt noted the improvements
that had been made. Streetcar tracks were shifted to dedicated lanes, center medians, or off of
roads entirely to remove them from traffic. Small local stops were combined into farther apart
stations and streetcar vehicles were replaced with multi-vehicle or articulated trains. Quibby
estimated the rapid tramway concept would carry twice as many passengers as an American streetcar
and almost four times as many as a diesel bus. In his conclusion, Quinby argued that the
advancements in European trams had constituted a new form of transit entirely: a modern successor
to the streetcar. The rest of the 1960's was pretty stagnant for American light rail development. A
couple more proposals were put into journals like Traffic Quarterly but light rail was not pursued
in any cities. Development in Europe did continue, the German rapid tramway concept was formalized
into the stadtbahn, direct translation "city rail" and then to the concept of pre-metros where tram
lines would be put into subway tunnels in the city center that were built to metro standards and
then the periphery lines would be progressively upgraded until it eventually reached the standards
of a rapid transit metro system. American transit development has always kind of struggled with this
kind of incremental improvement. My video on metro systems covers the early Urban Mass Transportation
Administration, through the 1960's federal transit policy was focused heavily on all-new
technologically advanced heavy rail systems like BART and the Washington Metro rather than upgrades
to existing transit systems. By the early 1970's the Urban Mass Transportation Administration was
facing a dilemma. In 1970 Congress had allocated 3.1 billion dollars in transit funding for the
next five years. With costs exploding on metro systems under development it was pretty quickly
evident that funding was going to fall far short of demand if cities continued pursuing heavy rapid
transit. So in 1972 the UMTA commissioned a report on light rail by University of Pennsylvania
professor of transportation engineering Vukan Vuchic. Vuchic is sort of a legendary figure in transit he has probably had more groundbreaking
transit proposals ignored than pretty much anybody alive. The guy is pushing 90 but still
finds time to write op-eds about whatever the latest grew up in Philadelphia transit is and
true to form SEPTA ignores him every time. When it comes to US transit policy,
Vuchic really is—king, you dropped this. [ music ] Vuchic put together a report on light rail entitled "Light
Rail Transit Systems - A Definition and Evaluation" First, he solidified the term light rail over other
terms like rapid tramway or limited tramline. light rail is an adaptation of German stadtbahn, city rail, mixed with the British term light railway which was a regulatory class of railroad
built to a lower standard and at a lower cost than regular railways. Vuchic pulled statistics from the
last 20 years of transit ridership and found that while buses had shed millions of riders, ridership
on rapid transit lines had remained stable. This echoed what Quinby had said that American
transit was stratified into two extremes: the uncomfortable slow local bus
whose riders received disinvested second class service and left the
bus as soon as they could afford to, and more comfortable rail transit that was fast
enough to even beat driving in some cities. The position that Vuchic took in his report was
that the basic premise of metros had been right. High quality transit separated from traffic was
the only transit that would draw riders out of cars. A strong principle behind metros though was
that improvements to transit needed to be new and technologically advanced. Vuchic argued that the
metro proponents had been incorrect about this and that instead "the greatest immediate
benefits in transit can certainly be achieved through modernization of our existing
badly neglected and obsolete transit systems and facilities and through introduction
of innovative methods of operation which utilize basically standard technology". One
of these standard technologies would be light rail. He then went on to make the connection between
the few surviving streetcar systems in Newark, Boston, Philly, Pittsburgh, San Francisco,
and Cleveland and European light rail and pointed out that we already sort of had
our own template for light rail in these cities. Vuchic finished by reiterating what Quinby and others had
said that American cities should pursue the light rail developed in Europe as a way to more cost
effectively expand transit in less dense cities. After Vuchic's report was released the UMTA
looked to market the idea of light rail to cities and hosted the National Light Rail
Conference in Philadelphia in 1975. The Light Rail Conference had unexpectedly high
attendance because a bunch of hardcore trolley enthusiasts, hopeful to hear about the restoration
of extinct streetcar services, shacked up in nearby college dorms to crash the conference. They should restore it and run it on the mainline, god bless. That aside though, the conference was considered
a success and many of the transit and planning professionals in attendance returned home with
the message of light rail. So that about wraps up the history class, let's head on back to Washburn
and we'll see how a city ends up with light rail. [ music ] There's an important decision moment that we
visited in two previous episodes: deciding whether or not to pursue a heavy rail metro system. In the
metros episode, a voter referendum was passed to provide local funds to match federal funding for
building such a system. But in the busways episode we took a different timeline and that referendum
failed and transit expansions were kicked down the road a decade. In our scenario today light rail
is going to follow a similar divergence. The 1970 rapid transit referendum fails and plans
for transit go dormant. This was a real decision that cities made too, in Seattle a voter
referendum on a heavy rail rapid transit system failed in 1970 and it would be over 25 years
before voters approved new funding for light rail. Washburn's turnaround is going to be a little
faster. The local transit leaders attended the National Light Rail Conference in 1975 and heard
the good word about light rail. Planners at the Washburn Area Rapid Transit System dusted off
the plans from the 1960's for a metro system and re-examined them in the context of trying to
build out a similar system but for a much lower cost as light rail. This was a common feature
of early light rail systems; San Diego, Buffalo, Los Angeles, and Baltimore all were planned
originally as heavy rail and then altered for cost reasons. By 1980 there was enough political
momentum to bring another transit plan to voters. Federal funding had gotten stingier though in
the decade since the last referendum. After costs spiraled on the great metros of DC and Atlanta the
feds were no longer willing to fund entire systems. Voters had been asked to supply 20% of the funds
for an 850 million dollar system in 1970. Now they would be asked to provide the same percentage but
for a much smaller 150 million dollar starter line that would then be gradually extended into a full
light rail network. Voters approved a more modest plan and construction starts in 1981. Unlike the
metro systems of the 1970's the light rail systems of the 80's largely did not face the extraordinary
cost overruns and were built in a pretty timely fashion. Inflation was much lower in the 80's
and accessible stations were factored in from the start and in general the nuts and bolts of
figuring out how to build a rail transit project after decades of neglect in that area
had been worked out by the metro systems. In 1984 our first light rail line
opens on time and close to budget. This east-west line starts in the downtown
where it runs in either mixed traffic or in a dedicated lane and moving out of the
downtown it gets a more dedicated means of travel in the median of an arterial road and then
it enters a completely separated right-of-way operating alongside a freight rail corridor
with park-and-ride suburban stations. This line demonstrates the versatility of light
rail. Transit corridors can be pieced together from a variety of sources and there's not one
single standard to follow. This versatility is great for cost savings but it sometimes
also comes at the cost of ridership. Running in mixed traffic downtown means not
having to buy up expensive land but it also slows the trains down to a crawl and using a
freight corridor in an urban neighborhood can be a cheap way to reuse an existing right-of-way,
but often the land surrounding freight rail was used for industrial purposes and so there's
few sources of riders or destinations that they want to go to along that line. A crucial part
of the new light rail system is the vehicles that run on it and for a system opening in the
1980's there were a handful of options. There was a robust european market for light rail vehicles
but that was mostly inaccessible to systems trying to purchase vehicles using federal grant money. In
1971 before light rail systems opened, three of the remaining streetcar subway systems: San Francisco's
Muni, SEPTA, and Boston's MBTA were in need of replacements for their decades old PCC streetcars
they were still using that had been built in the 1940's. The systems tried to buy European vehicles
but Nixon created the Buy America policy that same year and since the Urban Mass Transportation
Administration was going to fund the new purchases the new vehicles would have to be built
domestically, the same domestic market where a streetcar hadn't been built in 20 years. To
make a new vehicle viable the UMTA requested that the three systems combine their purchases
to create an order large enough that somebody would be interested and that somebody turned out
to be defense contractors looking for work amid the winding down war in Vietnam. Boeing ultimately
won the contract and in 1972 began building a new vehicle in Philadelphia called the US Standard
Light Rail Vehicle. So one option would be to buy Standard Light Rail Vehicles or SLRV's but
there was a bit of a problem: they were horrible. Boeing's project managers had viewed themselves
in their own words as "bearers of high technology" and so making a slow little train should be no
issue. Teams of aerospace engineers were assembled and to make sure this point is clear nobody
involved had any experience working on a train. A ton of development was outsourced to companies
and countries with more transit experience as a result though it was really difficult to
source parts for maintenance and the SLRV was really difficult to maintain in general. It hadn't
actually been designed with maintenance in mind, some parts couldn't even be removed without
hacking away at it with a welding torch. Difficult maintenance was made worse by
the fact that they just broke so much. There were issues with the electronics, the doors
were finicky and would repeatedly open and close until they broke, and the cars were breaking down
15 times more frequently than the German vehicles that San Diego had purchased without federal money.
So many SLRVs broke down that after Boston started receiving their order, disabled SLRVs were hidden
in subway tunnels to be cannibalized for parts until so many were broken they ultimately had
to be stored in yards in view of the public and the press who soon found out about the
issues. After court settlements forced Boeing to address the issues, the steel-framed cars began
corroding less than a decade into their life. Ultimately the federal government shortened
their declared lifespan from 25 years to 15 years to allow Boston and San Francisco to retire
them early. So knowing this, Washburn's light rail planners opted to pursue what other 8'0s
light rail systems did and find ways to purchase internationally produced vehicles. WARTLink's
vehicles are Siemens-Duwag U2's, the same that were purchased by San Diego and the new Canadian
light rail systems in Edmonton and Calgary. To meet Buy America requirements factories had
to be set up in the US which raised the cost and this is still the way we buy light rail
trains in America in the year of our lord, 2021. 40 years after the failure of the Standard Light
Rail Vehicle, there is no light rail manufacturing industry in the United States. Most of our vehicles
come from Germany or Kapan at an inflated price. With one line open in Washburn, where does light
rail go from here? Well light rail is really easy to expand. To expand a heavy rapid transit system
each mile of new rail needs to be the same quality as the rest of the system. Expansions are very
expensive and they're limited in what areas they can easily go and light rail systems have been
expanded, a lot. Remember at the start I said that almost 200 miles of light rail have been built
in just the last 10 years? Almost every single light rail system built was done in the starter-line-piecemeal-extension model. So WARTLink gets a bunch of extensions. A natural first one is the
north-south line running through the downtown and similar to the route that we took in the
busway in the last episode and in the metro from a while ago, again it makes sense that the route
is similar to other transit plans we've had. Failed metro plans were commonly recycled into light
rail. This line opens nine years later in 1993. It begins south of the downtown with a station a
highway median making a distant connection to the Amtrak station. On it'ss north end the line ends at
a station for the science center, the same one that I mentioned in the streetcars episode. Through the
downtown the light rail runs in dedicated lanes but on the street surface. One of the principles
of European light rail and pre-metros had been that the initial phase should include
putting a tunnel through the city center to get transit off of congested streets. American
light rails never really followed this principle that closely. Upgrades to older street cars
included some tunnels, Pittsburgh's streetcar was put into a subway tunnel in the downtown
during it's light rail upgrade in the 1980's and San Francisco's Muni had a tunnel built
beneath Market Street alongside the construction of BART. A handful of new systems have some
tunneling; Seattle makes the most use of tunneling since it inherited a downtown bus tunnel that
was converted to light rail and Los Angeles has some light rail subways. Buffalo, New York really
told the Europeans to go f— themselves by putting its new light rail on streets with cars in the
downtown and then blowing so much money tunneling under the suburbs that they couldn't afford
to finish the line. Choosing to forego downtown tunnels was an obvious cost cutting choice, maybe
mixed with the pessimism that American light rail would never have high enough ridership
to justify an expensive but faster subway, and unfortunately this is becoming a limitation of
some of our systems. Portland's light rail crawls through the downtown at just seven miles per hour
making stops at stations less than 500 feet apart and the stations themselves are issues. Each
station is only as long as a city block and Portland famously has very small 200 foot
long blocks so trains are limited in their length and that limits the entire capacity of the system
and the same has happened in Dallas where all four lines of the city's light rail share the same
downtown trunk on the surface and now the city is preparing to invest nearly two billion dollars
in a subway project to alleviate that congestion. This isn't really meant to be a dig at those
cities—the real dig is the one they're gonna have to do to bury those trains—when they built their
original light rail systems the political capital and funding just didn't exist for new subway
tunnels and none of the city's building light rail had a culture of transit ridership yet that
would necessitate it but cost savings shortcuts are a limitation built into systems that are going
to have to be faced in the future. In Washburn the next extension opens in 2002 with two new stations
on the north-south line terminating at the airport. Eight light rail systems in the us serve their
airports and several more under construction or in the planning stages so airports are pretty popular
light rail connection. Airports aren't a great source of ridership though and it can require
running trains at weird hours so while they may be politically popular, care needs to be taken to
make the airport line useful to riders other than airline passengers. Serving airport employees
should be a top priority along with making stops along the way to the airport. Moving much
further down the list of useful transit extensions we come to the 2004 expansion of WARTLink to the
stadium across the river from downtown Washburn. This stadium on a redeveloped brownfield site gets
extremely large and extremely infrequent crowds which makes it a dubious case for an expensive
light rail extension crossing the river but nonetheless the city pursued the plan like
many cities did chasing connections that most of their citizens would rarely use but tourists could
find useful. The final extension that brings us to the modern day layout of WARTLink is a branch
of the north-south line that opened in 2014 extending the northern terminus to a
suburban mall. This extension is funded in a similar way to streetcar systems that we
discussed in the first episode of the series using New Starts or Small Starts federal funding
schemes that incentivize small transit systems and extensions. I didn't put together a cost for
this extension but based on the trends in the latest generation of light rail construction it
would probably be expensive. Light rail projects in the United States have been rapidly escalating
in cost. Minneapolis's 15 mile Green Line extension will be about 140 million dollars per mile and
Maryland's Purple Line will cost about 150 million dollars a mile and then in San Diego, famous for
opening its original light rail in 1981 at a cost of just six million dollars a mile, is constructing
a new extension that'll cost nearly 200 million dollars per mile. With this final extension in
place let's look at how service on WARTLink works and who it serves. Our system has three lines now:
the Pink Line which is the first line that opened in the 1980's, and second is the Green Line that
runs between the airport downtown in the stadium and this is the tourist train, and finally the Gold
Line that runs between the mall and the downtown. These lines run from early morning to late night,
there are no 24 7 light rail systems in the US except for a shuttle service to Minneapolis's
airport, again airports have some weird hours. Now for accessibility, all the stations in
WARTLink are accessible there's not a lot to say about light rail accessibility that differs
from what I said about modern streetcars, again same technologies. All of our modern light rail
systems existed in an era where federal dollars required accessible buildings and many were built
after the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Among the older light rail systems that were
originally streetcar subways accessibility is less universal. The reality is that most of these
systems were never fully modernized to light rail standards and one of the largest streetcar
systems, Philadelphia, has only introduced modernization plans in the past several years.
These systems still have stops with low platforms or no platforms like Boston's Green Line or San
Francisco's Taraval Line. Alright so there's one more important area that I want to cover before we wrap up and that's frequency and service variation. I keep stressing the flexibility of light rail
and this is an area where that flexibility is a double-edged sword. Light rail can
run a huge range of service levels which is really cost effective but it creates
some subpar experiences. At peak morning and evening periods most light rail systems
top out at trains every five or six minutes although there's a couple systems like DART
in Dallas that have trains every three minutes. Outside of peak hours though frequencies drop off
really quickly. Most light rail systems in the US operate on 15 to 20 minute frequencies off-peak
and it can be even worse on nights and weekends. American light rail systems have abysmally
low frequencies by international standards and it reflects on our ridership. A service
that runs infrequently outside of peak hours is one that is not reliable to anybody who's
not a 9-to-5 commuter. Office commuters are invariably wealthier and wider than other riders.
In systems that have a large discrepancy between peak and non-peak frequencies are not equitable
transit systems. A light rail line stretching into low-density suburbs receiving massive investment
but operating primarily for commuters while high ridership city bus lines languish in traffic is
a perpetuation of this inequity. Part of the reason why we have such poor frequencies outside of peak
hours though is in how we fund transit. When the federal government gives money to transit it's
almost always for what we call capital expenses. Capital expenses are those that are usually for
things we can see and touch and last a really long time like building a new track or stations
or new vehicles, and sometimes maintenance is a capital expense sometimes it's not it kind of
depends on how big and how broken things are the bigger and brokener it is the more likely
to be capital. What the federal government does not give money for is operating expenses,
annual expenditures like labor, fuel, maintenance; all the costs that are necessary to make the
system actually move. So transit operators are given large amounts of money to buy shiny
new track and equipment but then struggle to actually pay to run service that is useful to
riders. In Vukan Vuchic's 1972 report on light rail he observed that what American transit needed
was not new technologically advanced systems, this was the promise that metros had made, that
a sufficiently advanced system would meet the needs of riders and draw them back from their
cars. Extraordinary costs ultimately meant metros could not serve the vast majority of riders and
that promise failed. Light rail put forward a new proposal that by using a simpler and more
adaptable form we could build enough transit that more riders would be within reach of a system.
Light rail certainly did expand transit, there are hundreds more miles of rail transit now than
when it first came on the scene in the 1970's, but light rail's failure so far has been that to
simply spread rail across the city is not enough. We can't get out of this mess just by purchasing
new trains. Again to Vuchic's point, the greatest improvement in transit that we can make is in
operations which includes operational funding. Most of my other videos are a bit of a post-mortem on
types of transit that have long since gone extinct, for light rail though it's pretty much the only
politically viable form of transit that we have so addressing our shortcomings is essential.
Going forward, American light rail systems need to expand in a cost effective way similar
to the first light rail systems. This includes managing the cost of light rail vehicles that are
artificially inflated from Buy America requirements. Our light rail systems need to follow routes that
actually reach riders destinations and if they are routed through an unpopulated area then housing
needs to be built aggressively around stations. Finally building high quality light rail systems
and then operating them on razor thin budgets is not a viable approach to building a culture of
transit. Infrequent service is not reliable and it favors the inequitable model of prioritizing
computer needs. Growing ridership on our existing light rail systems depends on improving
frequencies both on the train and on bus services connecting to it. There is some hope here, with
a new presidential administration comes renewed calls to change rules so transit agencies can tap
into federal funds to cover part or all of their operating costs. The Biden administration seems like
it could be receptive to this especially after including funding for operations in the COVID-19
relief package that was passed in early 2021. So there is hope for light rail to improve and I'm
optimistic that the continued development of the form will make it an integral part in building
a culture of transit in small and medium cities. [ music ]
