I agree that a mass transit system is very important to big cities. In the same breath I personally could care less about big cities such as Santo Domingo ( or New York City) other than when they take money away from more important issues. Some would say eduction and I would say electricity are much more important.
There are other more economical solutions than the Pharaonic underground system being built as we speak in Santo Domingo. It is a point where others that support the Metro and I will have to agree to disagree.
You could list them here:
#1:________________
#2:________________
#3:________________
etc...
A solution for the actual situation is not a solution to a constant growing problem, as the city will undoubtedly become denser each decade after the last.
So far a mass transit system like the Metro has been found to be the ONLY feasible solution, to a problem that never stops expanding.
What? Put more buses around the city? Create a bus only lane all around the streets? Ban private cars not carrying more than 2 people from traffic?
All those and more ideas (solutions) have been tried and found to serve for about a decade or so, until after the volume became too much for the ideas to work their wonders any longer.
Adding more traffic is not a long term solution...
NYC, LONDON and JAPAN would come to a grinding halt, if they needed to move the people in their Metro systems unto the streets...
We don't want more horizontal expansion of housing eating away the green areas near metropolitan zones. We need to think vertical and with a right mixture of mass transit, able to meet demand by adding more train sets on a need basis.
The SD Metro was built to handle over 200,000 riders, per line, per day, using the actual three car configuration. All stations were built with the capacity to meet a six car configuration and traffic within the infrastructure of over 500,000 riders per line, per day. The stations were also engineered to accommodate enlargement to meet future expansion when needed to 9 cars per train; again rising the rider ship to over 700,000 per day, per line.
That's without even touching the present traffic timetables from the circulation patterns. Our train system is built to eliminate human error and drive via fully automatic computer guidance the entire network. That means that trains can operate between less than a minute from each other, safely.
Think that the riders per day, per line would be tripled or more without any potential danger for disasters...
If the metropolitan area serviced by our Metro became a 10 million + city, the actual system would be capable of offering the best route to over 20% of the population during rush hour per line.
You want to see an efficient Metro system? Take a ride in Line 1 of the SD Metro and judge for yourself the value it brings to the metro population of the city.
After all, this is only the first line of the larger system. I don't know if you can take the time to fully understand two things in your ill based opinions:
#1- The investment made in the Metro by the gov, wouldn't make any difference if taken and put into the electrical sector. As a matter of fact, the electrical sector gulps down more money than the Metro could ever seek to take away from the gov.
The problem with the grid is not about dumping money into building new plants or upgrading the grid, but changing how we bill and who's going to get their cables cut for non payment.
For a political party the solution to that problem is political suicide with their voting masses of freeloaders...
#2- Investing the money into education... Are you so naive to think that ANY foreign financial institution would gladly extend a credit line to fund education in the DR?????????? Where do you think the money to repay the debt would come from???????? The funds for the SD Metro were issued by the financial institutions with backing from their perspective nations to open nee contracts for their companies and goods abroad. Even most of the material to be used was pre-conditioned to be purchased from the foreign nations where the loans were extended to the DR.
Go and try to ask for millions in loans to fund a nice education make over for the DR, from the same channels and see how far or how much you can get...
Stop talking nonsense repeated by a geologist turned Metro expert, or by thinking that somehow the transit unions of the DR would change their ways one day...
It took NYC over 100 years to have the puny old subway it owns today, with the clang! Clang! Clang! of the wheels at every roll and the smells that turn your stomach inside out. Think that it has 368 km of tracks built over a 100 years span; the SD Metro would be over 100 km in less than 3 decades alone.
By the time Line 3 becomes operational, the train cars will be manufactured in the DR for a long time. Already we have local industry preparing to be the main suppliers of the rails for our expansions.