Tuesday, March 1, 2011

The great train robbery: NCTD sticks up Del Mar for wayside horns



Bend over, Encinitas. We're going to buy four of these.


A group of fundraisers that spent more than $17,000 for the North County Transit District to design a quieter train alert system for Del Mar were unpleasantly surprised last week when the expected price was nearly $200,000 higher than anticipated.

The Del Mar fundraisers are working toward installing a wayside horn train-alert system at the city’s lone Coast Boulevard crossing. They spent the money on the design phase in hopes that NCTD would return with a price lower than the $276,000 originally estimated. But the NCTD final estimate came in at $454,147, including $91,000 in administrative fees. The actual wayside horn equipment costs about $43,000, according to the estimate.



$454,147 to the government for a $43,000 horn. Ain't big government grand?

4 comments:

  1. File this with the ~$5m pedestrian underpasses. There are four planned, so that's roughly $20m to let people cross from one side of the tracks to the other at four key areas. We could build forty at-grade crossings for that. Or better yet, five for half the cost of a single underpass, and they would be done in this lifetime. The city is wasting our money.

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  2. Waiting for the city officials to clean up their own act is like waiting for Santa Claus. The citizens need to pass initiatives or force greater accountability - these projects are just pocket liners for these crooks.

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  3. Will our NCTD rep Jerome Stocks gets us a better deal in Encinitas? After all his supporter John DeWald, developer of Pacific Station, will be the prime beneficiary of the wayside horns, at least at the D and E Street crossings. Will Stocks exclude the Chesterfield crossing to stick it to Teresa Barth again?

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  4. The fleecing of America has reached epidemic proportions. This is an outright rip off! Grab your ankles and smile Encinitas.

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