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This is not a fair comparison: 1.) The real cost for an Uber ride is opaque, at best. 2.) Unlike Uber, public transportation becomes exponentially better with
by tabeth 9y ago
This is not a fair comparison:
1.) The real cost for an Uber ride is opaque, at best.
2.) Unlike Uber, public transportation becomes exponentially better with infrastructure upgrades. These upgrades would cease (in both mind and in implementation) to exist with the proliferation of Uber and other "car sharing" rides.
3.) Road travel is more subsidized than rail, anecdotally. I hate to say I don't have hard data for this, but I'm pretty sure it's right (sure, there's a gas tax, however cars are subsidized both implicitly, with parking lots and real estate, and explicitly, with wars and other foreign policy to manipulate the price of gas).
- yardie 9y agoThey have been planning to bring more light rail and more buses for decades. I’ll go with the solution that works today. When the transit authority and politicians get off their ass and install the lines we agreed and paid for then we can revisit the perfect hypothetical.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> Road travel is more subsidized than rail, anecdotally New York spends between $1.11 and $7.34 subsidizing each ride on our Subway or LIRR, respectively, [1]. Assuming 2 trips a day on each of a year's 260 workdays, that comes to $577 to $3,810 of subsidies per commuter per year. The article is from 2012, so we'll use BLS data [2] to adjust those figures to September 2017 dollars: $618 and $4,080, respectively. "The statewide average of highway spending per capita in 2009 was $233," [3] or $266 in September 2017 dollars. That said, this isn't a fair comparison since we aren't adjusting for usage. On the other hand, most of roads' wear and tear comes from trucks [3]. And New York taxes the hell out of trucks [4]. TL; DR Trains work, but in the United States we tend to treat them as jobs programs first and public infrastructure second. [1] http://www.wnyc.org/story/283927-mta-suburban-passengers-get-7-per-ride-subway-riders-a-buck/ http://www.wnyc.org/story/283927-mta-suburban-passengers-get... [2] https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm [3] http://facweb.knowlton.ohio-state.edu/pviton/courses2/crp776/776-roads-handout.pdf http://facweb.knowlton.ohio-state.edu/pviton/courses2/crp776... [4] https://www.tax.ny.gov/bus/hut/huidx.htm https://www.tax.ny.gov/bus/hut/huidx.htm
- kalleboo 9y agoYou're comparing different values here - subsidies per commuter vs subsidies per capita. To be fair you should recalculate the road spending to be paid only by those who use it for commuting. Not to mention that number only includes highway spending and not regular roads.
- TheCoelacanth 9y agoIn NYC, the cost of the land area that roads take up is far more significant than the cost of the actual road itself.
- lazerpants 9y agoI would like to add a couple of points of clarification to your comment: 1. Subway rides for most commuters are money-makers for the MTA, it's rides late at night or at the ends of lines that lose money (full trains are obviously more cost effective). I suspect LIRR costs work out similarly though I have not seen enough of their data to know. 2. The NYC bus system is massively subsidized. The subway could operate (less frequently, and to fewer places) and make a profit, the bus system could not. I can probably find my old sources for that if anyone is terribly interested.
- timthelion 9y agoCars are mostly subsidized by way of devoting the majority of publicly owned land to roads. If the government were to auction off the land under every street and highway, that would pay off the national debt in no time.
- V-2 9y agoJust because I don't have a car doesn't mean I don't use roads (eg. as of now, the groceries I buy weren't delivered to the store by drones)
- timthelion 9y agoThat doesn't change the fact that the cars and trucks that drive on them are subsidized. What if those goods were delivered by train?