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It's one thing to try and quantify the collective "cost" of a hypothetical increase in traffic. It's another to lay blame for that increase on one segment of tr

It's one thing to try and quantify the collective "cost" of a hypothetical increase in traffic. It's another to lay blame for that increase on one segment of traffic user, and assume troubles would disappear if that segment were suddenly gone. Especially as more studies show that most regular cyclical heavy traffic is ultimately supply-side controlled, given any chance to reach equilibrium. >Finally, given 60 percent of rideshare users who could have used public transportation otherwise "Studies" like this are worse than misleading. Just because people could have done something doesn't mean they would have. And public transport ends up paying the price for it eventually, because when arguments like this end up funneling money to public transit projects with inflated demand: 1) they steal money from more beneficial projects based on realistic modeling of life choices, 2) they end up underperforming vs expectations, which makes public transport look bad, 3) if they aren't self sufficient, end up being an operating budget drain in addition to a capital layout drain.

carlmr 7y ago
The problem with these underperforming projects is also that you have a kind of bistable equilibrium here. I don't use the bus to work because it only goes once every half hour, and since it's stuck in city traffic the schedule is completely random. If there were more buses on this route (e.g. one every 5 minutes), I would not care about the randomness, since whenever I arrive a bus should be there soon. But the transit authority doesn't add buses because there's a low number of passengers on this route, even though there are thousands working at my company that may take the same bus but opt for a car. Public transit only becomes viable once it's densely connected and frequent enough to be useful. But to get out of this rut you need massive investment. For this reason any individual public transit projects in the US will always underperform IMHO. You're in one of two equilibria and it's massive costs with little return until you get to the better equilibrium on the other aide, but this would need broad political support to happen.
- beerandt 7y ago
  Yeah, multiple iterations of the chicken-egg problem. Ironically the only way I see this problem ever being solved is via an extremely responsive, informative, and at least somewhat on-demand version of public transport. Which I don't really see happening, at least without some sort of competitive market of public private partnerships. But as long as public transport remains the status-quo, it's not going to overcome that equilibrium battle in the vast majority of the US. And I suspect that would even be the case even given nearly unlimited resources to get there.

carlmr 7y ago

The problem with these underperforming projects is also that you have a kind of bistable equilibrium here. I don't use the bus to work because it only goes once every half hour, and since it's stuck in city traffic the schedule is completely random. If there were more buses on this route (e.g. one every 5 minutes), I would not care about the randomness, since whenever I arrive a bus should be there soon. But the transit authority doesn't add buses because there's a low number of passengers on this route, even though there are thousands working at my company that may take the same bus but opt for a car. Public transit only becomes viable once it's densely connected and frequent enough to be useful. But to get out of this rut you need massive investment. For this reason any individual public transit projects in the US will always underperform IMHO. You're in one of two equilibria and it's massive costs with little return until you get to the better equilibrium on the other aide, but this would need broad political support to happen.

beerandt 7y ago
Yeah, multiple iterations of the chicken-egg problem. Ironically the only way I see this problem ever being solved is via an extremely responsive, informative, and at least somewhat on-demand version of public transport. Which I don't really see happening, at least without some sort of competitive market of public private partnerships. But as long as public transport remains the status-quo, it's not going to overcome that equilibrium battle in the vast majority of the US. And I suspect that would even be the case even given nearly unlimited resources to get there.