3 ms·

At the end of the day, metro is always going to be cheaper overall than cars as a mode of travel. Think about it. Let's take the bay area as an example. We hav

At the end of the day, metro is always going to be cheaper overall than cars as a mode of travel. Think about it. Let's take the bay area as an example. We have 7 million people or so. I would wager cars per capita is like 0.8 or something but let's round down to 5 million cars in the bay. Car ownership is about 9k per year. So that's about 45 billion a year in car ownership costs alone. Now, let's say we built a good metro/ public transit in the bay, such that a family doesn't need a car, but some will still have them. So maybe there are still a million cars, saving us about 35 billion a year. Operating costs for NYC metro are about 400 million a year. Let's say the bay is 20x more expensive and spends 8 billion a year on operating costs for a truly world-class transit system. That means every year we'd save about 20 billion by using transit. So even if the capitol cost of building out a good transit system in the bay is 300 billion, we'd be saving money in just 15 years. And of course this completely discounts the astonishing negative externalities of cars w.r.t land use and economic value. The math is just not going to work out in favor of cars. The development model is trash. And of course it's trash when you think about how it scales. Every person needs a car! Every person needs an extremely complex, expensive machine that consumes vastly more energy than the alternative! A subway car presumably services thousands of people a day. The average car services one person. Car manufacturers have been exceedingly successful at gaslighting Americans for the better part of a century. A little critical thinking can help

xyzzyz 4y ago
Your figures are completely, utterly off, in so many ways. > Operating costs for NYC metro are about 400 million a year. I don’t know where you got this figure from, but this is off by a factor 20x. $400M won’t even cover NYC MTA’s electricity bill. The actual operating cost is closer to $8B. Does being completely off with your calculations affect your thinking about transportation economics? I seriously doubt that.
- JamesBarney 4y ago
  In addition 45% of households in NYC own a car.
  - danny_codes 4y ago
    Yes this calculation was for taking 4 million cars off the road, leaving room for a million cars. Perhaps a bit more optimistic than the NYC case
- danny_codes 4y ago
  So, we still save 20 billion a year? Assuming similar operating costs.
  - xyzzyz 4y ago
    I am not sure you understand how silly your position is. You were operating on figures which were utterly and entirely wrong, and you made strong pronouncements about economic viability of this and that. This showed that you have zero intuitive grasp of the scale and complexity of the issues involved, and yet you expect people to take your economic analyses seriously. Then, when you were made aware how much off you were, instead of coming to terms with how much you do not know that you don’t know, and getting some humility, you come up with a second estimate, just as crude, and still pronounce how much we could save, as if there was more standing behind it than a back of a napkin estimate using 2-3 scalar input variables. This is literally a perfectly spherical cow level of analysis.
    - danny_codes 4y ago
      I'm confused, are you mad about napkin math or do you disagree with the outcome? The point is that car-dependency is quite astonishingly more expensive than public transit based systems. You are welcome to do the math yourself and reach the same conclusion. Actually if you have the time, I'd very much like to see how you'd compare them
      - xyzzyz 4y ago
        > The point is that car-dependency is quite astonishingly more expensive than public transit based systems. Bell peppers are also astonishingly more expensive than wheat, and oysters are more expensive still. Imagine the cost savings we could make if we just all exclusively ate wheat and beans. The point is that cars are more expensive in a sense that people spend more money on them, but they are very much not more expensive if you compare them like for like in terms of actual service. They simply offer a different thing, which in the mind of the huge majority of population is superior service despite higher cost (most people who do use public transit would prefer personal cars, but they cannot afford it, so they use heavily subsidized public transit). It is just not viable with today technology to provide public transit service that offers similar travel times with similar schedules, in fact it is barely cost effective to run existing public transit with lousy service quality today (e.g. here in Seattle, a $2.75 bus ride actually has operational costs of something like $7 on average, which is way more than operational costs of driving your own car). You do not, however, compare the actual service. Instead, you just take 3 random numbers that carry very little information about actual problem being solved, at least one of which is off by a factor of 20x, multiply them, and pretend that what you do is a serious economic analysis. This is basically assuming that humans are identical, uniformly distributed spheres etc etc. The people who believe that public transit can be made cheaper than cars while offering similar service apparently are so clueless about actual costs of operation public transit that they are off by a factor of 20x, and see absolutely no reason to change their mind when they are corrected about it.

xyzzyz 4y ago

Your figures are completely, utterly off, in so many ways. > Operating costs for NYC metro are about 400 million a year. I don’t know where you got this figure from, but this is off by a factor 20x. $400M won’t even cover NYC MTA’s electricity bill. The actual operating cost is closer to $8B. Does being completely off with your calculations affect your thinking about transportation economics? I seriously doubt that.

JamesBarney 4y ago
In addition 45% of households in NYC own a car.
- danny_codes 4y ago
  Yes this calculation was for taking 4 million cars off the road, leaving room for a million cars. Perhaps a bit more optimistic than the NYC case
danny_codes 4y ago
So, we still save 20 billion a year? Assuming similar operating costs.
- xyzzyz 4y ago
  I am not sure you understand how silly your position is. You were operating on figures which were utterly and entirely wrong, and you made strong pronouncements about economic viability of this and that. This showed that you have zero intuitive grasp of the scale and complexity of the issues involved, and yet you expect people to take your economic analyses seriously. Then, when you were made aware how much off you were, instead of coming to terms with how much you do not know that you don’t know, and getting some humility, you come up with a second estimate, just as crude, and still pronounce how much we could save, as if there was more standing behind it than a back of a napkin estimate using 2-3 scalar input variables. This is literally a perfectly spherical cow level of analysis.
  - danny_codes 4y ago
    I'm confused, are you mad about napkin math or do you disagree with the outcome? The point is that car-dependency is quite astonishingly more expensive than public transit based systems. You are welcome to do the math yourself and reach the same conclusion. Actually if you have the time, I'd very much like to see how you'd compare them
    - xyzzyz 4y ago
      > The point is that car-dependency is quite astonishingly more expensive than public transit based systems. Bell peppers are also astonishingly more expensive than wheat, and oysters are more expensive still. Imagine the cost savings we could make if we just all exclusively ate wheat and beans. The point is that cars are more expensive in a sense that people spend more money on them, but they are very much not more expensive if you compare them like for like in terms of actual service. They simply offer a different thing, which in the mind of the huge majority of population is superior service despite higher cost (most people who do use public transit would prefer personal cars, but they cannot afford it, so they use heavily subsidized public transit). It is just not viable with today technology to provide public transit service that offers similar travel times with similar schedules, in fact it is barely cost effective to run existing public transit with lousy service quality today (e.g. here in Seattle, a $2.75 bus ride actually has operational costs of something like $7 on average, which is way more than operational costs of driving your own car). You do not, however, compare the actual service. Instead, you just take 3 random numbers that carry very little information about actual problem being solved, at least one of which is off by a factor of 20x, multiply them, and pretend that what you do is a serious economic analysis. This is basically assuming that humans are identical, uniformly distributed spheres etc etc. The people who believe that public transit can be made cheaper than cars while offering similar service apparently are so clueless about actual costs of operation public transit that they are off by a factor of 20x, and see absolutely no reason to change their mind when they are corrected about it.