3 ms·

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.

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.