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When C$119M is a “bargain” compared to US costs, it should come as no surprise why public transit has so little utility in most cities (as measured by utilizati

When C$119M is a “bargain” compared to US costs, it should come as no surprise why public transit has so little utility in most cities (as measured by utilization as a percent of total trips).

berkes 3y ago
How does it compare to car infrastructure though? I strongly suspect that, although the price-per-kilometer might be lower, the price per traveled-kilometer is literally multiples of that. I do know in my city-area, price to build, maintain and travel on bike infra, public transport and even dedicated bus infra is far cheaper than the same distances for cars. And that excludes private costs for fuel.
- anjel 3y ago
  Don't forget the enormous land-use opportunity cost of a metro road network. In Los Angeles,I once read in the LA Times that when you factor in residential and commercial parking, drive ways, and incedental adjacent land consumed eg in ramps medians and cloverleaf's, more than 80% of land in the LA basin is devoted to auto use.
  - berkes 3y ago
    Even in The Netherlands, where we have decades of investment in bike and PT infrastructure, and therefore one of the highest bike and PT use in the world, a staggering amount of land is used for cars. In most cities, the land used for cars surpasses the land used for living, gardening, working combined.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- mfringel 3y ago
  [vehicle not included]
namdnay 3y ago
Which cities? And what parts of these cities I’m pretty sure public transit represents the lions share of trips in Manhattan or London zones 1-2
- ethanbond 3y ago
  You know, all those cities that chose not to invest in public transit. Looks like they were smart, no one even uses it!
- sokoloff 3y ago
  I bet I can name the other 3 cities where that’s possibly true in the US: DC, Chicago, and Boston. So 4, maybe 6 if you add Atlanta and Seattle (both of which I doubt have a majority share of transit), out of over 300 cities (or equivalent) with 100k+ people.
  - namdnay 3y ago
    So you're saying that in a country that has been organised around the personal automobile for the past 70 years (going so far as to actively undermine public transport in certain cases), there are few cities with good public transport? Yes, I think we can all agree on that
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      Yes. And the cost of providing of usably pervasive public transit is a huge part of that. I live in Cambridge, MA (attached to Boston and sharing one of the top 5 transit systems in the US). We have one car per driver and expect to maintain or exceed that ratio for the next three decades as we can’t afford to spend the increased time needed to do all trips via transit. Or even transit plus ride-share.
      - namdnay 3y ago
        > We have one car per driver and expect to maintain or exceed that ratio for the next three decades as we can’t afford to spend the increased time needed to do all trips via transit. Or even transit plus ride-share. That's exactly what needs to be fought. A bit of carrot, a bit of stick
Retric 3y ago
Transit looks really expensive until you start looking into how expensive cars are including roads, cars, maintenance, gas, insurance, etc. Car insurance alone in small city is what ~= 80$/month/driver * 1 million drivers = approximately 1 billion dollars per year. When people drive less they don’t just use less fuel and save on maintenance etc, but also get into fewer accidents driving down insurance. People also avoid traffic tickets, and cities need fewer traffic cops etc. The city’s air quality improves which reduces respiratory issues saving not just lives but sick days etc. Local property becomes more valuable and congestion shrinks. The costs comes out of cities budgets, but the savings largely goes to individuals.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  1 million drivers is by no means a small city. That’s probably only 4 cities in the entire US: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston.
  - Retric 3y ago
    Austin Texas has 1 million people living inside city limits, but 1.8 million people in the metro area and therefore more than 1 million drivers. Large vs small vs tiny is an arbitrary separation, but Chicago is the 39th largest city in the world. Auston is so far down that list it’s a small city IMO. By comparison Terre Haute, Indiana with 60k people can be called a city, but it’s a tiny city.
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      The ones living outside the city limits: is it practical for and done by most of them to use public transit and thereby save money by not owning a car?
      - Retric 3y ago
        It’s more likely to reduce the number of cars owned by a family than to allow a single person to avoid owning a car. However, simply reducing the number of trips makes a significant difference.
mumblemumble 3y ago
That isn't a whole lot more than the cost per kilometer to construct urban roads with a comparable passenger throughput, though. And construction cost alone isn't exactly a fair price comparison because users of urban roads tend to need to supply their own vehicles, at considerable cost to themselves, and more money also has to be spent to provide space to store those vehicles when not in use. And you could argue that roads are actually even more expensive to invest in because they tend to create a feedback cycle that promotes even more spending on road construction. Because as more people use roads, you need to widen them to increase their carrying capacity, and because road-oriented infrastructure encourages sprawl that pushes people toward choosing driving, and spending more time on the roads, which increases the need for more roads to be built. A nice case study here is Chicago versus Detroit. Proportionally speaking, they had similar and approximately contemporaneous population growth and loss trends over the 20th century. But that trend didn't cause the same financial catastrophe for Chicago that it did for Detroit, and one argument for why this is is that, since Chicago retained a denser, more public transit oriented urban plan, its infrastructure costs relative to population stayed lower, which in turn meant that it was able to weather a lot more population decline without its economy shrinking too much to be able to affordably maintain its infrastructure, including transportation infrastructure.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Roads are about $5m/km in the US. Over course size matters, but that number covers a two lane road near me that goes to a school (read designed for school buses) In Spain $100m/km gets you a subway.
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    The new rapid transit line in Montreal mostly elevated. A comparable road project would be a bridge or an overpass, and you certainly can't buy those for $5m/km.
  - hylaride 3y ago
    A surface road being cheaper than a tunnel shouldn’t surprise anybody, but a single highway lane can move about 2,000 cars an hour (much less for city streets). Assuming all the cars have two people (they don’t) that’s 4,000 people an hour. A modern metro line can do 40,000 an hour (in Tokyo they’ll do 60K/hour packing people in like sardines). So you need a 10 lane road in one direction just to match the single line’s people movement. Of course, the whole concept is moot considering the built form around said subway line needs to be able to support having ridership like that.
vkou 3y ago
Compared to the total cost of ownership of an automobile (Easily hitting $10,000/year), public transit looks like an absolute bargain. And that's not counting all the other costs of automobile infrastructure. Endless parking lots, huge road footprint, 'free' curbside parking...

When C$119M is a “bargain” compared to US costs, it should come as no surprise why public transit has so little utility in most cities (as measured by utilization as a percent of total trips).

berkes 3y ago

How does it compare to car infrastructure though? I strongly suspect that, although the price-per-kilometer might be lower, the price per traveled-kilometer is literally multiples of that. I do know in my city-area, price to build, maintain and travel on bike infra, public transport and even dedicated bus infra is far cheaper than the same distances for cars. And that excludes private costs for fuel.

anjel 3y ago
Don't forget the enormous land-use opportunity cost of a metro road network. In Los Angeles,I once read in the LA Times that when you factor in residential and commercial parking, drive ways, and incedental adjacent land consumed eg in ramps medians and cloverleaf's, more than 80% of land in the LA basin is devoted to auto use.
- berkes 3y ago
  Even in The Netherlands, where we have decades of investment in bike and PT infrastructure, and therefore one of the highest bike and PT use in the world, a staggering amount of land is used for cars. In most cities, the land used for cars surpasses the land used for living, gardening, working combined.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
mfringel 3y ago
[vehicle not included]

namdnay 3y ago

Which cities? And what parts of these cities I’m pretty sure public transit represents the lions share of trips in Manhattan or London zones 1-2

ethanbond 3y ago
You know, all those cities that chose not to invest in public transit. Looks like they were smart, no one even uses it!
sokoloff 3y ago
I bet I can name the other 3 cities where that’s possibly true in the US: DC, Chicago, and Boston. So 4, maybe 6 if you add Atlanta and Seattle (both of which I doubt have a majority share of transit), out of over 300 cities (or equivalent) with 100k+ people.
- namdnay 3y ago
  So you're saying that in a country that has been organised around the personal automobile for the past 70 years (going so far as to actively undermine public transport in certain cases), there are few cities with good public transport? Yes, I think we can all agree on that
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    Yes. And the cost of providing of usably pervasive public transit is a huge part of that. I live in Cambridge, MA (attached to Boston and sharing one of the top 5 transit systems in the US). We have one car per driver and expect to maintain or exceed that ratio for the next three decades as we can’t afford to spend the increased time needed to do all trips via transit. Or even transit plus ride-share.
    - namdnay 3y ago
      > We have one car per driver and expect to maintain or exceed that ratio for the next three decades as we can’t afford to spend the increased time needed to do all trips via transit. Or even transit plus ride-share. That's exactly what needs to be fought. A bit of carrot, a bit of stick

Retric 3y ago

Transit looks really expensive until you start looking into how expensive cars are including roads, cars, maintenance, gas, insurance, etc. Car insurance alone in small city is what ~= 80$/month/driver * 1 million drivers = approximately 1 billion dollars per year. When people drive less they don’t just use less fuel and save on maintenance etc, but also get into fewer accidents driving down insurance. People also avoid traffic tickets, and cities need fewer traffic cops etc. The city’s air quality improves which reduces respiratory issues saving not just lives but sick days etc. Local property becomes more valuable and congestion shrinks. The costs comes out of cities budgets, but the savings largely goes to individuals.

sokoloff 3y ago
1 million drivers is by no means a small city. That’s probably only 4 cities in the entire US: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston.
- Retric 3y ago
  Austin Texas has 1 million people living inside city limits, but 1.8 million people in the metro area and therefore more than 1 million drivers. Large vs small vs tiny is an arbitrary separation, but Chicago is the 39th largest city in the world. Auston is so far down that list it’s a small city IMO. By comparison Terre Haute, Indiana with 60k people can be called a city, but it’s a tiny city.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    The ones living outside the city limits: is it practical for and done by most of them to use public transit and thereby save money by not owning a car?
    - Retric 3y ago
      It’s more likely to reduce the number of cars owned by a family than to allow a single person to avoid owning a car. However, simply reducing the number of trips makes a significant difference.

mumblemumble 3y ago

That isn't a whole lot more than the cost per kilometer to construct urban roads with a comparable passenger throughput, though. And construction cost alone isn't exactly a fair price comparison because users of urban roads tend to need to supply their own vehicles, at considerable cost to themselves, and more money also has to be spent to provide space to store those vehicles when not in use. And you could argue that roads are actually even more expensive to invest in because they tend to create a feedback cycle that promotes even more spending on road construction. Because as more people use roads, you need to widen them to increase their carrying capacity, and because road-oriented infrastructure encourages sprawl that pushes people toward choosing driving, and spending more time on the roads, which increases the need for more roads to be built. A nice case study here is Chicago versus Detroit. Proportionally speaking, they had similar and approximately contemporaneous population growth and loss trends over the 20th century. But that trend didn't cause the same financial catastrophe for Chicago that it did for Detroit, and one argument for why this is is that, since Chicago retained a denser, more public transit oriented urban plan, its infrastructure costs relative to population stayed lower, which in turn meant that it was able to weather a lot more population decline without its economy shrinking too much to be able to affordably maintain its infrastructure, including transportation infrastructure.

bluGill 3y ago
Roads are about $5m/km in the US. Over course size matters, but that number covers a two lane road near me that goes to a school (read designed for school buses) In Spain $100m/km gets you a subway.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  The new rapid transit line in Montreal mostly elevated. A comparable road project would be a bridge or an overpass, and you certainly can't buy those for $5m/km.
- hylaride 3y ago
  A surface road being cheaper than a tunnel shouldn’t surprise anybody, but a single highway lane can move about 2,000 cars an hour (much less for city streets). Assuming all the cars have two people (they don’t) that’s 4,000 people an hour. A modern metro line can do 40,000 an hour (in Tokyo they’ll do 60K/hour packing people in like sardines). So you need a 10 lane road in one direction just to match the single line’s people movement. Of course, the whole concept is moot considering the built form around said subway line needs to be able to support having ridership like that.

vkou 3y ago

Compared to the total cost of ownership of an automobile (Easily hitting $10,000/year), public transit looks like an absolute bargain. And that's not counting all the other costs of automobile infrastructure. Endless parking lots, huge road footprint, 'free' curbside parking...