The Accountant's Falacy: Anything for which the debit doesn't appear on your balance sheet is "free". Follow busses in traffic for a while, and add up the tot

The Accountant's Falacy: Anything for which the debit doesn't appear on your balance sheet is "free". Follow busses in traffic for a while, and add up the total fuel, time wasted, etc. in all the traffic impeded by the less then 1/2 full (on average) bus. There is no branch of mathematics that could be used to argue that busses save the civilization money. Consider if everyone was not disallowed by law(1) from carpooling for compensation. Roughly doubles the aggregate person-mile per hour bandwidth of the existing traffic system... Bus driver unions and taxi owner associations are the net gainers of the lobbyist-written laws impeding transportation innovation; everyone else loses. 1) you can carpool all you want informally. You cannot set up publicly accessible systems which compete with taxis.