6 ms·

I guess I'm one of the few here who disagrees with this article. Maintaining a bus and subway system is extremely expensive in terms of resources, both in term

by drcode 13y ago

I guess I'm one of the few here who disagrees with this article. Maintaining a bus and subway system is extremely expensive in terms of resources, both in terms of equipment expenses, salaries (for employees who could be providing other benefits to society instead of operating a bus) fuel, and use of land. There is no 100% certainty that buses/subways are more efficient than cars. Luckily however, we have a way to tell which is more efficient: The free market! The free market is not perfect, but it is likely that a person who pays a fare to ride a bus is getting significant value from that bus ride, and if the fare CAN COVER THE EXPENSES of running the buses, then we can be confident that buses are an efficient mode of transportation. If you just make the buses free, people may take more roundabout trips to get to where they need to go, just to be able to make use of the free bus, causing inefficiency and waste. Or, it may cause people to take more inefficient taxi trips (because the bus doesn't take them to their precise destination like a personal car would) or they may do a million other things that are damaging to the environment and wasteful (like eating out more because they can take free bus trips to restaurants.) These scenarios may sound silly, but the fact is that removing price signals from public transportation is a terrible idea because it can have a multitude of unexpected consequences. If you read this post and think I'm crazy and say to yourself "What an idiot, cars are obviously guaranteed to be less efficient than buses" I would argue you don't understand how incentives behave in a complex system. If you think cars are so horrible, you should work to stop subsidies to oil companies so that gas prices reflect the true cost of energy. But in my view there is absolutely no way making public buses free is going to make cities more efficient and/or help the environment. EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm not saying we should get rid of all public transport subsidies (this is a harder argument to make, I'm not sure where I stand on it.) I'm just saying we shouldn't make them 100% free because price signals are valuable.

rayiner 13y ago
The free market doesn't, at least theoretically, work very well for transit. Transit creates a tremendous positive externality and it doesn't make sense to try and capture all the cost of providing transit at the point of the user.[1] I think the way to go would be to have all transit be funded by a combination of user fees and tax increment districts in the areas served by transit. After all, it's not just the subway rider that benefits from the existence of a subway line, but all the businesses and residential developments near a subway stop too. But the same would have to apply for road construction. Those segments of state highways snaking through suburbia should be entirely paid for by those who live along the route, not from the general tax revenues of the state. And gas taxes should be raised so they cover the capital costs of the interstate system, not just ongoing maintenance. And while we're at it, the Army Corps of Engineers should stop subsidizing the west coast by damming up the rivers of the United States. If you want water move to somewhere that has water. [1] That's without even reaching all the theoretical implications of the use of eminent domain authority, state rights of way, etc--you can't discount from the value equation the opportunity cost of using an existing state right of way for a highway versus a rail line.
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  Public transit is needed most by those who cannot afford a car; placing extra penalties on areas around public transit lines will hurt the poor dis-proportionally. Not to mention, if your city has good public transit, you should be able to get around anywhere, so I guess what you really mean is 'tax everyone,' which seems reasonable.
  - mmanfrin 13y ago
    Public transit is needed by all who commute in dense areas (like the Bay Area). If you had everyone on the road, it would be a 24/7 parkinglot. A robust public transit option would further help to alleviate driving-only traffic.
- drcode 13y ago
  I agree the best rebuttal to my comment is to argue about positive externalities, as you have done. I fully admit that I don't have all the answers regarding "tragedy of the commons" and that at some levels arguments about "how far we take the free market" is affected by issues that end up becoming ideological without strong evidence/arguments on either side. However, I would argue that modern technology could go a long way towards capturing these costs in a way that's tractable, at the point of the user.
- jwallaceparker 13y ago
  > The free market doesn't, at least theoretically, work very well for transit. We actually have some historical record to examine in this area, though you have to look pretty far back in US history to find a time when the government wasn't directly involved in the transit business. James J. Hill built the Great Northern railroad in the late 1800's without taking any subsidies. He competed directly with subsidized railroads in the mid- and far west, consistently delivering lower prices and superior service to his customers. As for highways, thousands of miles were created by private for-profit companies during the first half of the 19th century before highways and railways began to be taken over by government beginning with the Lincoln administration.
  - 13y ago
smartician 13y ago
So, do you think it would be a good idea to turn all public roads into toll roads? After all, building and maintaining a road system is extremely expensive in terms of resources, both in terms of equipment expenses, salaries (for employees who could be providing other benefits to society instead of building and maintaining roads), and use of land. If you just make the roads free to use, people may take more roundabout trips to get to where they need to go, just to be able to make use of the free roads, causing inefficiency and waste.
- drcode 13y ago
  > So, do you think it would be a good idea to turn all public roads into toll roads? yes.
  - bluthru 13y ago
    Why? So you can turn a city into a gated community?
    - abraininavat 13y ago
      Perhaps because he likes the idea of poverty being a pit that's progressively harder to dig your way out of. Don't have the money to pay for the road access which will get you to your job? Should've thought about that and been rich in the first place!
      - drcode 13y ago
        In the US we've built a system where the cost of car ownership is mostly hidden (because of gas subsidies and hidden infrastrucure costs) If we fix this, then it may lead to an improved public transportation network, which would help poor people.
  - scarmig 13y ago
    Shouldn't this actually be an empirical question? There are wasted costs in extracting a toll: it takes away minutes of time from tens or hundreds of thousands of commuters, costs extra gas which is itself heavily subsidized, increases the chance of getting into an accident, requires an initial capital outlay, maintenance, and salaries for related workers, costs money to enforce penalties for cheaters. Sometimes the value the road provides heavily outweighs all these costs, in which case a toll makes sense. But every road? I'm skeptical. We can imagine (expensive!) systems that governments could use to track which cars go where, resulting in a monthly use fee. But some system of satellites visually tracking your every movement or a mandate that you have a GPS tracking device on your car that reports to the government is... problematic in lots of ways.
ajross 13y ago
Maintaining a road system is far more expensive in all of the categories you list than maintaining a transit system is. Yet road systems are maintained almost exclusively without usage fees (the occasional toll highway notwithstanding). The same is largely true of air and rail travel: government spending on airports, traffic control, security, etc... is generally not recouped from either the passengers or the operators. Literally all the stuff you say seems to be directly contradicted by the way we deal with every other transport mechanism. So maybe you're the one who doesn't "understand how economics work in a complex system"?
- drcode 13y ago
  You make a good point. I agree we would need to increase usage fees on personal cars for my argument to hold.
- refurb 13y ago
  It's not universal, but most road maintenance is paid for through fuel taxes. Obviously the BIG projects (new highways, etc) are funded through bonds which are repaid through general revenue.
  - stouset 13y ago
    No. No it is not. Not even remotely close. Road maintenance (at least in the United States and most of Western Europe), is overwhelmingly paid for by property taxes.
bluthru 13y ago
>Luckily however, we have a way to tell which is more efficient: The free market! The free market rewards selfish, short-term impulses. It also doesn't require that individuals have a full understanding about what they're buying into. http://www.geo.sunysb.edu/bicycle-muenster/traffic.jpg http://www.geo.sunysb.edu/bicycle-muenster/traffic.jpg
- oftenwrong 13y ago
  I think that image really says it all. Every aspect of city planning that caters to car culture is a detriment to nearly every other aspect of city life. Less space, more noise, more danger, more pollution, greater travel distances, etc.
ronaldx 13y ago
I disagree with this on the basis of "tragedy of the commons"[0] For every person acting in their self-interest, it's usually cheaper and more efficient for them to use their car. However, using their car has a cost of congestion (and a cost to the local and global environment) that is borne by everyone: if everyone makes the same decision, then everyone suffers quite badly and is still more constrained because now the public transport option is unmaintained and even worse than before. A "Prisoner's Dilemma"-type Nash equilibrium has occurred. As such, it's important for government to incentivise public transport (which they generally do, as it stands). [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
- drcode 13y ago
  Yes, TOC makes this question more complicated. However, my argument wasn't against subsidizing public transport, just that we shouldn't have a 100% subsidy.
sharkweek 13y ago
Bus commuter here -- and also a wild advocate for mass transportation expansion Most commuter buses in Seattle fill up before reaching some main dumping points in downtown. Imagine if 75% of those people were on the road instead, what that would do to traffic, road conditions, pollution, etc. I think the free market is fine, but subsidizing something like mass transit seems universally beneficial, even those who still choose to drive their evil cars to work every day (like my wife). Sure you can nitpick at edge cases like people taking taxis more, but I don't think there's much a case for overall arguing that mass transit isn't beneficial for a city.
- stephengillie 13y ago
  Seattle did experiment with a free-ride area in the downtown neighborhood a couple of years ago. They ended the experiment instead of expanding it, but I'm not sure why.
  - ISL 13y ago
    Cost concerns killed it. Here's a piece from a ride-free advocate: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-death-of-the-ride-free-area/Content?oid=14916427 http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-death-of-the-ride-fre...
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
superuser2 13y ago
The free market measures efficiency in terms of immediate spending, not long term environmental impact.
jstalin 13y ago
I think most people would be shocked to learn that buses are using more energy per passenger than if the same passengers were transported in cars. Buses are more expensive too. There are very few transit agencies in the US that operate more efficiently and pollute less than private (car) transit. It's a myth that bus public transit is green.
- abraininavat 13y ago
  Usage of energy isn't the only metric by which something can be considered green, as you probably realize but fail to cite. What percentage of buses are powered by natural gas or ultra-low-sulfer diesel compared to cars, for example? What percentage of buses are hybrid compared to cars? You're using a little bit of information to make a big claim.
  - jstalin 13y ago
    See, for instance, Table 2.10 of the latest federal Transportation Energy Data Book (page 2-14) showing that, to transport one passenger one mile, cars are using less energy than buses. http://cta.ornl.gov/data/tedb31/Edition31_Chapter02.pdf http://cta.ornl.gov/data/tedb31/Edition31_Chapter02.pdf My own analysis of my local (mid-sized city) transit data from the National Transit Database, using actual gallons of fuel spent, and comparing CO2 emissions of the average passenger car, the buses are net adding CO2 to the environment. Indeed, hybrid buses are barely more efficient than traditional diesel buses. The issue isn't full buses, it's the very large number of empty buses that continue to run on non-peak hours on fixed routes. This is why I'm so optimistic about driverless cars. I think it will obviate the need for public transit because we won't be stuck with inefficient fixed route and fixed schedule service.
    - abraininavat 13y ago
      My own analysis of my local (mid-sized city) transit data from the National Transit Database, using actual gallons of fuel spent, and comparing CO2 emissions of the average passenger car, the buses are net adding CO2 to the environment. Indeed, hybrid buses are barely more efficient than traditional diesel buses. Would you mind sharing your stats?
mistercow 13y ago
The problem with this reasoning is that the free market tends to optimize efficiency very locally. It optimizes the interests of the two parties involved with a transaction, but notoriously fails to account for externalities. Public transit is a perfect example of that. There are a ton of ways that availability of transit helps society at large, and approximately zero of those are particularly of concern to an individual when deciding whether or not a fare is worth it, or to a transit provider when deciding how much to charge for a ride. The free market is not magic. It's just a simple optimization process. And different optimization processes have different limitations. If you try to optimize a problem without accounting for the limitations of the process, you'll get bad solutions.
king_jester 13y ago
> Maintaining a bus and subway system is extremely expensive in terms of resources, both in terms of equipment expenses, salaries (for employees who could be providing other benefits to society instead of operating a bus) fuel, and use of land. Mass transit systems are not as expensive expanding and building up roadway systems in favor of automobile transit. > There is no 100% certainty that buses/subways are more efficient than cars. Mass transit is more efficient in a variety of ways compared to cars, esp. on cost per rider and utility cost of infrastructure per rider. > Luckily however, we have a way to tell which is more efficient: The free market! The free market is not perfect, but it is likely that a person who pays a fare to ride a bus is getting significant value from that bus ride, and if the fare CAN COVER THE EXPENSES of running the buses, then we can be confident that buses are an efficient mode of transportation. The free market has already demonstrated that cars are not as efficient as mass transit systems. Most cities prior to mass car adoption had mass transit systems, typically subways or street trolley systems. A lot of these existing systems were dismantled in favor of expanded roadways and bus systems. The net result is that riders are less able to move about on roads/buses, the cost is greater to riders to take any form of transit, pollution got worse, and roads now consume far more resources than those mass transit systems do. > If you just make the buses free, people may take more roundabout trips to get to where they need to go, just to be able to make use of the free bus, causing inefficiency and waste. If buses were free, then there would be not need to take a longer route since the most direct bus route would be free. Further, fee based mass transit does nothing to stop this right now and for most fee systems the fee does not completely cover the operating expense of the system, so this is something that already happens in lieu of free mass transit. Further, longer trips on some types of mass transit are far more environmentally friendly compared to the same trip made in a car or bus. > Or, it may cause people to take more inefficient taxi trips (because the bus doesn't take them to their precise destination like a personal car would) or they may do a million other things that are damaging to the environment and wasteful (like eating out more because they can take free bus trips to restaurants.) The people that most need cheap or free transit are unlikely to be able to afford taxis, as they most certainly are not free and wouldn't be scalable as a free transit option. Eating out at a restaurant is not necessarily more wasteful than other options, esp. in locations were food transit and delivery generate pollution due to delivery method, such as trucking (a lot of places do not grow or produce enough food stuffs to avoid importing). > If you read this post and think I'm crazy and say to yourself "What an idiot, cars are obviously guaranteed to be less efficient than buses" I would argue you don't understand how incentives behave in a complex system. We have already seen how incentives the car and roadway system work, and that system most certainly is complex. Suffice it to say that this system has not been effective in providing transit needs for the masses and expansion of those system is not working as scalable solution for transit. As density increases, roadways become less efficient for travel period. > If you think cars are so horrible, you should work to stop subsidies to oil companies so that gas prices reflect the true cost of energy. But in my view there is absolutely no way making public buses free is going to make cities more efficient and/or help the environment. You can do more than just fight against oil energy policy to attack the public of public pollution from transit systems. If buses can displace a certain amount of cars on the road for a population they are more environmentally friendly and making such transit as accessible as possible is the best way to maximize ridership.
specialist 13y ago
Article is about costs, not ridership. What NTA determined is that not collecting fares is less expensive, more efficient. Meaning, it costs more money to collect fares than not. In my area, fares have never covered the costs of buses. Or ferries.
- drcode 13y ago
  Somewhat true: The article argues it may cost more to collect fares if ridership is held constant. However, ridership would probably increase and lead to more expenses. So now the argument boils down to "Is it efficient or is it wasteful to ferry around all these extra people who didn't think the bus is worth the cost of a fare?"
amalcon 13y ago
I'm one of the many here who agrees with the article, but I came to this comment section mainly to figure out why someone might disagree. So thank you. That said I do have a few nitpicks here: > Luckily however, we have a way to tell which is more efficient: The free market! I'm not going to argue this point, as I'm uninterested and others have taken up that torch. Still, it's worth pointing out that it's not self-evident that A) A free market can exist for transportation, or B) That the free market equilibrium would be a desirable situation for anyone in this case. > If you just make the buses free, people may take more roundabout trips to get to where they need to go, just to be able to make use of the free bus, causing inefficiency and waste. This one I don't understand at all. A la carte public transportation is the one that encourages roundabout routes, because they often cause travelers to pay multiple fares. All-you-can-eat public transportation encourages planners to serve customers as efficiently as possible, as opposed to making each route as efficient as possible. > it can have a multitude of unexpected consequences. I agree that this is true, but why would we assume that these consequences would be bad enough to offset the consequences we know about? Why would we assume that, on the balance, these unexpected consequences would be bad rather than good?
Shivetya 13y ago
Charge a 1% fee for all businesses along the routes. Issue passes that be acquired at designated centers; schools, transit offices, and the like; to anyone with an ID. Tag the IDs to see how they are used, do not tie them to an individual. The IDs tags would also be detectable by the bus/subway/train and could alert authorities to those who are merely camping out. I can see more benefits to a free mass transit system than negatives. The boon to businesses along the line should be measurable, especially food businesses. Think about it, if the service was timely, clean, and free, going to lunch or shopping at any time would be a no brainer. The transit issued IDs simply give a means to track usage and abuse - the staying on the transport too long. Sell ads on the passes, the buses, the whole line.
- silencio 13y ago
  > do not tie them to an individual Just knowing the transit pattern for any particular ID would be a huge indicator of who the individual is. Imagine the consequences if you looked at my Clipper (SF Bay Area) card. I almost always get on or off at one of two specific transit stops but not any others (which would pinpoint me down to a pretty specific 1-2 block radius if you assume I use the closest stops to my home), if I take the train from downtown SF it's either to the airport or to an East Bay stop, if it's an East Bay stop I take a specific bus that goes to only so many stops...and I chose that particular bus route over others from that train station. You would be able to guess where I live and where I'm going all the time at the bare minimum. While I'm fine with this data aggregation right now since it's used for payment and proof of payment, in conjunction with your idea of selling ads and maybe a corrupt politician who wants to monetize that data for a free system... I shudder to think about super targeted ads as a result.
lawnchair_larry 13y ago
> If you just make the buses free, people may take more roundabout trips to get to where they need to go, just to be able to make use of the free bus What?!
- derleth 13y ago
  It's like Free Healthcare: Unless it's expensive, people will be out there breaking bones and getting diseases for the sheer hell of it, and not caring about the consequences because it's free! It's in Mises somewhere. Cato Institute said it. Or... something.
- jff 13y ago
  Would it surprise you that a person might take a 30-minute bus ride to avoid a 15-minute walk? Wouldn't surprise me.
tzs 13y ago
> Luckily however, we have a way to tell which is more efficient: The free market! Free markets find Nash equilibriums, which are locally most efficient for each market participant, but aren't necessarily most efficient globally.
- drcode 13y ago
  Fair point, I guess the question is what the causes are for local maxima. If the reason for them are things such as difficulties in microtransactions, or counterproductive government regulations, those might be where we should be devoting our efforts to improve public transportation.
crazy1van 13y ago
Excellent points. I fear we have totally lost price signalling in transportation in general. Some will make the point that comparing the profitability of cars to buses isn't fair because cars still ride on subsidized roads. Very true. That trend began because it wasn't possible to charge a driver per road he used -- tons of toll booths just wouldn't work. But, times have changed. Things like EZ-Pass allow for totally automated toll collection. I would like to see drivers charged per use of roads just like bus and train riders are charged per use. Then we can start comparing apples to apples on transit. Plus we can get the pricing right by charging enough to make each system un-subsidized. My guess is that cars will still be far and away more popular, but the consumer's choice would be the final proof.
- drcode 13y ago
  Exactly right. You are not crazy, crazy1van. Nice to hear one person agreeing with me :-)
brigade 13y ago
It's not just oil subsidies that encourage private vehicles - parking is also massively subsidized [1], and of course all infrastructure is payed for from everyone's taxes. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/business/economy/15view.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/business/economy/15view.ht...

by drcode 13y ago

rayiner 13y ago

The free market doesn't, at least theoretically, work very well for transit. Transit creates a tremendous positive externality and it doesn't make sense to try and capture all the cost of providing transit at the point of the user.[1] I think the way to go would be to have all transit be funded by a combination of user fees and tax increment districts in the areas served by transit. After all, it's not just the subway rider that benefits from the existence of a subway line, but all the businesses and residential developments near a subway stop too. But the same would have to apply for road construction. Those segments of state highways snaking through suburbia should be entirely paid for by those who live along the route, not from the general tax revenues of the state. And gas taxes should be raised so they cover the capital costs of the interstate system, not just ongoing maintenance. And while we're at it, the Army Corps of Engineers should stop subsidizing the west coast by damming up the rivers of the United States. If you want water move to somewhere that has water. [1] That's without even reaching all the theoretical implications of the use of eminent domain authority, state rights of way, etc--you can't discount from the value equation the opportunity cost of using an existing state right of way for a highway versus a rail line.

steveklabnik 13y ago
Public transit is needed most by those who cannot afford a car; placing extra penalties on areas around public transit lines will hurt the poor dis-proportionally. Not to mention, if your city has good public transit, you should be able to get around anywhere, so I guess what you really mean is 'tax everyone,' which seems reasonable.
- mmanfrin 13y ago
  Public transit is needed by all who commute in dense areas (like the Bay Area). If you had everyone on the road, it would be a 24/7 parkinglot. A robust public transit option would further help to alleviate driving-only traffic.
drcode 13y ago
I agree the best rebuttal to my comment is to argue about positive externalities, as you have done. I fully admit that I don't have all the answers regarding "tragedy of the commons" and that at some levels arguments about "how far we take the free market" is affected by issues that end up becoming ideological without strong evidence/arguments on either side. However, I would argue that modern technology could go a long way towards capturing these costs in a way that's tractable, at the point of the user.
jwallaceparker 13y ago
> The free market doesn't, at least theoretically, work very well for transit. We actually have some historical record to examine in this area, though you have to look pretty far back in US history to find a time when the government wasn't directly involved in the transit business. James J. Hill built the Great Northern railroad in the late 1800's without taking any subsidies. He competed directly with subsidized railroads in the mid- and far west, consistently delivering lower prices and superior service to his customers. As for highways, thousands of miles were created by private for-profit companies during the first half of the 19th century before highways and railways began to be taken over by government beginning with the Lincoln administration.
- 13y ago

smartician 13y ago

So, do you think it would be a good idea to turn all public roads into toll roads? After all, building and maintaining a road system is extremely expensive in terms of resources, both in terms of equipment expenses, salaries (for employees who could be providing other benefits to society instead of building and maintaining roads), and use of land. If you just make the roads free to use, people may take more roundabout trips to get to where they need to go, just to be able to make use of the free roads, causing inefficiency and waste.

drcode 13y ago
> So, do you think it would be a good idea to turn all public roads into toll roads? yes.
- bluthru 13y ago
  Why? So you can turn a city into a gated community?
  - abraininavat 13y ago
    Perhaps because he likes the idea of poverty being a pit that's progressively harder to dig your way out of. Don't have the money to pay for the road access which will get you to your job? Should've thought about that and been rich in the first place!
    - drcode 13y ago
      In the US we've built a system where the cost of car ownership is mostly hidden (because of gas subsidies and hidden infrastrucure costs) If we fix this, then it may lead to an improved public transportation network, which would help poor people.
- scarmig 13y ago
  Shouldn't this actually be an empirical question? There are wasted costs in extracting a toll: it takes away minutes of time from tens or hundreds of thousands of commuters, costs extra gas which is itself heavily subsidized, increases the chance of getting into an accident, requires an initial capital outlay, maintenance, and salaries for related workers, costs money to enforce penalties for cheaters. Sometimes the value the road provides heavily outweighs all these costs, in which case a toll makes sense. But every road? I'm skeptical. We can imagine (expensive!) systems that governments could use to track which cars go where, resulting in a monthly use fee. But some system of satellites visually tracking your every movement or a mandate that you have a GPS tracking device on your car that reports to the government is... problematic in lots of ways.

ajross 13y ago

Maintaining a road system is far more expensive in all of the categories you list than maintaining a transit system is. Yet road systems are maintained almost exclusively without usage fees (the occasional toll highway notwithstanding). The same is largely true of air and rail travel: government spending on airports, traffic control, security, etc... is generally not recouped from either the passengers or the operators. Literally all the stuff you say seems to be directly contradicted by the way we deal with every other transport mechanism. So maybe you're the one who doesn't "understand how economics work in a complex system"?

drcode 13y ago
You make a good point. I agree we would need to increase usage fees on personal cars for my argument to hold.
refurb 13y ago
It's not universal, but most road maintenance is paid for through fuel taxes. Obviously the BIG projects (new highways, etc) are funded through bonds which are repaid through general revenue.
- stouset 13y ago
  No. No it is not. Not even remotely close. Road maintenance (at least in the United States and most of Western Europe), is overwhelmingly paid for by property taxes.

bluthru 13y ago

>Luckily however, we have a way to tell which is more efficient: The free market! The free market rewards selfish, short-term impulses. It also doesn't require that individuals have a full understanding about what they're buying into. http://www.geo.sunysb.edu/bicycle-muenster/traffic.jpg http://www.geo.sunysb.edu/bicycle-muenster/traffic.jpg

oftenwrong 13y ago
I think that image really says it all. Every aspect of city planning that caters to car culture is a detriment to nearly every other aspect of city life. Less space, more noise, more danger, more pollution, greater travel distances, etc.

ronaldx 13y ago

I disagree with this on the basis of "tragedy of the commons"[0] For every person acting in their self-interest, it's usually cheaper and more efficient for them to use their car. However, using their car has a cost of congestion (and a cost to the local and global environment) that is borne by everyone: if everyone makes the same decision, then everyone suffers quite badly and is still more constrained because now the public transport option is unmaintained and even worse than before. A "Prisoner's Dilemma"-type Nash equilibrium has occurred. As such, it's important for government to incentivise public transport (which they generally do, as it stands). [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

drcode 13y ago
Yes, TOC makes this question more complicated. However, my argument wasn't against subsidizing public transport, just that we shouldn't have a 100% subsidy.

sharkweek 13y ago

Bus commuter here -- and also a wild advocate for mass transportation expansion Most commuter buses in Seattle fill up before reaching some main dumping points in downtown. Imagine if 75% of those people were on the road instead, what that would do to traffic, road conditions, pollution, etc. I think the free market is fine, but subsidizing something like mass transit seems universally beneficial, even those who still choose to drive their evil cars to work every day (like my wife). Sure you can nitpick at edge cases like people taking taxis more, but I don't think there's much a case for overall arguing that mass transit isn't beneficial for a city.

stephengillie 13y ago
Seattle did experiment with a free-ride area in the downtown neighborhood a couple of years ago. They ended the experiment instead of expanding it, but I'm not sure why.
- ISL 13y ago
  Cost concerns killed it. Here's a piece from a ride-free advocate: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-death-of-the-ride-free-area/Content?oid=14916427 http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-death-of-the-ride-fre...

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

superuser2 13y ago

The free market measures efficiency in terms of immediate spending, not long term environmental impact.

jstalin 13y ago

I think most people would be shocked to learn that buses are using more energy per passenger than if the same passengers were transported in cars. Buses are more expensive too. There are very few transit agencies in the US that operate more efficiently and pollute less than private (car) transit. It's a myth that bus public transit is green.

abraininavat 13y ago
Usage of energy isn't the only metric by which something can be considered green, as you probably realize but fail to cite. What percentage of buses are powered by natural gas or ultra-low-sulfer diesel compared to cars, for example? What percentage of buses are hybrid compared to cars? You're using a little bit of information to make a big claim.
- jstalin 13y ago
  See, for instance, Table 2.10 of the latest federal Transportation Energy Data Book (page 2-14) showing that, to transport one passenger one mile, cars are using less energy than buses. http://cta.ornl.gov/data/tedb31/Edition31_Chapter02.pdf http://cta.ornl.gov/data/tedb31/Edition31_Chapter02.pdf My own analysis of my local (mid-sized city) transit data from the National Transit Database, using actual gallons of fuel spent, and comparing CO2 emissions of the average passenger car, the buses are net adding CO2 to the environment. Indeed, hybrid buses are barely more efficient than traditional diesel buses. The issue isn't full buses, it's the very large number of empty buses that continue to run on non-peak hours on fixed routes. This is why I'm so optimistic about driverless cars. I think it will obviate the need for public transit because we won't be stuck with inefficient fixed route and fixed schedule service.
  - abraininavat 13y ago
    My own analysis of my local (mid-sized city) transit data from the National Transit Database, using actual gallons of fuel spent, and comparing CO2 emissions of the average passenger car, the buses are net adding CO2 to the environment. Indeed, hybrid buses are barely more efficient than traditional diesel buses. Would you mind sharing your stats?

mistercow 13y ago

The problem with this reasoning is that the free market tends to optimize efficiency very locally. It optimizes the interests of the two parties involved with a transaction, but notoriously fails to account for externalities. Public transit is a perfect example of that. There are a ton of ways that availability of transit helps society at large, and approximately zero of those are particularly of concern to an individual when deciding whether or not a fare is worth it, or to a transit provider when deciding how much to charge for a ride. The free market is not magic. It's just a simple optimization process. And different optimization processes have different limitations. If you try to optimize a problem without accounting for the limitations of the process, you'll get bad solutions.

king_jester 13y ago

> Maintaining a bus and subway system is extremely expensive in terms of resources, both in terms of equipment expenses, salaries (for employees who could be providing other benefits to society instead of operating a bus) fuel, and use of land. Mass transit systems are not as expensive expanding and building up roadway systems in favor of automobile transit. > There is no 100% certainty that buses/subways are more efficient than cars. Mass transit is more efficient in a variety of ways compared to cars, esp. on cost per rider and utility cost of infrastructure per rider. > Luckily however, we have a way to tell which is more efficient: The free market! The free market is not perfect, but it is likely that a person who pays a fare to ride a bus is getting significant value from that bus ride, and if the fare CAN COVER THE EXPENSES of running the buses, then we can be confident that buses are an efficient mode of transportation. The free market has already demonstrated that cars are not as efficient as mass transit systems. Most cities prior to mass car adoption had mass transit systems, typically subways or street trolley systems. A lot of these existing systems were dismantled in favor of expanded roadways and bus systems. The net result is that riders are less able to move about on roads/buses, the cost is greater to riders to take any form of transit, pollution got worse, and roads now consume far more resources than those mass transit systems do. > If you just make the buses free, people may take more roundabout trips to get to where they need to go, just to be able to make use of the free bus, causing inefficiency and waste. If buses were free, then there would be not need to take a longer route since the most direct bus route would be free. Further, fee based mass transit does nothing to stop this right now and for most fee systems the fee does not completely cover the operating expense of the system, so this is something that already happens in lieu of free mass transit. Further, longer trips on some types of mass transit are far more environmentally friendly compared to the same trip made in a car or bus. > Or, it may cause people to take more inefficient taxi trips (because the bus doesn't take them to their precise destination like a personal car would) or they may do a million other things that are damaging to the environment and wasteful (like eating out more because they can take free bus trips to restaurants.) The people that most need cheap or free transit are unlikely to be able to afford taxis, as they most certainly are not free and wouldn't be scalable as a free transit option. Eating out at a restaurant is not necessarily more wasteful than other options, esp. in locations were food transit and delivery generate pollution due to delivery method, such as trucking (a lot of places do not grow or produce enough food stuffs to avoid importing). > If you read this post and think I'm crazy and say to yourself "What an idiot, cars are obviously guaranteed to be less efficient than buses" I would argue you don't understand how incentives behave in a complex system. We have already seen how incentives the car and roadway system work, and that system most certainly is complex. Suffice it to say that this system has not been effective in providing transit needs for the masses and expansion of those system is not working as scalable solution for transit. As density increases, roadways become less efficient for travel period. > If you think cars are so horrible, you should work to stop subsidies to oil companies so that gas prices reflect the true cost of energy. But in my view there is absolutely no way making public buses free is going to make cities more efficient and/or help the environment. You can do more than just fight against oil energy policy to attack the public of public pollution from transit systems. If buses can displace a certain amount of cars on the road for a population they are more environmentally friendly and making such transit as accessible as possible is the best way to maximize ridership.

specialist 13y ago

Article is about costs, not ridership. What NTA determined is that not collecting fares is less expensive, more efficient. Meaning, it costs more money to collect fares than not. In my area, fares have never covered the costs of buses. Or ferries.

drcode 13y ago
Somewhat true: The article argues it may cost more to collect fares if ridership is held constant. However, ridership would probably increase and lead to more expenses. So now the argument boils down to "Is it efficient or is it wasteful to ferry around all these extra people who didn't think the bus is worth the cost of a fare?"

amalcon 13y ago

I'm one of the many here who agrees with the article, but I came to this comment section mainly to figure out why someone might disagree. So thank you. That said I do have a few nitpicks here: > Luckily however, we have a way to tell which is more efficient: The free market! I'm not going to argue this point, as I'm uninterested and others have taken up that torch. Still, it's worth pointing out that it's not self-evident that A) A free market can exist for transportation, or B) That the free market equilibrium would be a desirable situation for anyone in this case. > If you just make the buses free, people may take more roundabout trips to get to where they need to go, just to be able to make use of the free bus, causing inefficiency and waste. This one I don't understand at all. A la carte public transportation is the one that encourages roundabout routes, because they often cause travelers to pay multiple fares. All-you-can-eat public transportation encourages planners to serve customers as efficiently as possible, as opposed to making each route as efficient as possible. > it can have a multitude of unexpected consequences. I agree that this is true, but why would we assume that these consequences would be bad enough to offset the consequences we know about? Why would we assume that, on the balance, these unexpected consequences would be bad rather than good?

Shivetya 13y ago

Charge a 1% fee for all businesses along the routes. Issue passes that be acquired at designated centers; schools, transit offices, and the like; to anyone with an ID. Tag the IDs to see how they are used, do not tie them to an individual. The IDs tags would also be detectable by the bus/subway/train and could alert authorities to those who are merely camping out. I can see more benefits to a free mass transit system than negatives. The boon to businesses along the line should be measurable, especially food businesses. Think about it, if the service was timely, clean, and free, going to lunch or shopping at any time would be a no brainer. The transit issued IDs simply give a means to track usage and abuse - the staying on the transport too long. Sell ads on the passes, the buses, the whole line.

silencio 13y ago
> do not tie them to an individual Just knowing the transit pattern for any particular ID would be a huge indicator of who the individual is. Imagine the consequences if you looked at my Clipper (SF Bay Area) card. I almost always get on or off at one of two specific transit stops but not any others (which would pinpoint me down to a pretty specific 1-2 block radius if you assume I use the closest stops to my home), if I take the train from downtown SF it's either to the airport or to an East Bay stop, if it's an East Bay stop I take a specific bus that goes to only so many stops...and I chose that particular bus route over others from that train station. You would be able to guess where I live and where I'm going all the time at the bare minimum. While I'm fine with this data aggregation right now since it's used for payment and proof of payment, in conjunction with your idea of selling ads and maybe a corrupt politician who wants to monetize that data for a free system... I shudder to think about super targeted ads as a result.

lawnchair_larry 13y ago

> If you just make the buses free, people may take more roundabout trips to get to where they need to go, just to be able to make use of the free bus What?!

derleth 13y ago
It's like Free Healthcare: Unless it's expensive, people will be out there breaking bones and getting diseases for the sheer hell of it, and not caring about the consequences because it's free! It's in Mises somewhere. Cato Institute said it. Or... something.
jff 13y ago
Would it surprise you that a person might take a 30-minute bus ride to avoid a 15-minute walk? Wouldn't surprise me.

tzs 13y ago

> Luckily however, we have a way to tell which is more efficient: The free market! Free markets find Nash equilibriums, which are locally most efficient for each market participant, but aren't necessarily most efficient globally.

drcode 13y ago
Fair point, I guess the question is what the causes are for local maxima. If the reason for them are things such as difficulties in microtransactions, or counterproductive government regulations, those might be where we should be devoting our efforts to improve public transportation.

crazy1van 13y ago

Excellent points. I fear we have totally lost price signalling in transportation in general. Some will make the point that comparing the profitability of cars to buses isn't fair because cars still ride on subsidized roads. Very true. That trend began because it wasn't possible to charge a driver per road he used -- tons of toll booths just wouldn't work. But, times have changed. Things like EZ-Pass allow for totally automated toll collection. I would like to see drivers charged per use of roads just like bus and train riders are charged per use. Then we can start comparing apples to apples on transit. Plus we can get the pricing right by charging enough to make each system un-subsidized. My guess is that cars will still be far and away more popular, but the consumer's choice would be the final proof.

drcode 13y ago
Exactly right. You are not crazy, crazy1van. Nice to hear one person agreeing with me :-)

brigade 13y ago

It's not just oil subsidies that encourage private vehicles - parking is also massively subsidized [1], and of course all infrastructure is payed for from everyone's taxes. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/business/economy/15view.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/business/economy/15view.ht...