2 ms·

> 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. Agreed, but the qu

by drcode 13y ago

> 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. Agreed, but the question is whether people would be more wasteful with 100% free buses, taking more trips and negating that benefit. > lot of these existing systems were dismantled in favor of expanded roadways and bus systems. Sorry, I don't have the citations right now, but much has been written about cities especially in Latin America where new subway systems were built that showed a strong negative impact on efficiency and expenses. > ... uses can displace a certain amount of cars on the road for a population they are more environmentally friendly ... All I'm saying is that we have to be careful with subsidies. Subsidies are MONEY and as a general rule spending more money causes more energy use and waste. Saying "We'll save energy by spending money" is always a tenuous argument that needs to made with care.

SomeCallMeTim 13y ago
>All I'm saying is that we have to be careful with subsidies. Don't forget the subsidies on the other side of the equation: As the poster above mentioned, building larger roads to handle increased traffic is very expensive.
- 300bps 13y ago
  >Don't forget the subsidies on the other side of the equation: As the poster above mentioned, building larger roads to handle increased traffic is very expensive And the users of those roads pay tens of billions of dollars per year by paying or the Federal Gas Tax on every gallon of gas they buy: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/00gastax.pdf http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/00gastax.pdf They also pay local and state tax that pay for the maintenance of local and state roads. They also pay tolls which make so much money that they pay for roads, bridges and a sizable portion of many state's general funds. Car drivers are more than self-sufficient. Bus riders rely on subsidies or they wouldn't be able to afford bus travel. I'm not passing a value judgement on this, but let's at least acknowledge reality.
  - stormbrew 13y ago
    You can't argue that drivers are self-sufficient because they pay taxes and turn around and argue that bus riders aren't because they're tax subsidized. Neither are paying the true cost of their transportation in direct fees.
  - SomeCallMeTim 13y ago
    >Car drivers are more than self-sufficient. The state of Colorado just announced that there are some roads that will never be fixed, because there isn't the money in the budget, and at the current rate there will never be (because the higher priority roads that the budget does fix will use up the budget perpetually). I've heard that at least one big city has a "97 year" road fixing rotation, again because the budget isn't there to keep the roads fixed. This is not even close to self-sufficiency for cars. If everyone took a bus there would be a small fraction of necessary road surface and wear-and-tear to repair. The reality is that cars have hidden costs paid by everyone, and that shifting some of those subsidies to public transit saves money.
geetar 13y ago
> Agreed, but the question is whether people would be more wasteful with 100% free buses, taking more trips and negating that benefit. It's worth mentioning that with public transit, more trips does not contribute linearly to more waste because many riders can take a single bus. Sure, it's probably somewhat more expensive to operate a full bus than an empty one, but there's a net benefit when compared to the cost of operating individual vehicles for all those riders instead.
- drcode 13y ago
  Hmm... Unless a bus system is initially extremely inefficient, I think the number of buses in a city is always going to have to scale linearly with the number of riders. You shouldn't be having bus routes that are almost all empty to begin with if you're making an efficiency argument about public transportation.
  - dhughes 13y ago
    My city only got buses about five years ago and most times they're empty a lot is due to inefficiency but also the design of the city. The city streets tend to go away from the city center/harbour but subdivisions are perpendicular to those streets, cross town streets are terribly disorganized. It all ends up with buses going one way but the people who use it want to go 90 degree angle to where the bus goes. Add to that buses leave at times not suitable for the population e.g. people get to work at 8am but the buses arrive at 6am , it's a joke but at least we have a bus system.
  - geetar 13y ago
    I agree that number of busses will scale linearly with the number of riders, but if we consider a single bus, waste will not scale linearly with the addition of passengers. The situation I'm trying to capture is one where there's a relatively unpopular route; say we only have one or two busses on the loop. In these cases, more people taking advantage of free busing would only increase the efficiency of the system. Of course, the utilization of these routes must be high enough to justify the cost; obviously if there is only one passenger for the day it would be cheaper overall for him to just drive.
king_jester 13y ago
> Agreed, but the question is whether people would be more wasteful with 100% free buses, taking more trips and negating that benefit. Generally this isn't how bus systems operate. Bus lines will run for a dedicated period of time and constantly run the line. The only way for more buses to be introduced is to expand the hours of operation or introduce more lines. That then becomes a question of capacity and how many people are using those lines. As bus lines become saturated and need to be expanded, we already have an idea of how many riders are using that system and we can directly measure that against changes in density of other forms of transit (car, rail, pedestrian, etc.). To that end, the buses are least wasteful when saturated, so its simply about measuring against cars to determine if there is more resources spent on bus systems compared to the number of cars that would exist without said bus system. We know that buses carry many more people per trip than cars do reducing car volume in favor of bus volume means we are being more efficient per vehicle, which is a bonus for things like more environmentally friendly bus tech while avoiding the externality cost that individual people and families pay when having to purchase and operate/maintain a car. > Sorry, I don't have the citations right now, but much has been written about cities especially in Latin America where new subway systems were built that showed a strong negative impact on efficiency and expenses. It is totally possible that a mass transit system will fail to provide any benefit. Its up to each city and locality to determine what transit will for that area. However, in the US we do know that car transit wasn't really considered this way and was expanded without a lot of thought going into density issues. > All I'm saying is that we have to be careful with subsidies. Subsidies are MONEY and as a general rule spending more money causes more energy use and waste. Saying "We'll save energy by spending money" is always a tenuous argument that needs to made with care. Owners and drivers of cars are spending money already to obtain and maintain those vehicles. Those drivers are also subsidized in a variety of ways. Spending money in general doesn't guarantee an increase in energy use w.r.t. transit, certain forms of transit are much more energy efficient in comparison to other forms.

by drcode 13y ago

SomeCallMeTim 13y ago

>All I'm saying is that we have to be careful with subsidies. Don't forget the subsidies on the other side of the equation: As the poster above mentioned, building larger roads to handle increased traffic is very expensive.

300bps 13y ago
>Don't forget the subsidies on the other side of the equation: As the poster above mentioned, building larger roads to handle increased traffic is very expensive And the users of those roads pay tens of billions of dollars per year by paying or the Federal Gas Tax on every gallon of gas they buy: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/00gastax.pdf http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/00gastax.pdf They also pay local and state tax that pay for the maintenance of local and state roads. They also pay tolls which make so much money that they pay for roads, bridges and a sizable portion of many state's general funds. Car drivers are more than self-sufficient. Bus riders rely on subsidies or they wouldn't be able to afford bus travel. I'm not passing a value judgement on this, but let's at least acknowledge reality.
- stormbrew 13y ago
  You can't argue that drivers are self-sufficient because they pay taxes and turn around and argue that bus riders aren't because they're tax subsidized. Neither are paying the true cost of their transportation in direct fees.
- SomeCallMeTim 13y ago
  >Car drivers are more than self-sufficient. The state of Colorado just announced that there are some roads that will never be fixed, because there isn't the money in the budget, and at the current rate there will never be (because the higher priority roads that the budget does fix will use up the budget perpetually). I've heard that at least one big city has a "97 year" road fixing rotation, again because the budget isn't there to keep the roads fixed. This is not even close to self-sufficiency for cars. If everyone took a bus there would be a small fraction of necessary road surface and wear-and-tear to repair. The reality is that cars have hidden costs paid by everyone, and that shifting some of those subsidies to public transit saves money.

geetar 13y ago

> Agreed, but the question is whether people would be more wasteful with 100% free buses, taking more trips and negating that benefit. It's worth mentioning that with public transit, more trips does not contribute linearly to more waste because many riders can take a single bus. Sure, it's probably somewhat more expensive to operate a full bus than an empty one, but there's a net benefit when compared to the cost of operating individual vehicles for all those riders instead.

drcode 13y ago
Hmm... Unless a bus system is initially extremely inefficient, I think the number of buses in a city is always going to have to scale linearly with the number of riders. You shouldn't be having bus routes that are almost all empty to begin with if you're making an efficiency argument about public transportation.
- dhughes 13y ago
  My city only got buses about five years ago and most times they're empty a lot is due to inefficiency but also the design of the city. The city streets tend to go away from the city center/harbour but subdivisions are perpendicular to those streets, cross town streets are terribly disorganized. It all ends up with buses going one way but the people who use it want to go 90 degree angle to where the bus goes. Add to that buses leave at times not suitable for the population e.g. people get to work at 8am but the buses arrive at 6am , it's a joke but at least we have a bus system.
- geetar 13y ago
  I agree that number of busses will scale linearly with the number of riders, but if we consider a single bus, waste will not scale linearly with the addition of passengers. The situation I'm trying to capture is one where there's a relatively unpopular route; say we only have one or two busses on the loop. In these cases, more people taking advantage of free busing would only increase the efficiency of the system. Of course, the utilization of these routes must be high enough to justify the cost; obviously if there is only one passenger for the day it would be cheaper overall for him to just drive.

king_jester 13y ago

> Agreed, but the question is whether people would be more wasteful with 100% free buses, taking more trips and negating that benefit. Generally this isn't how bus systems operate. Bus lines will run for a dedicated period of time and constantly run the line. The only way for more buses to be introduced is to expand the hours of operation or introduce more lines. That then becomes a question of capacity and how many people are using those lines. As bus lines become saturated and need to be expanded, we already have an idea of how many riders are using that system and we can directly measure that against changes in density of other forms of transit (car, rail, pedestrian, etc.). To that end, the buses are least wasteful when saturated, so its simply about measuring against cars to determine if there is more resources spent on bus systems compared to the number of cars that would exist without said bus system. We know that buses carry many more people per trip than cars do reducing car volume in favor of bus volume means we are being more efficient per vehicle, which is a bonus for things like more environmentally friendly bus tech while avoiding the externality cost that individual people and families pay when having to purchase and operate/maintain a car. > Sorry, I don't have the citations right now, but much has been written about cities especially in Latin America where new subway systems were built that showed a strong negative impact on efficiency and expenses. It is totally possible that a mass transit system will fail to provide any benefit. Its up to each city and locality to determine what transit will for that area. However, in the US we do know that car transit wasn't really considered this way and was expanded without a lot of thought going into density issues. > All I'm saying is that we have to be careful with subsidies. Subsidies are MONEY and as a general rule spending more money causes more energy use and waste. Saying "We'll save energy by spending money" is always a tenuous argument that needs to made with care. Owners and drivers of cars are spending money already to obtain and maintain those vehicles. Those drivers are also subsidized in a variety of ways. Spending money in general doesn't guarantee an increase in energy use w.r.t. transit, certain forms of transit are much more energy efficient in comparison to other forms.