4 ms·
Great story. Did the increase in tax revenue offset the loss of fare revenue?
by rossjudson 13y ago
Great story. Did the increase in tax revenue offset the loss of fare revenue?
- tomp 13y agoNo: -12 million + 9 million = -3 million.
- vkou 13y agoWhat's the dollar value of getting 14% of the city's cars off the roads?
- sliverstorm 13y agoThat would be difficult to compute, but probably less than you might figure. A 15% increase in bus ridership is going to increase either bus weight or bus frequency, and a bus is harder on the road than a passenger car. Not 15% harder, of course, but not 0% harder either.
- yread 13y agoyes, but a person in the bus weighs (person's weight) but a person in a car weighs (person's weight)+(weight of the car) which is about 10 times more. And since road damage is proportional to (at least) the 4th power [1] of weight you get 10.000 times less damage from person travelling by bus. And that doesn't even count the worse effects - pollution, parking places, streets necessary for the cars to get to downtown, ... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_axle_weight_rating http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_axle_weight_rating
- danielweber 13y agoIf wear is really weight to the 4th power, than buses are horrible ideas. A 20 ton bus starts out 160,000 times worse than a 1 ton car. If you get 13.3 people off the road, and people weigh 150 pounds, then you have taken off 13.3 units of car wear, but added 34,000 units of bus-wear (going from 20-to-the-4th to 21-to-the-4th). If the argument is "reduce road wear" and damage is proportional to weight to the 4th power, you want lots and lots of smaller units over bigger units. EDIT: I did some more math. Assuming a very light 5-ton bus, adding a 90-pound person to it is the same road wear as adding a 2.18 ton vehicle to the road. O(n^4) is nasty.
- ars 13y agoYes, wear really is to the 4th power, and yread got his conclusion exactly backward. (Someone once evoked it like this: Would you rather have 300 1lb kittens walk on you, or one 300lb human?) But the wear is per tire, not per vehicle. So you have to divide the bus weight by the ratio of number of wheels compared to a car.
- yread 13y agoWeren't we talking about an almost empty bus with fare versus almost full bus without fare? Of course buses damage road much more than cars, just look at an asphalt bus stop - sometimes it looks like tracks in the mud (that's why they are sometimes made with concrete surface)
- ars 13y agoThey would for sure end up havingb to add more buses.
- hso9791 13y agoThe wear is per axle, not per wheel. It looks like the conclusion was read exactly right. A car with 2000lbs per axle will put sixteen times more wear on the road than one with 1000lbs.
- marcosdumay 13y agoAdded to the fact that wear is per tire, it's also per time, thus any vehicle causes more wear when waiting or moving at very small speeds in a congestion. And the wear increases again at very high speeds, for unrelated reasons.
- saraid216 13y agoIt's even harder than that to compute, if you're trying to estimate the net value to the city, because you have to account for further effects beyond road wear and tear. Like increased pedestrian traffic to shops, thus increasing tax revenue. Or less land dedicated to parking.
- snogglethorpe 13y agoYeah, but a single bus is the equivalent of many cars. http://www.copenhagenize.com/2012/02/street-cars-named-desire.html http://www.copenhagenize.com/2012/02/street-cars-named-desir...
- akgerber 13y agoMost of the cost of traffic congestion isn't in road wear, it's in lost productivity to those stuck in it.
- relix 13y agoNo, on top of that, it's probable that a lot of these people were already living in Tallinn, yet registered elsewhere, or are still living in a nearby city, and just registered with a relative/friend with an address in Tallinn. I'm not sure which would be the case more often, but depending on that it might be a positive or negative for the cities. Also, the 15% increase in public transportation would probably demand more busses/trams to be run. There should be some extra marginal costs.