P J O’Rourke weighs in with a modest proposal on public transit in the Wall Street Journal. A choice tidbit:
The Heritage Foundation says, “There isn’t a single light rail transit system in America in which fares paid by the passengers cover the cost of their own rides.” Heritage cites the Minneapolis “Hiawatha” light rail line, soon to be completed with $107 million from the transportation bill. Heritage estimates that the total expense for each ride on the Hiawatha will be $19. Commuting to work will cost $8,550 a year. If the commuter is earning minimum wage, this leaves about $1,000 a year for food, shelter and clothing. Or, if the city picks up the tab, it could have leased a BMW X-5 SUV for the commuter at about the same price.
That, my friends, is a sound bite that can stop a light rail train (proposal) in its tracks if it gets in front of the voters before the referendum passes. Of course, as we all know, these kinds of facts emerge only after the horses have left the barn, so to speak, because of the bare-faced lying that always accompanies the run-up to large public works projects.
The cost of operating a car alone is about $0.35 a mile according to the IRS. So a 25-mile commute with a car will cost about $9 each way.
Then there’s the cost of building and maintaining roads: since we’re talking about construction in the above post, in the US, the average interstate costs US$30.6 million/mile.
With a low-density population, cars probably do work out to be more practical, but it’s doubtful that they’d be cheaper.
Mass transit, especially by rail, is inherently cheaper than private car transport per passenger mile when ALL costs are taken into account for both and where the traffic density is above a certain minimum. Rail transport is also vastly more efficient than road – for the same consumption of fuel, you can move no less than five times the mass of cargo than you can by road.
The problem with the sort of analysis considered is that the comparison is hardly apples with apples. The capital cost of the entire mass transit system – power, railway, trams or train stock, etc – is compared to the cost of the car alone, neglecting the capital cost of the road. To get a fair comparison, deduct the cost of the mass transit infrastructure, or add the fair share of the road transport infratructure.
If you include other factors, such as the thermal efficiency, pollution, death rates, and so on, there is no doubt whatsoever that by any measure rail-based mass transit systems are way ahead of the private car where the population density is high enough. However, the private motorist is insulated from the total cost of the car, since he does not notice the capital cost of road construction and maintenance (paid separately in taxation), whereas the rail passenger pays this directly in the fare. If railway infrastructure was paid for in the same way as the roads, trains would be much cheaper in terms of ticket price compared to the analogous passenger-mile cost of the private car.
EG
The Answer:
Toll roads & private roads. Hell you might even make a *gasp* profit.
O’Rourke is not as funny as Dave Barry and not as meaty as Walter Williams. Besides, I hae ma doots about some of his facts. Only one in four New Yorkers commutes by subway, train or bus? In the whole Greater NY area, maybe– but most readers will assume he means the city centre, and will wonder where the 75% park.
As other commenters have indicated, the full costs of motoring are buried in taxation. Every Third World city which starts to sprawl has to build a rapid transit network sooner or later. Are they all deluded victims of statism, or have they reached conclusions about efficiency, safety, pollution etc which don’t fit the libertarian script?
Anyhow, I’m pretty libbo myself, but I can’t afford a chauffeur of my own and I’d rather be driven to work by an expert while I read or fantasise out the window, even if I have to share the accomodation, than arrive sweaty with fear behind my own wheel. I guess that makes me a miserable serf.
It’s quite possible that a libertarian society with private roads and rail systems might pretty quickly see a lot of traffic moving to rail, simply on the grounds of cost.
EG
I’d love to see roads and streets, paid for with taxpayer dollars, subjected to the same analysis. How many of them can say they are routes of transportation “in which fares paid by the passengers cover the cost of their own rides”?
There may be a good argument against mass transit, but this isn’t it.
I’d love to see highways and streets, paid for with taxpayer dollars, subjected to the same analysis. How many of them can say they are routes of transportation “in which fares paid by the passengers cover the cost of their own rides”?
There may be a good argument against mass transit, but this isn’t it.
Euan Gray writes:
“However, the private motorist is insulated from the total cost of the car, since he does not notice the capital cost of road construction and maintenance (paid separately in taxation), whereas the rail passenger pays this directly in the fare.”
Loath as one is to enter into another attritrional posting session with Mr. Gray, he can’t be allowed to get away with this sleight of hand.
Rail is massively subsidised from taxation and the passenger pays nothing like the real cost of his or her journey – hard though that might be to believe given the astonishing price of rail tickets in the UK.
I’m both a supporter and user of rail travel – but this sort of inaccuracy does it no favours.
As a matter of fact (as opposed to received wisdom) car transport is nowhere near as inefficient as is claimed, as was admitted by a writer in a leading pro-rail magazine: “At present a family of four going by car is about as environmentally friendly as you can get” (Roger Ford, Modern Railways magazine). This followed the publication of work by Professor Roger Kemp at Lancaster University, which called into question the theoretical advantages of rail transport when the realities of empty stock transport etc are taken into account.
Now why do I feel I’m going to regret posting this?
There was a very thorough analysis of the history of train/trolley systems in American Heritage magazine a few years ago. The conclusion was that urban train systems failed because busses and cars were so much more versatile for the traveller, and cheaper to operate.
The Hiawatha light rail is 11 miles long, from downtown Minneapolis to the international airport and the Mall of America, which are adjacent to each other on either side of a freeway. The original proposal for the line claimed a cost of about 375 million dollars. The bill so far is at 1.2 billion dollars, and it isn’t finished yet.
The management just announced that the tunnel between the airport and the Mall that runs under the freeway is leaking badly due to an underground creek, which the builders knew about, and may have to be redone.
On the upside, physicists at the University are very interested in the project, as it may be the first human engineered black hole, at least for money.
I have to disagree with the orginal post. Public transportation may never pay when all costs are taken into account, but would London, for instance, be a better city without the Tube? I for one am grateful to all the impoverished investors (a surprising amount of them American) and taxpayers who suffered so that I can go to work without sitting in a three-hour traffic jam.
Sort of off-topic, but I found out today that my council, LB Hounslow, spends £116k/year on a theatre in Hounslow at which “events planned for the year 2005-2006 include Asian Theatre, Asian Starsearch, Asian Poetry, Black History Month, Sikh Lecture Series, Asian Women’s Film Festival, Chinese New Year, Young Black Artists Showcase, Kali Theatre Company, Alpana Sengupta, Kathakali Schools Workshop and the Brentford Oscars”, while it only spends £80k/year on road maintenance.
Anybody have any solutions, short of a Unabomber or Oklahoma City style deal, which isn’t really my cup of tea?
A couple of points that seem unduly neglected:
O’Rourke is not speaking of rail in general, but of light rail. The term is a bit loaded, but it refers to “street-car” style systems that run on rails installed on an existing roadway, and are quite distinct from underground subway trains, elevated commuter lines like the S-Bahn, or ordinary commuter trains running on railroads.
Euan Gray is therefore a bit off-base when he insists that the costs of building a light-rail system be compared with the costs of maintaining roads. Even if light rail were as ubiquitous, flexible, and capable as a rubber-wheeled automobile, it still couldn’t get away from the fact that light rail requires the same roadway system to operate, in addition to the costs of laying rail tracks on top of the road. We should also keep in mind that light-rail streetcars are, with few exceptions, just as vulnerable to traffic delays as those inching along with them on rubber tires. (To say nothing of the fact that an auto accident that blocks their path stops them cold. Can’t exactly drive around the blockage…)
On the flipside: when considering the cost of a public transit system, it’s important to realize that it’s not just riders who benefit. Much of the benefit actually goes to the drivers, who get to have more room on the road and in parking garages.
Completly wrong. Rail is subsidised to the tune of £2.6 billion a year, and carries a small proportion of all of journeys. Cars through the various taxes net the goverment a profit of about £36 billion a year after payment for new roads, road repear etc. Maybe you can make a case that cars are subsidised in other countries, but in Britain they are definately not. Some people use made up figures to try and prove cars are subsidised by blaming all respitory deseases on cars etc, but they’re lying.
I think its fair to say that car and rail transport are subsidized in both the U.S. and Europe (though certain countries like France may have less in the way of subsidies for car transport given their penchant for toll roads, etc.).
Rail transportation is inherently cheaper, if everyone wants to go where the stations are. It is utterly useless once you factor flexibility into the equation.
I can get from where I live to every place I’ve worked since I arrived in Milwaukee by car. I can get to all the widely scattered places of business which have all the things I have reason to buy, and get most of them home, by car. The proposed light rail system which they have finally stopped pushing here after spending enough on studies to have done great things for the bus system, wouldn’t even have served to funnel me downtown, because I don’t live in one of the targeted neighborhoods.
One of the biggest mysteries of my life, which nobody has ever been able to explain to me, is how my opposition to the proposed light rail system proved that I am, according to its supporters, racist.
There’s another factor in this: federal funds. I know of one state on the east coast (of the US) that is building a light-rail transit system that goes from nowhere, through nowhere, to nowhere, at great cost to state taxpayers. However, once they finish this, they figure they can use this investment to qualify for massive influxes of federal funds to build up all sorts of other systems at little or no direct cost to the state. So the first system is porkbarrel for some local politician and the rest is gravy for the entire state. Is Minnesota also planning a similar stunt?
No one tried a scooter yet? Best way to get round a city. A nice 500cc model to get you away from the lights with helmet mounted speakers and an MP3 player. More fuel efficient than your car, and more fun to boot.
“Samizdatistas do it on two wheels”?
From the man who now runs the Democrat Party, $1000 per ride, while it lasted. I barely got a chance to get a pic before they torn down the sign.
Not every public works project turned out badly. This is a personal favorite.
But then, there’s this mother of all messes.
And how much is road transport subsidised through taxation? A 1995 study by Prof. D Newbery for the AA suggested the annual road use subsidy through taxation amounts to some 23 billion. This comes from a total cost of 47 bn, less 24 bn paid by the user through road tax and fuel taxes. Hardly a fair comparison if the road subsidy is 10 times the rail subsidy, now is it?
Where does that come from? It seems there are two radically different assessments here.
Perhaps so, but it seems inescapable that a considerable amount of respiratory disease, certainly in cities, is attributable to the private car.
EG
I have used most types of transport system and it is all horses for courses.
Rail is great for the tiny minority of journeys where you start near a station and your destination is near a station and you have little luggage.
Cars are most adaptable, you can go from most anywhere to most anywhere with several hundredweight of luggage and a couple of passengers.
Scooters are good if you like taxis bumping into you as they do their unsignalled illegal manouvres.
Come to think of it, the best transport is a car with a private hire plate, you needn’t stop for red lights, you can travel in bus only lanes, drive off after hitting parked cars, do u-turns on blind corners and the brow of a hill. Yep. The private hire car is best.
James wonders:
“No one tried a scooter yet?”
No. I’ve seen what happens when two wheels hits four wheels.
Euan Gray asserts:
“Perhaps so, but it seems inescapable that a considerable amount of respiratory disease, certainly in cities, is attributable to the private car.”
Does it? I think you had better hurry up and present that paper, Mr. Gray – you’re obviously in possession of some remarkable new data.
Until you do (and pace the Greenpeace mythology department), I think the rest of us will probably have to accept what Dr. Kenneth Calman, the government’s Chief Medical Officer said, in 1995: “Air pollution does not cause asthma. There is no correlation between levels of vehicle emissions an asthma incidence.”
Moreover, even were the link present, or if it is some other respiratory disease that concerns you, it seems likely that two of the biggest culprits could be 3-nitrobenzanthrone and 1,8-dinitropyrene; both found in, err, diesel bus emissions.
Just don’t tell Ken Livingstone, though.
GCooper,
Who mentioned asthma? I said “respiratory disease,” not “a specific respiratory disease.”
From any diesel engine, actually. This includes buses, but also includes trucks, cars and railway locomotives.
An exercise for the reader:
Which will produce the most emissions per ton-mile – a 3,000hp locomotive pulling 900 tons of cargo, or 40 300hp trucks pulling the same 900 tons?
EG
Supposedly the trams that used to run in Brisbane (Australia) ran at a profit but now we have a heavily subsidised Bus/Rail network.
And which will be involved in more accidents, the locomotive or the convoy?
Much US antipathy to public transit is based on the belief that everyone should love at least 30 miles from where he works, 5 miles from the mall, and never, never, have to walk or push a bike anywhere. This is cognate with the belief that every red-blooded American has the duty to eat himself to death to prove what a rich land he lives in.
But if riches are defined as ease, comfort, healthiness and the reassurance of spending most of your life among friends and neighbours, there is much to be said for ‘downsizing’– climbing off the hamster wheel of consumerism. That can include paying someone else to drive you or strolling to your destination, instead of fuming on the turnpike for two hours daily.
Interestingly, despite their ideological commitment to growth at all costs, most libertarians I know choose to lead a rather downsized life: cycling and jogging, drinking wine and shunning cigarettes, reading instead of gawping at the tube.
Eaun Gray writes:
“Who mentioned asthma? I said “respiratory disease,” not “a specific respiratory disease.”
So which did you have in mind? Or was it, as seems likely, just a handy stick to grab in the attempt to prolong a failing argument?
If it was bronchitis, perhaps you’d take the word of Professor Emeritus Stanley Feldman, of Charing Cross and Westminster Medical School, who writes: “Pollution does not cause bronchitis or asthma…”?
And again (on diesel emissions)
“From any diesel engine, actually. This includes buses, but also includes trucks, cars and railway locomotives.”
Rather disingenuous, don’t you think? It is most prevalent from diesel engines under heavy load. For example, city busses pulling away.
Which is why Delhi has banned the diesel bus.
So, let’s see, that’s the taxation argument shot full of holes, the efficiency scam dented beyond recognition and now the health scares debunked.
I’ll leave Mr. Gray to Google. I’ve seen this process before and life is too short and too interesting to get sucked into one of these quagmires.
Here is the Southern California ( where I live)take on MassTransit:
Hey! cool! Mass Transit is a GREAT idea! For THOSE people! It will get all those pinheads off the road so I can DRIIIIIVE!
OK,OK I confess! I am vile! I am morally reprehensable!
I also got 455 cubic inches and I use every damn one of them, HEH! heh! heh! God help me…but I do love it so…
Respiratory disease in general, not specific conditions. This should have been obvious from the wording of the comment.
You should also consider that, whilst pollution does not cause asthma (for example), it does greatly exacerbate the effects of the illness. It therefore contributes directly (and considerably) to the cost of such disease in healthcare, lost work, personal inconvenience, worse personal health, secondary infections, and so on, which is the point.
Or, for example, diesel trucks pulling away. Or diesel cars. Or diesel locomotives. The problem is an inherent feature of the diesel combustion cycle – ALL diesel engines under heavy load (burning rich) produce the stuff. Your argument is the disingenuous one in that it implies that the problem is unique to the bus when it simply isn’t.
It will be argued that the stop-go cycle of the bus makes it worse. True enough, but consider the stop-go cycle of the car in the urban cycle. The problem does not seem to be so bad, because the car engine is small (perhaps a tenth the cubic capacity of the bus engine, at least in the UK) and the car doesn’t stop-go quite so often (although there isn’t much in it), but what is often overlooked is that there are many more car engines than bus engines.
Replacement of old engines with newer, cleaner and more efficient ones would have the same or greater beneficial effect.
Buses last longer than cars, and it is to be expected that the average age of bus engines is greater than that of car engines. The average bus engine can therefore be assumed to be more polluting (having regard for size) than the average car engine. Replacing the engine basically removes this problem.
Given that the roads are subsidised to a greater extent than rail, this is not correct.
Quick figures for you – a VERY GOOD diesel car operates at an overall thermal efficiency of about 20%, a good petrol car at 10-12%. An AVERAGE diesel locomotive operates at 30-35%.
The note about cars being less polluting than trains is disengenuous, since you overlook why – safety regulation. Railway carriages in the UK are far heavier than they need to be, due to excessive safety regulation and the conservatism of the engineers in the approval system. Ton for ton, rail transport is MUCH more efficient than road. This is simple physics. The problem is that the contemporary passenger train has a huge unnecessary penalty of weight and the number of tons which actually constitute payload in a given passenger train is therefore lowered. This is a recent innovation. If cars were built to equivalent safety standards, they would be much heavier than they are, and consequently require much more fuel.
So, the efficiency argument is not dented beyond recognition. Since it relies on elementary physics, it isn’t going to be any time soon, either.
Only because you are arguing against a straw man.
Yes, you do that a lot – post some glib statements and then run away so you don’t have to explain why you are attacking unmade arguments or disorting other peoples comments.
EG
I would just like to point out to Matt, that I, and many like me would LOVE to live in the city near where I work, but in Boston, and most US cities, if you want to own a place in town, which is to say anywhere within 20 miles of it, it is prohibitivly expensive…
The ‘efficency’ discussed above is irelavant: the efficiency that counts is getting people from where they are to where they need to be. (New) Light Rail is abysmal in this respect.
Also, in out-of-pocket expenses, public transportation costs far more than the out-of-pocket expenses in using a car for commuting (in the US).
Until the choice of using the car is completely removed (London springs to mind), public transport will always be a very poor compromise to the user. Public transportation infrastructure in the UK has been the stalwart of all transportation infrastructure. The US, however, does not.
Either way, geography prohibits any kind of mass transit system in the US: it just isn’t practical. Light rail is a possibility, in certain areas, but still needs the roads (parking lots/car parks) so people can drive their cars to and from the rail station: an aspect completely overlooked (in the US) when planning for such light public transportation (busses included).
If the road user had to pay for the road in the same way as the rail user pays for the rail, this would not be the case. This has been explained above.
Not necessarily.
I live in Edinburgh, a much smaller but still busy city compared to London. I have variously used bicycle, bus, car and motorbike to get around. The bicycle is obviously the cheapest, but not necessarily terribly practical. Next is the bus – I can travel anywhere in Edinburgh, 7 days a week, for a cost of 1 pound a day on a non-subsidised bus system. Giving my travel pattern to and from work, I can’t even buy fuel for the car at that price, never mind amortise the purchase cost, maintenance, insurance, etc. The bus is also faster than the car.
But as was observed above, it is horses for courses. If I want to visit my mother or brother & family, who live 80 miles away, I hire a car to get the convenience. It’s more expensive than train or bus, but it’s convenient. I don’t need this added convenience when commuting to/from work, and neither do most people. If I lived in London, I wouldn’t even think about owning a car for commuting.
Again, this is a subject where US experience doesn’t always translate elsewhere. British cities tend to be more compact with a higher population density, and the sprawling suburbs common in the US don’t really exist here. Petrol is expensive and roads are heavily congested in most cities. Public transport makes sense here, as in much of western Europe, but it doesn’t necessarily work so well in the US.
EG
In Orlando, Florida, we’re in the middle of a huge, multi-billion dollar effort to keep traffic flowing through the center of town along Interstate 4.
It’s not working.
A recent suggestion is to put two toll lanes in the center of the highway, for all of the people north of town to travel to the jobs south of town (Disney and the other theme parks).
We have upwards of 100,000 people going to a few locations every day (Disney, Universal, Sea World, the Convention Center), along the same straight-line route. If some sort of light rail system isn’t a good answer, then what is? Widening a highway doesn’t increase the capacity of that highway in a linear fashion (going from three to four lanes only adds another 20%, going from four to five another 10% at best). Yesterday, we had a major wreck on I-4 a couple of miles south of downtown, and traffic stopped dead on that road for three solid hours.
A “branching tree” bus-and-rail system is a great answer for this. You can haul a lot of people past the choke points, and you have some redundancy in case of failure of the road systems.
One glaring omission in the debate around cost comparison thus far: Roads are not optional.
We can’t not have roads as only roads reach to everyone’s door. The cost comparison should then be about marginal cost of more roads or hiring BMWs vs building rail links.
Seen this way it is quite clear that roads rule.
From a policy perspective it makes sense to devote money to rail links only where they are cost effective as standalone projects, such as linking ports to industrial sites. Otherwise spend money to lower the unit costs for road transport.
Matt O’Halloran – “…everyone should love at least 30 miles from where he works …”
Agreed. Cuts down on office gossip.
If the road user had to pay for the road in the same way as the rail user pays for the rail, this would not be the case.
Well, in the US the road user does pay for the road via gasoline taxes. The degree to which other funds are used for road building and maintenance is not at all clear, and varies from state to state, but it is my impression that by and large the gasoline taxes cover the cost of the roads.
The rail user, however, pays only for the cost of their ticket, leaving non-rail users to pick up the rest of the tab.
However, the correct should be on the marginal cost of moving the folks who will use light rail. The question is, what additional roads and public infrastructure will we have to build to let this last few percent of commuters move around, and is light rail cheaper?
As a fairly strict libertarian free-marketeer I’m against all forms of subsidy. I’m not aware of a natural right, or a constitutional right, to transportation. Having roads or rails built through taxation only distorts the true costs to the individual, as has already somewhat been discussed.
Also, people put events out of order. The desire to use cars was triggered by the building of government subsidized roads, not the other way around. Supply and demand was predistorted by government intervention first, it is not government dutifully reacting after the fact.
Just as with all government interventions, they merely terraform the landscape and individuals react accordingly. Some people benefit from the intervention, others are harmed. For every ‘gain’ there is a ‘cost’. Advocates of government intervention tout the efficiencies for all by doing so, but they either neglect the costs, or purposefully hide them.
Lastly, the infrastructure of the US is falling steadily into disrepair. Massive racketeering, big and small, insinuated itself into the building of the infrastructure at the beginning, and the biggest racketeer of all, the government, slowly shifted revenues to other pet programs, and now the various systems and bridges are in need of massive new investment, which will demand greater burdens be placed on the taxpayer, and we can all be assured that a majority of the contracts awarded will not exactly be by fair an open competition.
Collectivism merely breeds a bloated sense of entitlement by the individual, and disproportionate power to bureaucrats and cronies. And true valuations are lost and massive misallocations of resources occurs.
Of course this discussion is hidebound by the assumption that buzzing about like a blue-assed fly is a Good Thing. But in an age of homeworking, teleconferencing, computer shopping, dating, chatting, etc etc, why premise the design of transport arteries on more and more physical movements, with their attendant pollution, noise, damage to the landscape, accidents and wear on the nerves?
The next phase in the great capitalist project to make every man a king should be to cut down on travel. The King makes people come to him and goes on a progress only occasionally, for pleasure.
The best thing to do is overhaul the FAA, and let people get filthy rich bringing cheap, easy-to-use personal aircraft to the masses.
“Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads!”
That’ll make roads, groundcars, and rail obsolete, not to mention the very cities themselves!
Great discussion. It should be pointed out that the huge office buildings in center cities could not be used as places of employment without cars to feed masses of people to them from considerable distances, where housing can be cheaper. For the last few miles, going to work, mass transit can be useful. But for food shopping, getting plywood at Home Depot, and taking kids to recreation, cars are the only answer. Cars also allow businesses to locate outside the city center, off the rail and bus lines, where land is cheaper, allowing cheaper prices. The people have chosen cars.
There’s a hidden cost that no one has mentioned yet: Having a skilled individual being a chauffer for empty space for one, two, three hours a day.
That there is pressure against this is evidenced by people hanging off their mobiles as they speed down the road at 80mph. I could get two hours of entertainment and/or work in per day if I had a mass transit option available.
As a libertarian I oppose subsidies but like Toolkien, I see that the *overwhelming* dominance of the car has occured (if unintentionally) because of government manipulation.
And don’t forget, it’s not necessarily an either/or situation.
And what would be the problem with having home depot deliver the plywood anyway? Or hiring a pickup to do the job?
I assume that was to be “…everyone should live at least 30 miles from where he works …”
Thing is, I work contract. I’ve had a job I could walk to but not bicycle to (descent too steep), a job I could bicycle to if it were in a different direction, and two seperate two year stretches on a job 27 miles (farthest I’ve gotten) from home. I even had one job where it made sense to take the bus. It would make no sense for me to move 30 miles from (or, more seriously, close to) my place of employment.
By the way, in the US, much of the cost of the roadways comes from fuel taxes, which means that people are paying more or less in proportion to their consumption. It used to be common for over-the road trucks to display signs “I pay $4,812 per year for highway maintenance.”
Guess what, folks! There isn’t a city in the world that has “solved” the “traffic problem”. Maybe there’s one or two in North Korea, but we won’t go there.
I favor choices. I like to ride my bicycle, enjoy the convenience of a car, and want a bus available when the others aren’t available options (rain, repairs, lack of parking in some locations, whatever). Having more choices makes for progress in ending the problems of transportation: it lets the market decide, even if that market requires socialistic controls to set up.
I’d love to agree with Toolkien that tolls are the way to go, but big government road projects are one of the best things governments did in the last century. The tremendous growth in transportation has allowed for vastly increased trade within nations, which vastly improved business worldwide. And it wasn’t done piece by piece as private investors built this road and that road. They piggybacked on government projects. You can argue whether or not the government has any business doing what they did, but it sure made a good return on the investment.
Hidden costs will always be a problem. But if there are options, the problem can be individualized to each traveler. Government provides options, subsidizes all of them to some degree, and makes it virtually impossible to opt out. Find the best plan for your needs and means, and you’ll realize that no matter what the government does, it will be insufficient for you.
I remember the American Heritage article mentioned earlier in the post, and the problem with light rail (trolley cars) was that they were replaced by buses that could be air-conditioned or heated and that would pull up to the curb, which saved many people from injury. People chose the buses, the rail tracks were torn up, and life went on. Now, buses are often overworked on some routes, so rail will likely come back in some places.
Here in the US, I think light rail can work as an option provided there’s a parking lot near each outlying station. Our workplaces and some recreational sites are concentrated, but our residences are getting less and less concentrated. It can work to alleviate some traffic, but not all over. But then, nothing can.
Maybe the Scottish Executive has abolished fuel taxes (it’s “their” oil after all), but in England I find that when a pay 80p for a litre of petrol I only get 20p worth of fuel, and Gordon Brown gets 60p. No other commodity has a tax rate anything near that. Plus I have to buy a tax disc every year, and when I insure my car I also have to pay Insurance Tax. It doesn’t feel like I am being subsidised to use my car.
One thing no one has metioned –
Are there any privately owned mass transit systems ??
If mass transit were ‘workable’, private industry would
have filled that niche decades ago, as it does for any
legitimate need/want in a free market.
Mass transit is a very proor ‘solution’ foisted upon the
public ‘for their own good’ regardless of its efficiency or need.
The flexibility issue is what usually is it’s downfall (along with true cost – subsidized through taxes – paid by many who do not/will not/can not use the system)
Ken, sorry, ‘air cars’ just ‘ain’t gonna happen’. Product liabilty has nearly killed private avaition (by driving the prices of aircraft out of reach of almost everyone except the very wealthy). Our current ATC system is overloaded in many metropolitan areas and could never handle hundreds of thousand more vehicles. Lastly, I see far too many people who should not be operating a motoized vehicle within two demensions, no way would I want to be around if you allow them to do attempt the same in 3 !!!
There are plenty of private mass transit systems in the world, most notably in Japan, where the high population density is more favourable to mass transit. Some privatised London commuter rail lines (e.g. what used to be Thames Trains) also operate without subsidy.
Mass transit in the form of railways started off as private business. In the UK it remained that way until 1923 when amalgamations were forced (still private companies, though), and remained essentially private until nationalisation in 1948.
Today in Britain the railway companies are privatised (but not the track). Many bus companies are wholly or largely privately owned, a change from the relatively recent past when they were completely owned by local governments. Public transport is perfectly possible (and profitable) in private hands.
EG