Comment by decimalenough
7 days ago
It's an order of magnitude easier and cheaper to dig out a 6-car platform the first time around than to expand from 3 to 6 when the system is already operational. And it's a one-off price too: if the platform is built but not used, it incurs essentially no operating costs to have it sit there waiting for the day it's needed.
Everything you said is completely orthogonal to my statement: "It's quite a lot easier to sell a huge monetary upgrade on something oversubscribed rather than a huge monetary outlay that may be a complete white elephant."
A better solution that no one has the political will to implement is inferior to every solution that can actually be implemented.
Or rather politics often results in the implementation of technically inferior solutions. Sometimes the best solution is to do nothing and wait until the political will catches up to reality. Then you will be lambasted for not having acted sooner, but at least it will be done.
The political will catches up a lot faster (if at all) when there's a practical demonstration of the thing to be achieved.
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I think one solution is to embed a self-adjusting feedback mechanism into the transit fee.
- If the rush hour contines to get more crowded, the transit fee would raise until people avoid commuting on peak hours.
- If the rush hour disappears, the extra premium fee would fall to zero.
It is not unrealistic as it sounds; JR East (the biggest railway operator in Japan) recently introduced "Off-peak Commuter Pass", which is 1) 15% cheaper than a normal pass 2) and cannot be used between 7:30 - 9:00 AM.
So they are beginning to implement a dynamic policy based on how crowded their trains are.
I don't think that public transportation should strive to price out people of lesser means to fix demand vs supply problems. That's what Uber is for.
Of course it's fine to give people an incentive to ride outside of peak hours if they can, but demand is not that elastic, because of daily rhythms and how interconnected they are. Raising prices until you have removed the last option a lot of people have to get around, just so that others can enjoy their ride more, will remove a lot of opportunities from the economy.
I'd also be interested to know if the slack introduced by people moving their travel to off-peak times is not immediately taken up by others again, in the way that widening a congested road often just allows more cars to be congested at the same time. (Edit: Which can still be a good thing, especially for public transportation, because I'd argue that giving more utility to more people is its mission.)
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It's not. These things become single point of failure for a city by the time these problems arise, and just can't be upgraded or replaced no matter the cost because they can't afford to take it offline for extended periods. "Too expensive" in these cases are just euphemism and technical disclaimer for something impossible.