Comment by AnthonyMouse
21 hours ago
> In an alternate universe, public transport is run to compete with the car, and attracts all demographics. Day-to-day operations are un-subsidised, and therefore relatively expensive. It competes on value. People use it because it's a better experience than driving.
The problem with this in the US is that it's nearly impossible for the bus to be faster than a car without making the car slower on purpose, and the latter is the thing which is going to create the most opposition, because you're essentially screwing people over during the transition period -- which would take years if not decades.
In the meantime people still can't take the bus because the higher density housing that makes mass transit viable where they live hasn't been built yet etc., and as long as they're stuck in a car they're going to fight you hard if you try to make being stuck in a car even worse.
Meanwhile, cars are expensive. ~$500/mo for a typical car payment, another $100+ for insurance, another $100+ for gas, you're already at $8400+/year per vehicle before adding repairs and maintenance etc. For a two-car household that's more than 20% of the median household income. Make mass transit completely free and people start preferring the housing where mass transit is viable, which means more of it gets built, which is the thing you need to actually make it work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox
Switching a car lane to a bus lane actually makes the cars in the remaining lanes move faster.
Even in a dense city with no parking, it takes an unusually fast and frequent bus to compete with a brisk walk, and a heavy-rail subway to beat a fit or electric-assisted cyclist.
That's assuming you're only going a short distance. The average commute is around 15 miles. That's something like a five hour walk.
And the average commute duration is around 27 minutes. If you happened to live in one of the very few places in America where there even are 15 urban miles to cross, doing it at city bus speeds of under 10mph would be a catastrophic collapse in your standard of living.
1 reply →
> ~$500/mo for a typical car payment
There is another interesting US-centric perspective here. For some reason, US consumers feel the need to drive new or nearly-new cars.
$5000 can get you a reliable but unsexy used car. I think there is a sort of "Parkinson's law" of consumer spending at play, where financial outgoings will expand to match disposable income.
I also think there's a problem with fixed spend (e.g. car payment, insurance) vs per-trip spend. Per-trip costs are felt more.
A reason that public transport is often more popular in European cities because driving isn't even an option. There's literally nowhere to park. Even the rich need to get around, and this creates pressure to improve non-car transport from all sides.
> $5000 can get you a reliable but unsexy used car.
$5000 can get you a 10+ year old used car with 100,000+ miles on it and no warranty. That's fine if you know how to do repairs and maintenance yourself, because then you're buying a part from the internet with a low markup and installing it yourself instead of paying four times as much for someone else to do it. But not every knows how to do that, or has time, or knows how to tell if a used car with no warranty will be reliable before buying it. And if you plop $5000 down on something with no warranty and then have to scrap it after the first year because your $5000 car needs a $5500 new engine, you're not saving money.
There is also the matter of where used cars come from. You can get one for $5000 because someone paid $30,000 to buy it new ten years ago. If more people did that, fewer new cars are sold and then fewer enter the used market and used car prices go up. So you can buy a used car for $5000, but it's not possible for "most people" to do that because if they tried to, they would no longer be available for $5000.
> I also think there's a problem with fixed spend (e.g. car payment, insurance) vs per-trip spend. Per-trip costs are felt more.
Which is the problem with mass transit. You get in your car and it feels like it costs nothing, the only thing that changed is the gas gauge went down by half a tank and the odometer went up. Meanwhile the amortized cost was actually over $100. Then you go to get on the train and you immediately have to swipe your card and get a bill for $40, which feels like a lot for one trip.
Worse, the car is $100+ per trip only if you're amortizing the fixed costs, i.e. comparing to the alternative of not having a car at all. If the fixed costs of having the car are sunk, the incremental cost of the trip is maybe $15, and then when the train is $40, nobody with a car is saving money to take the train when they can.
Whereas if the train is $0, then it's "hey that goes right where I'm going this time and I don't have to buy gas". Which, if it happens often enough, means more people don't need a car to begin with.
> A reason that public transport is often more popular in European cities because driving isn't even an option.
Obviously if you make something unavailable then people use alternatives. But in the US it's the other way around -- half the population lives in the suburbs where there is no public transport, nor can there be because the density is too low.
So then you need to find ways to make public transit more attractive (like eliminating the fares) rather than making cars less attractive, because making cars less attractive is going to encounter major opposition from the people who have no available option other than to use cars.