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This is similar to my philosophy on mass transit. If the goal is taking vehicles off the road (and reducing car ownership), then having every bus/train full (in order to maximize fares etc) is a failure. In order to be as convenient as a car, you have to run the nearly-empty seats at 3AM. If this requires automation or grade separation or quadruple-tracking or multiple unit cars, so be it, but it has to be available in order to replace cars. And ideally, so long as it's using high-efficiency electric motors, it should ENCOURAGE ridership, by not giving regular riders a per-ride fare to pay. DC Metro does not have a monthly unlimited-ride pass, and that frustrates me.
More liberal countries have mass transit systems that we can only dream of, and sometimes even do it free - IMO profit has been a somewhat corrupting influence over here(as compared to the heavily subsidized airports and roads). If a subsidized mass transit system costs 1 billion a year to run, and gets back 200 million in fares from 10 million riders(w/ the balance in subsidies) - we really need to look at what would happen if we reduces fares to zero. If 30 million riders still cost the same 1 billion dollars (no fare-collection inefficiency, much fuller seats, and a few vehicles added to peak times)... Somebody has to ask themselves - is increasing the budget by 25% and reducing the number of cars on the road worthy of attempting that course?
Alan, do you know of any systems that fit this description?
Toll roads (ones which are actually required to pay for themselves) can be quite unpopular. Tokyo has a giant, spectacular bridge/tunnel into the bay that remains little-used all day because of the $30 toll(which was reduced from $50(where the bridge was completely empty) after firing the guy that coordinates income estimates with traffic flow estimates, who made a $12B mistake) - free roads have the opposite effect. I posit that this effect is seen in transit as well, and that maximizing profit is a distinctly different course than trying to reduce traffic & car ownership.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying here -- I can never understand why people in LA constantly complain about traffic while at the same time the MTA has to raise fares because it is so underfunded. Make transit FREE and it could have a lot more impact on traffic.
No. Make transit FREE and it will become so infested with vagrants and gangbangers that no regular citizen will dare to ride it except maybe at the height of the rush hour, and maybe not even then. The Staten Island Railway has had problems of this sort for years, ever since they stopped collecting fares except at the ferry (last, northernmost stop). IIRC we discussed this issue here a week or two ago, in connection with one of the European cities.
What about a system similar to aircraft now?
Economy (near free), and Business (the bulk of the train), so that commuters can buy their way away from most of the vagrants.
The new Dubai Metro will have three car trains.
One for women and children, one "VIP" with leather seats and one Economy car.
AFAIK, the only "class" system Urban Rail.
Alan
It still leaves the problem of intimidation and muggings at the stations. And subsidized buses and railcars are a hellishly expensive way to provide free heat and A/C for the vagrants and gangbangers.
And anyway, with the cost of energy going ever upward, it seems very, very foolish to subsidize energy-intensive services, especially when the subsidized purpose - riding around and around for no reason at all - is no purpose at all.
In Sweden, sometimes the social services pay the bus fare for homeless people so they can ride a bus all night during winter.
Hello PaulS,
We have free buses here in Chapel Hill, NC. It's a college town so if every college student drove it would overwhelm the road system. The bus is free. There are all kinds of people that use the buses: Students and UNC workers, families with children, some homeless, mexican workers...perhaps because this is a small town that it works. Even grade school students use it. There is also a carrier for bikes so you can use your bike and take it with you. We have a good bicycle pathway system which is improving year to year. It works for us.
"...perhaps because this is a small town that it works. Even grade school students use it." Yes indeed.
In bigger places, many parents will not allow their grade school kids to walk anywhere on their own, much less use a city bus on their own, even though IMO the objective risk in the cases I see is much less than it was where and when I grew up doing things like that. But times have changed - these days, putting the kids on a city bus might almost be counted as reckless endangerment. Even if it doesn't earn a hostile visit from Social Services, it will draw the opprobrium of aunts and uncles, of friends and neighbors. So the kids get chauffeured to and from school, or, failing that, a parent (usually the mother, it seems) waits with them every morning at the school bus stop, and waits again every afternoon until the school bus arrives.
This may be a symptom of a larger issue as Mike M downthread posits, but all the same, it is what parents do. And, after all, once in a blue moon something bad does indeed happen. When it does, it's hyped up in scary bright yellow lettering on freeway signs, and retold endlessly in breathless TV reports, all across the entire country. Under those circumstances, and after more than 40 years of the "consumer" movement browbeating people and scaring them out of their wits about even the most utterly insignificant risks, parents will not be handling the issue differently anytime soon.
I lived in Austin Texas when they did a 1 year no fare experiment. generally considered a failure. Homeless rode to get free a/c and heat and napped in the back. Gangs of kids rode just to do something and were rowdy. "Choice" riders (those that owned a car) dropped.
Miami's gadgetbahn, the MetroMover, went fare free a few years ago with minimal problems. Perhaps because it is an elevated system connecting downtown office buildings.
Portland has a "fareless square" that seems to work OK, (some conflict with rowdy kids etc. riding and some related crime).
DC Metro does not have an unlimited ride pass because it would encourage more ridership and they are capacity limited. They want to allocate that capacity to the highest use (off peak fares are cheap, peak expensive).
My priorities would be a well built, well maintained and clean system first, and subsidized fares second. Targeted DEEP discounts for handicapped, elderly (off hours at least), children, disabled, those on food stamps, etc. is a better approach IMHO than broad based cheap to everyone.
New Orleans has free rides to all handicapped residents and school children going to school, and 60% discounts for elderly for example.
Alan
Seniors ride the Seoul subway for free. They go to the ticket window for a free ticket and the start of each ride. Seems like a good idea - driving in Seoul can be tough at any age, and it helps give seniors a little more independence and one less financial worry. It would be good to see the AARP and their non-American equivalents push for this; maybe they already are.
Alan It would seem to me that the issue of "muggings" and "rowdies" is a symptom of a bigger issue than the transportation of a "displaced car using society". I do think that as we move forward we need to seriously re-think why we need to move around so much. The whole notion of "Time is Money" seems to be at the root of much of this issue. I do think that a return to a more intergrated and improved rail system for the transport of required goods and services is needed. When the "Disaster Capitalists" see a way to make more money than they are currently making in places like Iraq, New Orleans, Atlanta, Sri Lanka, etc then you will see a return of the rails courtesy of KBR, Halliburton, CH2M Hill, Lockheed Martin, et al and they will use the same taxpayers money that have been using all along.
Check out the book The shock Doctrine by "Naomi Klein" to get a more complete picture of the way I see it developing.
Vouchers could always be provided to those that are too poor to afford the transport fares that they legitimately need. We do the same thing now with food stamps and other things. The vouchers could be configured to enable people to get where they really need to go, while not being enough to just give people with anti-social behavior issues unlimited free rides.
Alternatively, we could provide free passes to everyone subject to revocation for criminal, rowdy, other anti social behavior, or using the transit vehicle as a way of loitering.
Regardless, there are many people who are just offended by having to share any form of transportation with those who don't rise to their class standards. Taking the bus is just simply beneath most people as it is associated with the transit choice of the poor and non white.
When push comes to shove and people have no choice, lives will be re-arranged to accommodate what the transport industry is capable of offering.
I have heard so many times the refrain, "Oh, but people are not going to be willing to give up their cars."
When having a car is simply no longer viable, they will be given up in spite of the inconvenience of using whatever the locally prevailing best option is.
In 1970, public buses had 4% of commuters in Washington DC,
Last year more people took public transit to work in DC than drove alone in their cars & SUVs. (Cars with 1 or more people still outnumber transit pax).
I use that as proof that people can be lured out of their cars by reasonably good (not great) Urban Rail.
Best Hopes for Better and More Urban Rail,
Alan
http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/04/11/when-cheap-housing-...
April 11, 2008, 2:23 pm
When Cheap Housing Isn’t: How Transportation Changes the Equation
Posted by Keith Johnson
Ana Campoy reports:
I've recently noticed that in Asheville NC they have an Emergency Ride Home program.
This program makes wonderfully good sense, and should be a real "winner" when it comes to encouraging people to consider alternatives to driving for their daily commute.
I am so impressed with this idea, I wish I could research it further and develop it into an article for TOD:Local, but I'm afraid I just don't have the time.
Subsidies are bad. The effect here in Sweden from subsidized mass transit and heavily taxed gasoline is that as oil has risen in price, the ticket price for mass transit has risen a lot faster than the gasoline at the pump, due to the leverage.
Assume fuel costs being 33%, wages 33% and capital costs (the buses and stations etc) 33%. Close enough to reality.
If the bus company get 75 SEK for every customer, and 25 SEK from the customer (roughly correct figures) and the price of diesel at the pump increases by 10%, but not the subsidy, then the bus company need to increase the ticket price by 3.3 SEK or 13.2%.
But the driver of a car has costs where fuel is only 20-25% of the total cost of the car per mile. A 10% increase in the cost of diesel (or gasoline) will only increase what he pays per mile by 2%.
So what has happened in Sweden as the fuel price has risen, is that the cost of mass transit has risen more than the price of gasoline. If a driver only looks at the cost of fuel, and ignores service, insurance, capital costs etc (which many do), they immediately see that mass transit has risen more than car fuel, so they stick to their cars.
Subsidized mass transit is doomed.
And anyway, the politicians does not want to pay more to mass transit. Sometimes they have "free mass transit day" here in Sweden, but they won't increase the number of busses, so you end up with a full bus and people being left at the bus stop, cursing. If it even stops, might just drive past unless someone is getting off.
I really don't see any solution, unless we see oil in four figures, which I belive we will eventually. But then the solution won't be mass transit, it will be massive unemployment so fewer people will go to work.
Unfortunately once a government subsidized transit system is implemented you are doomed to a high cost monopoly. Now that BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) in San Francisco California, has a strangle hold on the Bay Area the union monopoly wants a total compensation per person of about $125,000 per year. This for train operators whose only job is to prevent the doors from trying to close if someone is standing in it. The trains were designed to run fully automated, but the union insists that thousands of employes are needed to keep it “safe”.
A monopoly by any other name is still a monopoly.
The reason they are striking for that much total compensation is that you need a salary that large to buy a house in Silicon Valley, or to rent an apartment for that matter. My sister ran an apartment complex ten years ago and she simply wouldn't rent to anybody that didn't have a family income of 65 thousand, which means a total compensation of 90 thousand, which is counting taxes and benefits. I understand that this seems high to you, but it really is expensive real estate around here.
The union isn't going to get the raise though. We're broke, we are running very large deficits statewide. Figure on a rollback in salaries as soon as house prices go back to normal.
You have touched on reasons why both government and corporate ownership and operation of toll goods does not work very well. The corporations just want to maximize profits, which means jam-packed mass transit during peak hours and no service at all when and where the riders are few. Governments tend to either pour in subsidies to the systems (resulting in better service when and where riders are few) but creating a black hole in their budgets, or they end up having to starve their systems in order to milk them for revenues to subsidize other projects and programs.
There is a better alternative, but to my knowledge it has rarely if ever been tried anywhere: public ownership of toll goods.
By public ownership, I mean that the toll good (mass transit system in this case) is owned and operated by a board of trustees, directly elected by the population of the service district and NOT appointed by the government. This point is crucial. Only by having the trustees b eing directly elected do you establish an effective feedback loop to assure that the right balance is maintained between fare prices and service extent and quality. If fares are rising too high, people have another alterntive than just driving their cars - they can vote for trustees that will run the system more efficiently and lower fares. If service quality is getting too poor and inconvenient, people have another alternative than just driving their cars - they can vote for trustees that will improve service quality, extend lines out to serve more people, and extend service schedules.
This is the only sure answer I know of to the problems you raise. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to make it happen. Obviously, corporations hate this and want everyone to think it is the most evil thing in the world. Less obviously, governments and politicians also hate this, because it reduces their power a little. The only ones that might like this are the ordinary people that have to continue to suffer, but we all know how much THEY (we) count.