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ChineseDaily Transit Links Roundup
Contributed by Fred Camino on April 25th, 2008 at 10:40 am
- High gas prices cause people to give up more and more of their own lives to pay for their car. Drive to work and work to drive
- People are getting scared about the end of free freeways.
- A 70-year woman experiences the car-free life for the first time, and makes some startling revelations.
- Metro rejects cuts of Tier 1 bus service.
- Dodger Stadium is getting a facelift, but will transit play a part?
- Awesome: Hipsters ride Amtrak’s free Coachella Express to the Indio rock festival
Discussion
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Please keep discussions civil: exercise Troll Controll.
Glad to hear the bus service cuts were rejected.
Glad to hear the acknowledgment that “freeways” aren’t really free.
How sad for anyone holding onto that car for dear life, so God forbid, you don’t have to be one of “those people” riding the bus.
Dodger Stadium — Let’s revive the Silver Line.
Coachella — Woo hoo. Sounds like a party.
Re the second link, the article is cynically titled “Another Hand Reaches for Your Wallet.” They could have mentioned all the other hands that reach for the wallets of car owners: gas, registration, insurance, maintenance, fuzzy dice…
But those are things you want! I mean seriously how radical is INSURANCE!!!!!!! I gotta get me sum of dat.
Public transportation is more expensive that driving? Well that’s a new one. If they don’t want to pay the toll, why can’t they drive in mixed flow traffic to Pasadena, drop off the kids in Pasadena (seriously, why the hell can’t the kids go to school near home), have some people take the Gold Line downtown, and then get the car to continue to Glendale? This is just radical isn’t it?
PT more expensive than driving, where do people come up with these things?
Also, that first article just shows what happens when driving is slowly phased out of a city that is oriented around the automobile. Things are only going to get worse before they get better for people who don’t want to break the habit.
Here’s one for you….
An essay written by Carolyn See that was in today’s L.A. Times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-see25apr25,0,7072146.story
“L.A. without wheels: Living car-less in Los Angeles is living by your wits.”
Everyone knows public transportation is far more expensive than driving. We just choose not to charge the users for public transit and choose to overcharge users of private transport. Note very carefully the wording. There is no judgement weighting in those two observations. They are just observations. For example we don’t charge children for attending public school but no one claims the public schools are free.
So the cost of freeways, gas, maintenance, roads, licensing, pollution, insurance, collisions, etc., not to mention the price of the car itself, all combined are cheaper than the true cost of transit? I just don’t see how that’s possible. And that’s not going into congestion and efficiency.
I’ll give you this, in some rural town, cars would be so much better that no one would consider transit, and they don’t for good reason. You’re saying that LA is not at the level yet where transit is not more efficient and cheaper than freeway expansion?
Yes, all combined much cheaper. Why is this even an issue? It is not anti-transit to state the facts. It is damaging to transit advocacy to misstate the facts and subsequently get caught.
I understand the vague claims of externalities like “congestion” and pollution.” You need to understand that they are called externalities precisely because they cannot be assigned.
That’s just ludicrous. Auto-math.
In 2005 there were 7,136,393 registered vehicles in Los Angeles County.
According Edmunds (a web site about buying cars), the total cost of owning a $10,000 used car for 5-years is $18,390. This cost includes insurance, maintenance, and DMV fees. No external costs are included. This comes out to a cost of $3,678 per year.
Information on Consumer Spending from the U.S. Department of Labor[PDF] shows that the average American consumer spends $4,352 per year on “Gasoline and Motor Oil” and “Other Vehicle Expenses”… the cost of purchasing the vehicle is not included in that amount, nor are any external costs.
To be kind we’ll use the lower number, $3678, from Edmunds. Multiplying that number by the $7,136,393 registered cars in Los Angeles, we get $26,247,653,454. Yeah, 26 billion dollarz. A year. Not counting road costs, external costs, and assuming that everyone is buying $10,000 used cars (HA!).
Metro’s operating budget this year is $3,126,000,000. We could build 3 subways to the sea and still it still wouldn’t cost as much as the 7 million drivers spent on their cars.
If Los Angeles County has 10 million people, it would cost each person $312 a year to cover the cost of public transportation. It would cost each person $2,624 a year to cover the costs of 7 million cars.
A monthly transit pass would have to cost $300 for the personal financial cost of transit to come close to personal financial cost of auto ownership.
I just can’t help but snark at the Dodgers item …
Q: Why is developing around the stadium a bad idea?
A: Diners would leave before dessert is served.
And serve an additional 1/2 of 1% of the people in cars.
LAMTA in 2006 provided 1,979,256,343 passenger miles at a cost of $1,611,834,485 that’s 81¢ per passenger mile.
Using your higher $4,352 per year on “Gasoline and Motor Oil” and “Other Vehicle Expenses” that works out to 25¢ per passenger mile.
Where is the cost of the vehicle in that number? Along with insurance and the cost of collisions?
Tony, that’s an annualized figure. It includes everything. Why is this so hard? Transit costs between 3 and 4 times as much per passenger mile as POV travel despite self selecting for the most cost effective tiny segment of the panoply of all transport.
Personally I’m looking at a number closer to 32¢ /pass mi for POVs and 93¢ for transit with an addendum. Transit is running up against a new infrastructure deficit and few low cost options being advocated.
Diesel is running $3.80/gal (no taxes remember) and buses get 4mpg. LACMTA buses run an average 12 passenger loading. Gas is running $3.80 and POVs get 20mpg. SoCal POVs run an average 1.57 passenger loading. Save money? Save energy?
As Fred said, the cost of purchasing a vehicle is not included in that number. I don’t understand what you’re trying to do.
I understand that transit advocates usually favor congestion pricing for private vehicles, but why people aren’t being more critical of this freeway toll plan since it targets the HOV carpool lane? My understanding of the plan is that solo drivers who want to use the carpool lane can do so for a fee that varies depending on the day’s congestion.
Drivers who don’t want to pay are still able to sit in the same traffic that they do now. But allowing non-carpoolers into the HOV will only create more traffic in these lanes (which aren’t exactly flying along at rush hour either). In turn, this further dilutes the benefits of carpooling. Drivers may just opt to pay the toll rather than rideshare with friends, and suddenly even more vehicles are back on the road. If the goal is to encourage alternatives, shouldn’t the congestion pricing apply to the entire freeway?
These toll lanes will be two lanes wide, and from what I hear, the Metro board is considering those cars with 3 people or more to go in for free.
Rob, externalities are assignable, and calculating the marginal cost of congestion for any one vehicle is not that hard. Go back and read your Coase, or just a decent intermediate microeconomics textbook.
neat. metro’s operating budget for the year is about as much as 9 days of the iraq war.
who took the picture of the viewliner?? i just finished my yearly cross country amtrak trip and spent alot of time in the lounge car.
Who cares? Yes, the more miles a POV is driven, the more cost effective it is. Yes, the fewer people who ride public transit, the less cost effective it is.
But using cost per mile is silly. Let’s say I live close to work, so I decide to be a wierdo and walk to work instead of drive. My round trip commute is 1 mile. I walk to work every single day of the year, for a total of 365 miles. If I spend $200 on shoes, socks, and other things that I need to walk… the cost per mile of walking is 54¢. So walking is more expensive than driving (at 32¢ per mile), right?
Very Light Jets will be the future of transportation, with an affordable price of $1.5 million dollars. It’s estimated that at that price, flying your own private jet will cost $1 per mile. But we can imagine that technology will rapidly lower the price of these jets, and if the price drops to $750,000 owning your own private jet could be less expensive than walking!!!
All you’ve proven here is that even with lower fuel effeciency and running at quarter capacity buses are a cheaper and more energy efficient way of moving many people.
To move 12 people 20 miles would require 6 POV’s at a passenger load of 2 (higher than the SoCal average you stated). If each of those cars uses a gallon of gas at $3.80, the total comes out to $22.80 (or $1.90 per person). To move 12 people 20 miles on a bus would require 5 gallons of diesel, at $3.80 per gallon, for a total of $19 (or $1.58 per person). If we could increase bus ridership to have an average load of 22 people (half-capacity), the cost per person would go down to 86¢. If we increase the average load in a POV to half-capacity (2.5 people), the cost per person would be $1.52.
Now you see why we promote transit ridership, the more people who ride the more efficient it gets. If ridership drops to an average of 8 passengers per load, then we’re in trouble.