Comment by darksaints | Hacker News Reader

Comment by darksaints | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

From a transportation standpoint, this is far more nefarious than people recognize at first glance. Cars and transit are economic substitutes: if you make one cheaper, you take users from the other. That much is a given, but people underestimate the impact this has on transit finances.

Transit is mostly a fixed cost business (step-fixed cost technically). That means that the marginal rider brings marginal revenue, but no additional costs. Transit operations have a break-even point: when you have X riders, you break even. Anything more is pure profit, and anything less is a negative cash flow.

When you rob transit of customers by subsidizing cars, you make transit less sustainable. Subsidizing cars literally means you'll end up subsidizing transit too. The opposite is true, and it's provable: Transit is dramatically more profitable in countries where driving is less subsidized. It was wildly profitable in the US too, before we started subsidizing cars.

The answer to getting more transit funding isn't to pay more in general fund taxes or fares, it is actually to tax road users. Tax road users appropriately, and transit will have more more users, more revenues, and little to no increase in costs. A 5% reduction in car use could double transit ridership nationwide. Oh, and our roads will have more maintenance funding, less congestion, and less wear and tear. A win-win if there ever was one.

People don't use mass transit when the density is too low for it. That happens more as a result of zoning than fuel costs, because fuel costs money but mass transit costs time. When you raise (long-term) fuel costs people mostly just buy more fuel efficient cars rather than driving less. Whereas if you increase housing density then you have more passengers per unit area and can increase mass transit frequency, which makes it more convenient, which causes more people to actually use it, which allows you to have even more frequent service etc.

The way to make mass transit work is to make mass transit better, not to make driving worse. Nobody wants something which is worse than what they already have.

But the best way to make mass transit better is often to give it exclusive use of space (aka bus lanes) and drivers moan endlessly when that happens.

That's because you're taking away space (i.e. making driving worse) in a way which is incredibly inefficient. You have an entire lane dedicated to a bus that only travels in it a dozen times a day.

It also has failure built into the mechanism, because it only "works" by making the bus lane better relative to driving, which is only effective when there is heavy congestion in the car lanes. Which means it's impossible for it to relieve that congestion or else it would lose its effectiveness. Methods that require failure and inefficiency in order to operate are inherently ridiculous.

The best way to make mass transit better is to build taller buildings. Then you can run more trains and buses while still having them full, which means they arrive more frequently and you waste less time waiting for them, which means more people willingly choose to use them over driving.

The second best way (which is complementary) is to not charge mass transit fares. Then more people use it because it's cheaper, which again justifies more frequent service and reduces the inconvenience. Yet you're not making driving worse, you're making it better by allowing more people to willingly choose mass transit rather than being pressured into it with penalties, which reduces congestion for cars. You also save a huge pile of money for not needing a fare collection infrastructure, and improve privacy because it's all too common for transit payment systems to be coupled to movement tracking infrastructure (which you also then don't have to pay for either).

> That's because you're taking away space (i.e. making driving worse) in a way which is incredibly inefficient. You have an entire lane dedicated to a bus that only travels in it a dozen times a day.

It's more efficient, not less. Bus lanes don't get built for buses that only have 12 trips a day. They're typically for places that have 10 minute frequencies or better. At 10 minute frequencies, with standard 40 foot buses, the lane capacity is about equal. With 2 minute frequencies, a single bus lane has a capacity about four regular lanes.

Under peak loads, during rush hour, that lane is worth every second of inconvenience to drivers. If they would rather have an extra lane and 3,000 additional drivers on the road, they'll regret it.

> At 10 minute frequencies, with standard 40 foot buses, the lane capacity is about equal.

At 10 minute intervals at 40 MPH, you have 35200 feet -- more than six miles -- of empty lane between each bus. At a 15 foot car length and one car length between each car, you could fit more than a thousand cars in that lane instead of that one bus.

Even if every car has only one occupant and not one of the bus passengers are people who would have taken the bus if not for the bus lane, buses don't carry more than a thousand people, so you've reduced the carrying capacity of the road.

Using two minute intervals would still be consuming space that could fit hundreds of cars, so to be worthwhile you would have to have very large buses, they would have to be entirely full on every trip, and every passenger would have to displace a whole car, which is implausible because some people would have taken the bus either way and some cars would have had more than one occupant.

Moreover, if you would fill a bus every two minutes then you have enough density to justify operating a subway, in which case you still don't have a bus lane.

> People don't use mass transit when the density is too low for it.

Density is too low for it because driving is artificially cheap.

Density is too low because urban housing is artificially expensive.

> People don't use mass transit when the density is too low for it.

This isn't quite right. There are many reasons people use public transit besides convenience (poverty, disability, inebriation). My home town is very spread out (1000 per square mile) and many of its buses run only every hour or two. This doesn't mean there are no riders, it just means that people who can drive do.

Density impacts the costs of operating transit and makes it more cost effective to provide higher quality transit. Higher quality transit means more people will use that transit.

> Nobody wants something which is worse than what they already have.

I want something better than what we have, which is walk-able city centers and less space wasted on mandatory parking. Just because driving has been subsidized for decades doesn't mean we can't stop subsidizing driving and shift that money to subsidizing mass transit instead.

> There are many reasons people use public transit besides convenience (poverty, disability, inebriation).

Sure, but those aren't really helpful ways to increase ridership. Increasing the number of people with a disability or promoting poverty or alcoholism in order to increase use of mass transit is not a reasonable plan even if it would be effective.

> I want something better than what we have, which is walk-able city centers and less space wasted on mandatory parking.

Mandatory parking is indeed very stupid. If there isn't enough parking then people will build more. There is no legitimate reason to mandate it by law.

Yep. With California’s for all its environmentally table pounding, I still can’t get from LA to Palm Springs by train.

Sounds to me like another coastal hippie who hates the middle class.

Literally we're in the middle of this fight right now in Canada with carbon taxes. The right wing party is losing their mind over a 4c/L price hike on gasoline even though there was an upfront rebate before the tax kicked in this summer. Check out the madness: https://arealplan.ca/about-our-plan/#failedTrudeauCarbonTax

So we know where we need to go. What's the sane political path that gets us there?

Canada is doing it the best way that I know how. Calculate the funding gap that is made up by general fund taxes, charge it directly via road use taxes or gas taxes, and then allocate the general fund savings to everybody in the form of a tax refund.

Then you have to sell it, and that's where Canada doesn't seem to be doing it right. For the vast majority of road users, this would be a net win. For those that drive a lot of miles, to the point where it would not be a financial win, it's still a quality of life win: most of the cost is offset, and some of it goes towards reducing traffic and having better roads to drive on. Those points need to be hammered home. Hell, I'm mostly a tax-hating libertarian, but I'm practically begging for this.

I will agree that the current Liberal government really botched the messaging and rollout of this, but it's been immensely frustrating watching the opposition party go to down on it with bad-faith arguments and misinformation about how the tax is "costing Canadians".

And that doesn't even get into distractions like the provincial government in Ontario putting propaganda stickers on pumps and a tempest in a teapot about how sales tax is being charged after the carbon tax, and the sales tax is not also being rebated, therefore the whole thing is a giant fraud.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com