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Comment by Osiris | Hacker News Reader

I think the 10 year estimate is a bit optimistic. Public transportation construction projects can easily take 10+ years from planning to construction to completion.

The California High Speed Rail project, for example, is estimated to take 18 years just for construction, not including all the planning time it took just to get to this point.

My personal opinion is that in areas with high traffic, car registration fees (or gas taxes) should be increased dramatically and the fees should be used to provide public transportation. Public transit should only charge fees as a means of controlling the number of people using the system (in other words, as low as possible to maximize usage but high enough to reduce overcrowding).

In other words, make people that want to drive subsidize public transit. This would encourage fewer people to own or drive cars and push them to the less expensive public transit.

It's all a matter of incentives.

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Public construction in the US is about an order of magnitude slower and more expensive than in the rest of the world.

Citation please.

US transit construction costs about ten times as much and takes about five to ten times as long as construction in Spain and Korea. Everyplace else falls somewhere in between, but most are much closer to the Spanish and Korean levels than ours.

http://streetsblog.net/2012/08/29/why-are-american-infrastru...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-26/u-s-taxpayers-are-g...

http://www.humantransit.org/2010/12/quote-of-the-week-transi...

I like this link: http://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-ra...

NYC costs are very high, they should be more in line with London at least.

Which pushes people to mass transit, lowers overall consumption of gasoline, decreases revenue from car registration and gas taxes and bankrupts the transit system.

Edit #1: I'm being intentionally glib, but the point is that it's not as simple as "raise taxes" or "take the bus."

Edit #2: I'd love to hear a counterpoint instead of just downvotes. Please explain to me how the spirit of what I said is incorrect.

The downvotes confuse me too. During the recent great recession, areas around Seattle saw a large increase in bus riders and a big drop in gas tax revenues. So agencies and politicians began raising bus fees and gas taxes to make up for the lost income.

Your statement makes the assumption that this will happen quickly, which it will not. It will likely take decades to incentivize people to move from cars to mass transit and other systems. As they do, taxes and budgets will be modified to reflect the current state of affairs.

For example, I suggested to use gas and vehicle taxes to subsidize public transport to push people toward using mass transit options. Obviously as that transition occurs, prices on mass transit tickets will increase to stabilize demand, and the revenue burden will shift for a subsidy by car owners to mass transit riders paying for their tickets.

Since the transition will take a long time, laws and budgets will change to reflect the new norm.

To stephengillie's point (since I can't reply), fees for mass transit should not be viewed as revenue generators but as means to restrict demand for a limited supply. In other words, the price on mass transit should be as low as possible (even free) to attract as much usage as possible, only using the price to restrict demand when too many people are trying to use the system. I truely believe that this type of pricing model would push a LOT of people toward mass transit.

As an example, here in Denver, CO we have a light rail. It costs (for me) $4.50 each way to downtown Denver. I can find parking in downtown for as cheap as $5 (if I want to walk a bit) to $10. It literally takes long as costs just as much to ride light rail as to just drive. Where's the incentive? If the light rail were $1-$2 per ride, then hell yes I'd use it.

For the most part, rail travel is private industry in the US - that means it has to make a profit. Obviously if you make something very cheap or free you're going to have a lot more people willing to use it. It will also cease to exist as a private enterprise very quickly.

I don't want to make this solely a political point, but it's a hard sell to convince me that it's inherently good to incentivize mass transit in the first place, let alone that it should be nationalized by default and offered below cost or for free.

The biggest argument for incentivizing mass traffic is that private car usage is heavily incentives in the United States. Gasoline taxes don't even come close to paying for the primary cost of roads, let alone the secondary external costs. Subsidies for mass transit would be much more palatable to the voting public than $20/gallon gasoline and toll roads everywhere.

I agree that 10 years is much too optimistic for most places, but I think it's possible. I wasn't looking towards public transportation directly, actually, in my assumption of how this is going to be solved. Rather, I think a much bigger event will be large networks of self-driving cars. Maybe Sao Paulo will "never" see them, but plenty of cities will, and those cars will do wonders in solving congestion issues.

Combine self-driving cars with increased and improved public transport, and I'd bet a few large cities have it all solved on the 10-ish year timeframe. As far as the California High Speed Rail project...well, that's not how to solve the problem. At least not in my opinion.

I still think 10 years is optimistic. We are still years away from production, self-driving cars, and the majority of people will have to upgrade to them, which, alone, will take 10 years from the point self-driving cars become affordable.

As much as I want it, I don't think it will have much of an impact on my commuting life. I'll likely be about to retire before the impact is really felt.

Public transit fees should not be a means of restricting usage. Crowded public transit isn't a sign that the fees are too low, but that the capacity needs to be increase. Granted it's not always possible to increase capacity overnight, but it's the best way to scale transportation. Higher fees just means poorer people can move around less, while for richer people the car just got relatively cheaper compared to public transit.

He didn't say that public transit fees should be raised to restrict usage, just the opposite, in fact. He said that public transport should be subsidized by car registration fees. This means cars get more expensive for rich people and poor people can move around more.

He did say all that, which I agree with entirely, but he also said public transit fees should be "high enough to reduce overcrowding".

The point I was trying to get across is that currently public/mass transit is priced to generate REVENUE. In cases where a light rail system is in the red, they try to "solve" this issue by INCREASING the price to generate revenue, which is the wrong thing to do.

They should start with free, then go up from there to the point in which the system's capacity and ridership are equal. So a busy system like the BART in S.F. may still be $8/round trip (what I used to pay), while light rail in Denver would be free or close it because almost no one uses the system.

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