Comments on: the 63% solution

By: Seven

Seven — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 23:29:12 +0000

Actually, 511.org does give me a slightly faster route (save 7 minutes each way) by using Samtrans ($3/day) instead of the free Burlingame Shuttle.

So, is it worth saving 14 minutes per day for $3? Maybe.

My solution is to save a whole lot more time by driving.

By: miked

miked — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 22:38:26 +0000

For a moment I had the same thought about the strike. Then I realized that I don’t own a car and I was very afraid of how slow buses would be in the train-less traffic.

By: Capricious Commuter

Capricious Commuter — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:18:05 +0000

Bite your tongue, Fritz! I hate driving I-80 enough without the thought of all those train commuters out there too. Besides, it’s a new month tomorrow and I’m going to get a new monthly pass and settle back into the train routine. Now if they would just get wi-fi…

By: Fritz

Fritz — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:14:22 +0000

I halfway wished the Amtrak strike would have happened just so we can see what adding 40,000 more people to Hwy 101 and 280 would have done to the commute.

By: Capricious Commuter

Capricious Commuter — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 19:41:19 +0000

Seven, how did you arrive at the 28 Bus-Bart-Shuttle combination? Did you use 511.org? I’m wondering if there might be a faster way by eliminating BART.

By: Seven

Seven — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 19:35:02 +0000

My commute: San Francisco to Burlingame = 27 minutes driving or 95 minutes Muni to BART to Burlingame Shuttle. That 95 minutes is quite variable depending on the very erratic Muni 28 bus.

By: DensityDuck

DensityDuck — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 16:29:19 +0000

Miked, I’d be happy to ride transit if it didn’t take 50% longer than the longest commute I’ve ever had as a solo driver. I’d go by the VTA Light Rail, which takes you through downtown San Jose whether you need to go there or not.

By: miked

miked — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 19:02:12 +0000

The Onion article is great because it illustrates hypocrisy and an interesting economics problem.

People want other people to ride transit but don’t want to ride it themselves. Many economists I know would respond by asking how much they want other people to ride transit, meaning how much are they willing to pay for other people to ride transit. This is exactly what happens when transit is subsidized- the general public pays people to take transit by reducing the needed fare for transit.

I know all the car drivers hate the idea of paying to drive, but this is the logic for congestion pricing in areas where there is a viable transit alternative. When you set a congestion price, the people paying to drive are also paying other people to take transit. It seems to work in London with the Tube and it may work in New York if Bloomberg has his way. I would be interested to see what happens in bus-dominated cities such as San Francisco and Rome if they had a congestion price. People don’t like to take the slow bus, but the bus will get a lot faster if the charge reduces traffic.

Mike

PS- Capricious Commuter, thanks for refiguring the costs. Would it be difficult to consider what share of taxpayer money went to transit vs roads for driving? I know this would miss many costs like police, pollution, and war in Iraq, but it would still bring the 63% figure closer to a fair comparison.

By: Eric Schatmeier

Eric Schatmeier — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:55:32 +0000

Even if the numbers weren’t fallacious, the “imbalance” is justified because the auto’s infrastructure is already at full build-out (despite boondoggles like the Bay Bridge project) while transit’s infrastructure has been systematically dismantled over the years. Transit carries a small percentage of travellers only because transit is still impractical or unavailable for many in the Bay Area. And despite the seemingly high percentage for transit, the level of investment is still pathetically small, especially compared to the overwhelming need.
Related to this, I’d like also to comment on a view of history contained in some of your responses and elsewhere. This is the view that, despite all the “investment” in transit over the past 25 years, Bay Area ridership hasn’t increased. History is not so simple, however, because the “investment” has been uneven, at best. Huge expenditures have been made in upgrading BART and Caltrain over that time and BART carries nearly three times as many daily riders today as it did in 1982, while Caltrain’s ridership is more than 2-1/2 times what it was, even though the trains still don’t go to downtown San Francisco. By contrast, services offered by such systems as Golden Gate and AC Transit are a shadow of what they were then, having undergone almost constant service cut/fare increase cycles that sapped growth and ridership. What we’ve learned from this is not that investment is wasted. Instead we’ve learned that if we make bad transit worse, we lose riders. If, on the other hand, we make bad transit mediocre, we get enormous gains. Just imagine the benefit if the level of investment provided the resources for GOOD transit. Whatever the percentage of transportation funds invested in transit, we’re nowhere near that level.

By: Bruce De Benedictis

Bruce De Benedictis — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 17:54:53 +0000

No, depreciation is counted in transit expenditures. Their budgets include the cost of acquisition, maintenance, disposal, and replacement of capital assets, which is depreciation. It all gets averaged in.

Of course, there is no depreciation in right-of-way, just in the improvements made to it. Actually, that is an interesting subject in street construction. Most new streets are not paid for from public funds, as we have been discussing them. They are put in by developers, and added to the price of the properties when they are sold. That expense becomes a private tax on the properties in the development, which is not reflected in the MTC budget.

The darn Translink will be the same as FasTrak, if they ever get it working correctly. Until then, it is worse!