When I was a kid I knew how to read a bus schedule and train map to plan my trip. Now, there is an entire generation of kids in school and Uber/Lyft is what they know.
Shouldn't it be the opposite?
I figure I can take 4 people from Mountain View to San Francisco and back for $20. Why does it cost $66 on Caltrain? (nevermind the costs of having to wait for trains, missing them, and transport from places the trains don't go)
Right now it's $322 to fly SFO to JFK for a trip of 5172 miles that's 3.1¢/mile. Compare a $8.25 trip Mountain view to San Francisco round trip at 20.6 ¢/mile. Are trains so inefficient that it's cheaper to fly than to ride?
Excuse me while I create a commuter airline between cities in the bay area.
A train is something like 10 times more fuel efficient per passenger. It's a much less complicated machine, and carries something like 10 times as many passengers per vehicle.
It's not reasonable that a train is more expensive. It doesn't have to accelerate to 550 mph 6 miles up. Piloting it doesn't require years and years of training. Compare SFO to your local caltrain station and tell me which one has a bigger impact on ticket price.
Just now, I decided to price a ticket from Delray Beach, Florida (where the closest Amtrak station is to my house) to Deland, Florida (a distance of 220 miles). By car (and my car, I mean, my car, which gets 30mpg), it's a total of six hours (three there, three back) and will cost me $45 in gas (assuming $3.00/gallon, which is a bit high right now). This is doable in one day (leave by 9:00 am, arrive around noon, leave at 6:00 pm, arrive home by 9:00 pm).
The same trip, by Amtrak, costs $96 (twice my gas costs), and is impossible to do in one day. The train leaves at 9:22 am, arrives at 2:39 pm (over five hours, but more on this below). The train back leaves at 1:02 pm and right there you should see the problem---I have to stay overnight, incurring more cost. But anyway, it leaves at 1:02 pm and arrives at 8:31 pm, taking over seven hours.
The departure times assume everything goes smoothly. My first real train trip [1] from Delray Beach to Kissimmee (not quite as far as Deland) was incredible (don't get me wrong), but the train from Kissimmee back to Delray Beach was over two hours late, and I was informed that that is a common occurrence for Amtrak (it not owning the track it runs on), but had it been on time, I would have only had about half an hour in Kissimmee. Had the train from Delray Beach been late, and the train from Kissimmee been on time, I would have missed my connection.
[1] http://boston.conman.org/2015/08/05 [2]
[2] I never did find out how much my friend paid for his trip, but I assume it was the price of a car.
Parking is usually very cheap and easy in most of the US due to public policy that mandates it in sufficient quantity to satisfy any possible demand at no cost to the driver, and that makes it illegal to construct new neighborhoods where parking is not cheap and easy.
That said, reducing fares might attract more riders -- but whether it would increase revenue overall is more questionable.
0: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://...
http://www.samtrans.com/Assets/_SSP/archives/2011/July_Open_...
Whereas, with public transit, far more of the costs are represented by the fare.
I did think about that, and I have. I briefly considered getting rid of my car to eliminate the cost of insurance and renting a parking space while working from home. It was at best break even to match my then current behavior with public transit and taxi-equivalents.
It seems about 40% of Caltrain is not covered by fares.
It's hard to find numbers, but it seems like as well something in the neighborhood of half of road costs are covered by gas taxes.
I'm trying to make the point that these costs aren't hidden and don't come from magic places, they seem to be real and Caltrain seems to be very inefficient compared to what one would expect.
One would expect a train capable of carrying hundreds of people would be orders of magnitude less expensive instead of being more or less at parity with one car per person.
http://www.caltrain.com/Fares/farechart.html
https://www.edmunds.com/toyota/corolla/2017/st-401668011/cos...
A small car that drives anywhere near that distance will cost >$5K/yr
And the most magicky auto costs are the ones hidden a few layers deep, in our city design & abundance of parking for example.
If you change your thought-experiment to a paid service, good luck being cheaper than CalTrain.
This doesn't really make sense. My original point is that for me personally going alone, it is cheaper to drive than to use public transit. If I bring friends it is _much_ cheaper.
At this moment I could take a CalTrain to SF for $33/person or a 4 person UberX to SF for $47.85.
So yup, if I'm traveling alone it's cheaper taking the train than having a driver. Easily stops being true if there's more than one person.
Once there are autonomous cars, paying the driver will go away too and I'd expect that to be cheaper than CalTrain.
CalTrain is $7.70 from MV to SF[0], not $33/person (or $16.5/person in your original comment). Or, you can get a montly pass for $215.
You don't need to wait on trains if you get your schedule down. They're VERY timely in my experience (caltrain). It is true that a car grants you the ability to fuck around and not worry if you'll miss the train. Especially during heavy commute periods, there are trains every 5-10 minutes.
Now, lets consider other pieces.
Depending on the vehicle you drive, where you park (how much it costs/inconvenience), insurance, maintenance, fuel, and potentially a lease, I have a difficult time in seeing how that would come up to less than $215/mo.
Fuel: SF to MV is 40 miles. A honda civic advertises 40mpg, so you use about a gallon of fuel in one direction. You go two directions each day if you're commuting. We'll call fuel $3/gallon, since you can find it both cheaper and more expensive in the bay. So, $6 worth of fuel for a day. 4.5 (weeks per month) x 5 (working days in week) x $6 = $135 in fuel costs alone, with no traffic (fuel/time/inconvienence costs). Running through a quick Progressive Insurance thing, I find that the insurance for a 2015 Civic is $62/mo for the base option[1]. Maintenance is $18/mo[2]. And there you have it, a vehicle for commuting is more expensive than a monthly pass alone. Excluding parking, the upfront cost of the vehicle, etc.
Yes, the tragedy of transit is that it's more expensive when you travel in groups. Few transit systems have actually tried to address this from my limited experience.
[0] http://www.caltrain.com/Fares/farechart.html [1] https://imgur.com/a/uS5CV [2] https://www.yourmechanic.com/estimates/honda/civic
Buy a hybrid (ford c-max used is about 15K), drive conservatively and you can get that mpg in Bay Area traffic.
There's no way a civic gas gets that mpg on bay area roads, i would guess approx 20mpg tops with an experienced driver behind the wheel.
Looking at the schedule. there is no time when there is a train from MV to SF within 5 minutes. The best case is trains at 7:04, 7:11, 7:25 in the morning or 4:36, 4:46, 4:57, 5:05 in the evening. Caltrain is a lot fo good things, one thing its not, is frequent enough for people who work anytime other than 8-4/5.
206: 6:05am and 208: 6:15am. (10min)
314: 6:59am and 216: 7:05am. (6min)
216: 7:05am and 218: 7:15am (10 min)
and another set of these after 8am. Northbound service does the same thing in the afternoon.
MountainView also has 7:04/7:11 and 8:04/8:11 trains. Unfortunately it trades baby bullet stops with sunnyvale which makes it a bit more difficult.
You are right though, they don't run frequently on evenings and weekends--there is simply not enough evening volume to justify it.
Anyhow, as you can see, there are trains that run a frequency of 5-10 minutes (not <5 minutes) during heavy commute hours. They actually do run 5 minutes apart if you depart from Diridon.
If that doesn't work for you, that's another question.
It may end up being less than a human, but do we actually know that? I'm not sure we do.
Diesel trains with conductors also have high opex as opposed to electric trains.
Plus transporting 4 people in a car is a best-case scenario for auto transport costs. And you seem to be making your estimate either assuming a very low TCO car or by excluding deprecation, maintenance, and insurance, since the IRS estimates the average car costs 54 cents a mile to operate.
Beyond that, cities along the Caltrain line have severely restricted development around train stations and forced it to their fringes along highways, which makes train transportation less practical and auto transportation easier.
I don’t buy that for a second - even in extremely expensive areas like the Bay Area, concrete is less than $20/sq ft poured (ie including all costs), and most parking lots I see around here are blacktop which is even cheaper....
If they aren't elevated or underground, the land itself is worth hundreds of dollars per square foot, so even if the actual construction is negligible the parking space is still worth $30,000+ that could be used for other things.
A quick google found me this: http://www.vtpi.org/tca/tca0504.pdf
Table 5.4.3 - 4 Parking Structure Construction Costs might be what you're after.
You're also not estimating the liability very well. Likelihood and cost of death or injury of 5 people MV to SF and back added with chances of uninsured drivers leaves most drivers well underinsured. Also, the statistical unlikelihood of having a fully occupied vehicle.
Other costs include road subsides, parking subsidies/real estate costs.
You're essentially comparing the cost of fuel versus the cost of: road infrastructure, costs of a vehicle, costs of a driver, costs of risk (insurance / safety), parking and servicing (cleanliness).
The train's parking space at the station and during off-hors is paid for your ticket, as are the tracks and tunnels it travels through, its trained driver, its safety measures, the cleaning and security personnel.
What you'd have to figure is, that the fuel might be $20. But you need to buy a car, pay for it monthly, pay for insurance, pay taxes indirectly to fund your roads, pay for your license and the police who ensure safety of the environment you drive in, enforcing the rules, you need to clean your car yourself and park it during off hours. All of those costs and some others (like say, maintenance/repairs) must be averaged into your car ride. And you'd need to divide that by the average amount of occupants, which is something like 1.2 for trips to work, not 4.
And then you get a typical long-term situation. I agree, it can be frustrating to think 'this car I already paid for, on a road which I pay for anyway, with this monthly insurance I already have, the license I already have, the 3 people I already have lined up to make this exact trip, and the police that's already in place to ensure a safe road, this trip is cheaper than the train'... But there's a lot to it as you can see, and it's not even a typical trip.
One important aspect about public transport is that it subsidises low-popularity roads. e.g. where I'm from, a bus ticket is basically the same price in the entire province, despite some routes earning no profit due to them just connecting small villages with a bunch of old people with bigger cities. The solution of say Uber would be to stop servicing or increase the price there to where it becomes economically feasible. The public transport approach is to not stop servicing or charge ridiculous rates, but simply to move money around so that everyone has a semblance of affordable transportation available. It's similar to post delivery, it's under pressure because there's no money to be made in lots of low-density areas. But there's something to be said for the ability to cheaply send a letter anywhere in the country for a roughly standardised price. That context too should be considered when comparing prices to very specific trips. You'd often end up comparing an averaged out transport mode price versus a specific high-occupancy car trip, cherry picking without the intention.
... and be faster. The SFMTA in San Francisco , at an average travel speed of 5 miles / hour. Is only slightly faster than brisk walking. Also, from the downtown FiDi out 2 miles in every direction, the Bus has a bus stop at Every block. Yes, every block.
and same with heading out of market st, but i mean...the point of the buses is to pick up workers on market st so why wouldn't they try to stop on every street?
i think the issue is there are too many buses based on market st, thus causing tons of congestion. there needs to be more buses going through mission st. or further southeast in soma that eventually comes back up on van ness.
also most buses during rush hour for people getting off work by the time you get to 6th st the bus is entirely full and you can't get on. for that i'm not sure what the solution is other than having buses on that route start somewhere on 6th st rather than from the transit station or embarcadero..
http://www.transitchicago.com/ashlandbrt/
They are going for a 16 mph average speed, vs 21 mph that the subway gets. Obviously still a bit slow, but way better than a normal bus (which I think is 5-10 mph)
I know street space is a bit more of a premium in SF over Chicago, but it seems like a pretty good help. Not as good as a subway, but in theory much much cheaper to use, it uses existing streets with just a few rule changes.
> ... and be faster.
mere reliability would be a nice start. denver's RTD system can't deal with predictable spikes in usage like the start of a semester at universities, or adjust itself when three or four of the high-frequency buses stack up on top of each other such that buses that should show ever 15 minutes don't appear for an hour.
everything in a smartphone that makes uber/lyft possible would've been cost effective to cram into a bus 20 years ago. but as far as i know they're still just talking (intermittently) on a radio.
In SF, this is made worse by the people's behavior. There is a dedicated line for the buses, but cars routinely drive on it to turn, get in/out parking or just feeling they can outsmart everybody by doing so. So in fact, the bus stops not once but 3-4 times per block to deal with these. And then there are traffic lights of course. And yes, as a result it's not too much faster than walking (though somewhat more relaxing, if you get a seat :)
Why do people say things like this? Have you ever been to a major European city? Most have well designed public transit systems that are much more convenient than driving. They usually manage this through a combination of local subways, regional trains to go into and out of the city core, and high speed rail to travel between cities. Chinese and Indian cities are implementing the same thing.
If SF actually cared about making public transit convenient (i.e. if Transit First was anything other than an empty slogan), they would have police ticket those cars that drive in the bus only lanes.
I just don't understand this bizarre behavior of insisting that problems are insolvable, when plenty of others have implemented adequate solutions.
That is also technically achievable in US, but much less politically achievable.
Also other countries were able to solve this. It's a uniquely American problem.
It'll be interesting to see how these prices change when they are no longer subsidized by venture capitalists, contractor drivers, and society at large.
And even more interesting once we have decent self-driving technology. That removes the constraint -- the driver -- that makes public transit and mass transit nearly synonymous. The Personal Rapid Transit crowd has been pushing toward that for years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit
And if cities do it right, PRT will have a big advantage over Uber, et al: they can reshape cities to accommodate the early stages of self-driving vehicles. Special lanes, limited-access roads, designated stopping points. Functioning PRT could arrive years ahead of autonomous taxis.
You say that without realizing that public transport has been subsidized by the State and "society at large" for a hundred years.
Anyway, it's irrelevant.
For example: I live in the countryside and want to get a bus into town. Fair enough but sometimes the buses run late, and sometimes they run really late - like half an hour plus. I often don't have that kind of time to waste, especially not if it means standing or sitting around in the rain. Moreover, it makes the timetable a work of fiction, and in that case what's the point of the timetable[1]? The truth is that in many cases I couldn't really care less about the bus timetable: what I want to know is when the bus I need is going to get here, and I'd like to be able to track its location to help with that.
Be great if there was an app for that, but sadly there isn't (not where I live, anyway). I have a feeling the Swiss Post buses might support that, but I could be imagining it. Thing is, it's not very start-uppable as a concept: you need partnerships with any bus companies involved, you need GPS equipment in the buses, you need parternships with cell networks and good enough coverage that location and ancillary information can be sent back to base to be served up through the app, etc.
In town the bus stops have those TfL style boards that tell you how long until the next bus arrives and where it's going but, of course, you still have to go to the bus stop to get that information.
[1] Timetables do become more important when you have to make changes, or use multiple forms of transport and make them dovetail together, so I'm not actually advocating that they be dumped.
https://tfl.gov.uk/bus/stop/490013766E/trafalgar-square-char...
https://www.trafi.com/lt/vilnius/autobusai/1g-greitasis-auto...
It may not be something you hack together in a weekend, but it's definitely startuppable. Love that word, btw, can I keep it?
Because of the partnerships needed, it won't scale quickly, but I wonder if it has potential as a non-profit startup. Or even for-profit, you just need to work on the value proposition to the local transit agencies. Some areas in the US do have this, after all. I'm not sure if it's GPS or what, but I've seen it Seattle when I visited, and also in Arlington, VA, where I used to live:
http://mobile.commuterpage.com/realtime.cfm?stopCode=41209&f...
I believe in Arlington, it was mostly grant funded (state and federal), but somebody's gotta be out there doing the work.
I live in Maine now - having decent public transportation would be a nice first step.
This info is online for (at least) Christchurch and Auckland buses in NZ.
Mass transit isn't for you. That's fine.
I'm sure Uber has had an impact of how people get around in other countries, but I would avoid taking this study and drawing overarching conclusions on it, like that mass transit has the same drawbacks at US does.
So despite all the comparative advantages of transit in those places, and the higher costs of car ownership, for whatever reason people really want private automobiles. So is it really a US-specific problem or just most obvious in the US, where cities that grew up when the majority of people had cars see no real need for super nice mass transit systems?
Yes, public transit is subsidised. But it isn't subsidised in such a way that it is expected to eventually become self sustaining - tax-payer funding is expected to continue in perpetuity.
That's not the case with Uber and Lyft. VCs are subsiding their rides on the expectation that eventually the company will dominate the market enough to not require subsidy any more.
I mentioned this elsewhere, but I wonder if maybe cities should run light rail and buses along the most used routes then subsidize private companies (like Lyft and Uber) to service people outside of those routes. I used to ride #43 Taylor's Ferry in Portland twice a day and I was sometimes on the bus by myself or with three or four other people. I bet it would have been far cheaper for the city to put us in a cab (this was before Uber) than to pay a driver to operate a giant, empty bus. I bet the bus was way worse from an emissions point of view as well.
I'd argue that there's no reason transport agencies couldn't do this kind of intelligent routing/hailing themselves. The problem is usually that government is actively punished when they don't go for the cheapest possible alterative, so rather than hire a team of skilled, innovative developers, they out source to a lowest cost bidder. As a result it looks like private enterprise is the only place where innovation happens. It's a shame.
EDIT: Reading some of the other replies, I suppose making rides on these routes on-demand instead of fixed timetable services may change the economics of less popular routes.
Every dollar we subsidize public transit, is far more than a dollar saved on road repair & upgrades.
Just think of buses. Two to three axles. If all the riders took cars instead, that's one hundred axles. Road wear is a function of weight, for which axles is a proxy, and obviously one hundred axles is a lot more traffic demanding road upgrades as well.
My current city, Miami, the city is looking at reducing mass transit service [0]. After already approving a 1-cent tax to expand service MDTA reneged and used the increase to pay for existing issues (fair enough, it needed fixing). Now, we're all paying slight more for a still terrible system.
At this point I think the solution just may have to come from the open market, obviously the govt run entity is unable/unwilling to do the job.
[0] http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/a...
This is a key misunderstanding: the systems are performing as designed but the normal maintenance was skimped on for years and now we're seeing the consequences of years of fiscal “conservatism” punting the problem down the road for future generations to deal with.
If we were to use that logic to say we should stop doing things, we'd also be shutting down most roads, bridges, water systems, schools, etc. because those have the same problems due to the large number of people who don't want to pay for the things they use. Every year, https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org will have a low rating for most U.S. infrastructure and every year a key part of the political system will shrug, say “starve the beast”, and plan on being dead / elsewhere before things break down too much more.
Privatization often makes this problem worse because all of those costs remain unmodified and there's a need to generate profits which requires either increasing prices or reducing service. That can be acceptable for many businesses but cutting infrastructure tends to have significant economic ripple effects since it affects your ability to participate in the economy.
...attract VC funding to subsidize trip costs.