Comment by repolfx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by repolfx | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Well, why? The OP has asserted that NY transit delivers vast economic benefits that offset its loss making nature. Fine, I can buy that to some extent, but how big exactly are these benefits? How do we know they're actually so big and not in reality quite small?

Well, we could do some one-off studies and hope that Excel is used properly, but why? We already have mechanisms that figure out the value of things and allocate resources appropriately, they're markets. The unviable nature of public transit suggests systematic resource allocation problems, created politically. If there were really such huge beneficial side effects, it wouldn't matter if ticket prices rose a lot, that'd just get priced in to other things like cost of goods near transit stops.

For instance maybe every ride in NY should be 2x or 3x the current price for the costs of the system to be worthwhile, but public transit is usually government owned and politicians aren't willing to bite the bullet on that.

(This is all kind of beside the point that NY's transit problems are mostly due to localized cost absurdity, but...)

I don't disagree that it's hard to quantify the exact economic value, but you can't use a free market to solve coordination problems like public transit.

Coordination failure in stages:

1) A transit line that goes where you want, when you want for only a fraction of your trips means you need a second means of travel the rest of the time.

2) Having a second means of travel on hand (e.g. a car) means that you're less likely to use the transit line when it would work for you.

3) Lack of use of the transit line leads halted growth and reduced service.

4) Reduced service further drives users away

5) Evidence of failure causes a loss of investor/government support.

6) Transit line dies slowly to the extent that political inertia allows.

Or to put it another way, asking a transit line to pay to for itself is like saying "if human beings really wanted world peace they could have all just disarmed!", ignoring the fact that until everyone else is disarmed you'd be a fool to disarm yourself.

And if you succeed and build a critical-mass, sustainable system you've just swapped your market problem for a natural monopoly and have to use non-market techniques to deal with the monopoly service provider. (And now we're back to NY)

> (This is all kind of beside the point that NY's transit problems are mostly due to localized cost absurdity, but...)

This is the entire point. You cannot dismiss it. What conditions allow the costs to rise so high in NYC?

> A transit line that goes where you want, when you want for only a fraction of your trips means you need a second means of travel the rest of the time.

Why should anyone want to go any place, and what makes them so entitled to receive such a transportation service? People, like businesses, will follow economic incentives. I'm sure landlords and real estate developers love the metro system, it brings great value to the otherwise less desirable realestate. For ever dollar someone doesn't pay to ride the metro, that's a dollar more in rent an apartment can charge.

You have to look at the big picture and figure out who these mass transit systems actually benefit.

Everyone wants to go everywhere - because people live Everywhere and have jobs Everywhere and their friends live Everywhere and there are stores Everywhere.

No one is entitled to anything - you added that word apropos of nothing in my post.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com