I appreciate solutions that meet us where we are, but it’s depressing that we don’t seem to actually have the will to make a sustainable, integrated mass transit plan.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260830071400/https://www.jwz.o...
I've spoken with old timers who would talk about the days before the Richmond-San Rafael bridge, to name one piece of the puzzle.
Probably has something to do with that. Why on Earth are there 27 different transit agencies in the Bay Area? Probably should be a single digit, no?
Minnesota has the Metropolitan Council which derives its power from state statute and can supersede the decisions of local governments. The same people that bitch about ‘my tax dollars’ complain about the Met Council but I feel it provides a cohesive regional planing organization and they provide water, sewer, transportation, and regional parks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Council_(Minnesot...
Portland, Oregon has a similar organization called Metro that I am not familiar with, other than it is similar to the Metropolitan Council. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_(Oregon_regional_governm...
They're all tied together through Clipper, so it doesn't make a difference to end users anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumbarton_Rail_Corridor
Check out the storied history of RM2. Taxpayers literally voted to raise sales taxes to fund a rail corridor, and the money was reallocated to a different county for an unrelated project that did not benefit the counties in question. Never mind that an actual functional Dumbarton Rail could be a huge improvement to life on the Peninsula if done well.
Imagine a genuinely fast transfer between any one of the Caltrain stations (say Palo Alto or Menlo Park) and one of the East Bay BART stations. Of course, getting the western portion past all the expensive neighborhoods in the way sounds like a real mess.
these aren't "good reasons" or unavoidable laws of nature or understandable tradeoffs. it's just a uniquely dysfunctional political system
Cost per passenger trip:
BART: $1.07B operating expenses / 59.5M trips = $16.92
SF Muni: $1.13B / 160M trips = $7.06
Caltrain: $225M / 9.1M trips = $24.73
Passenger Fare collected per trip:
BART: $259M / 59.5M trips = $4.35
SF Muni: $111M / 160M trips = $0.69
Caltrain: $58.7M / 9.1M trips = $6.45
Subsidy per trip:
BART: $12.57
SF Muni: $6.37
Caltrain: $18.27
Cost per passenger mile:
BART: $1.07B / 892.5M passenger miles = $1.20/mile
SF Muni: $1.13B / 312M = $3.62/mile
Caltrain: $225M / 177.5M = $1.27/mile
Subsidy per passenger mile:
BART: $1.07B / 892.5M passenger miles = $0.84/mile
SF Muni: $1.13B / 312M = $3.26/mile
Caltrain: $225M / 177.5M = $0.94/mile
For comparison, federal spending for the interstate highway system is about 2-3 cents per passenger mile.
I’d be more interested to know how so many people are paying less than $1 for a mini trip when the fare is closer to $3.
the person riding transit benefits themselves, and their landlord, and the people driving.
they also benefit their workplace, by both working there, and not having to store a car there, and then anywhere they spend money at their destination, or the transit stops they used.
the value of the transit line is all over the place
Often called 'land value uplift' these days, or 'unearned increment'/'land monopoly rents' in days gone by.
Theoretically in a free market, the landlords will be able to increase rent in proportion to the 'market value' of the convenience to the tenants (short commutes, etc). Likewise, homeowners will sell for a higher price - capturing the value that would be conferred to new owners. A city with good transport demands higher rents in outer suburbs serviced by that transport.
Your workplace likely also rents their premises too. They now have a convenient train station 5 minutes' walk away - and guess what, their landlord ups the rents too. Once again, in proportion to the 'market value' of the convenience to the workplace. The nearby cafes will now increase their coffee price to cover their increased rent.
Although this is the position of most economists, politicians are often reluctant to draw attention to it. Instead, where I live, they use models like commute time saved per person' x 'number of people' x 'average hourly wage'.
You can verify all of this yourself by viewing residential and commercial rental listings in your city.
Many economists have proposed solutions to this problem, often in the form of land value taxes.
The automobile analogue to fares is gas taxes, so the first crack at a true comparison is to compare the Caltrans budget to gas tax receipts.
But you cannot run a transit system on marginal costs, so using that comparison is also misleading.
If a transit project doesn't increase property values enough to justify the investment, or if the entity funding the project cannot extract that value, the project rarely makes sense.
So if everyone's value goes up 40% your property tax bill stays the same. If your area climbed faster than others, it goes up but not by 40%.
the property value goes up because of increased demand for it
We have under-utilized transit corridors that could alleviate much of this strain if they weren’t so damn far away from where the people sitting in traffic want to go.
If we could go back to pre-pandemic ridership levels, the subsidy rate would be inverted (fares covered 70% versus 30% now). Public Transit struggles with low utilization. It'll take 10+ years to get back to that ridership level though.
For BART, that number is:
$1.07B operating expense / 892.5M million passenger miles traveled = $1.20 per mile. Then subtract out the fare per mile and the government is paying $0.84/mile for people to ride BART.
Also, the cost to a driver of the car is around $0.70 not including cost to the government and cost of externalities.
If BART disappeared tomorrow, how much would the government have to pay to build all the additional roads and parking to support that incremental traffic?
And how much for healthcare for all the incremental pollution and collisions?
> several cents per vehicle mile
It's close to a dollar per mile when you include all the externalized costs.
Incremental property damage, injuries and fatalities, incremental chronic illness from pollution, parking land subsidy, fair market value of incremental land use and rights of way, lost tax revenue from that incremental land use, etc.
Public transportation will never have the incentive to minimize cost and headcount.
Where we do have public transportation, it should always face competition from private offerings - including on the tracks, as they do in Italy, for example.
In a city the only question that surely matters is: Can the mode of transport be scaled? For private car transit, the answer is no. No city can function if everyone gets around by car. Even Houston has light rail and a bus network. If you can drive and your city somehow remains livable, that is because other people are taking transit.
The Federal government spends ~$17.5B/year on maintaining and constructing the interstate highway system. Americans drive 852 billion miles/year on it. The cost per Vehicle Mile Traveled (VMT) is 2.1 cents / mile.
If we look at all government spending (Federal, State, Local) on highways, roads, and supporting infrastructure (which includes traffic management systems), that's around $285B/year and 3.28 trillion miles, or 8.7 cents per Vehicle Mile Traveled.
The cost to the government to provide and maintain roads is on the order of several cents per mile traveled per year. Roads are simply much more cost-effective to build and maintain than dedicated public transit infrastructure.
BART likely created huge profits for people who owned land in the areas it services - house prices and rents would have increased substantially. Public investment, private profits. Subsidies in the form of low-cost fares like this are just further welfare for the landowners.
Interestingly, about a third of BART's cost was acquiring land - if/when that same land is cleared and sold on market, the project would have operated at an enormous profit. Certainly, BART's current assets would far exceed 'total fares collected'.
Overpaid transit employees, engineering firms, and construction companies.
Unless you try to build housing.
https://reason.com/2018/02/21/san-francisco-man-has-spent-4-...
Tillman cites $1M of costs, of which $200k were 'city fees' (not itemized) and the rest were presumably normal costs for developers/engineers/architects/etc (of course, these would potentially be smaller if there was less regulation). The development start to approval time of 3.5 years is not crazy for a first time 'accidental developer' working on such a large project.
After approval, there seems to have been a~12 month period of bad faith activists slowing down the project. Tillman filed a lawsuit, did a media campaign, and the project was re-approved later in 2018.
He then sold the pre-approved project to a Cresleigh Homes for $13.5 million in early 2019.
So we've had 6 years of financial delays as Cresleigh tries to fund the build vs maybe 1 year of 'bad faith' development approval delays 2017-2018.
And of course - funding the build would have been much easier if the landowner didn't want $13.5 million for an empty lot! (or $12 million if you subtract the development costs). So arguably Tillman did more to delay housing than anyone else.
The reason we don't have roads is because the economics are terrible. The government gets $0 per trip [1], but it costs billions of dollars a year in operating expenses.
Wait, that's not how it works.
[1] Federal gas taxes don't count, because those go to the Highway Trust Fund which funds road construction, which is not an operating expense. State gas taxes may vary. Although toll roads also properly charge people user fees, although for some reason, lots of drivers complain about how expensive tolls are...
If public transit is less cost-effective than taking a helicopter, then something is clearly broken.
Note that a 12 seat private jet also costs less per passenger mile than BART does. That's not beacuse jets are cheap, but because BART is currently absurdly expensive.
* Few take it because it doesn't meet their need [low denominator]
* Let's spend money to make it meet people's need [numerator goes up]
...
?
It's about cost comparison: SF Muni's operating costs (in terms of costs per passenger mile) are so bloated they're comparable to chartering a helicopter.
This should not be possible, and it's a strong signal of poor fiscal management. SF Muni operates at $3.62 per passenger mile. For comparison, Transport for London (TfL) operates at around $0.50/passenger mile and Shanghai Metro operates at $0.11/passenger mile.
Doesn't the Highway Trust Fund pay for road maintenance as well?
instead you need to find the overall economic benefit and related government revenues from each transit trip, not just the cost of the trip alone
You know subsidy per train passenger mile?
I remember talking to a VC a few years back, and he vehemently explained why he will never ever fund companies related to public transit, for this reason. Public transit was one of the two sectors he would not invest in (the other being materials science).
In the bay, low-skilled / manual laborers spend >50% of their income on housing. Many can't afford to live here, so they demand higher wages or leave, which drives up the price of labor even further.
If sufficient housing were built and the Bay Area had the same housing prices as the rest of the US, then 1) the supply of labor would go up 2) wages could fall by 30-40% without a quality of life decrease. Businesses could reduce their labor costs by 20%, which would improve the QoL of everyone in the area, including manual laborers. When local businesses cut costs, then everything costs less (food, housing, transport), and QoL goes up.
Then run this process iteratively and you will see massive reductions in prices everywhere, the cost of everything will go down by 30%+ percent.
For the case of BART, they spend ~$800 million / year on labor, so reducing cost here has the highest RoI. They would save hundreds of millions per year.
Buy America Act makes buses roughly three times more expensive, and then they use decades-old technology due to a lack of competition.
The MTA in NYC has two-person subway crews, which is almost unprecedented in this day and age. BART could be driverless if unions wouldn't revolt.
There's an irony that American unions are strong enough to prevent automatization, but weak enough to fear it (unlike say Denmark or France).
Not everything has to be directly money making.
If anything, the Bay Area needs significantly more public transit. BART in particular is mostly useful between cities, in my experience. You can’t go from the mission to cow hollow or dog patch to north beach, let alone anywhere to the ocean.
Also, subways don’t have much (if any) marginal cost per passenger. The issue isn’t cost but ridership. Ridership will increase with utility, which requires political will, which does not exist.
SF could be so much more.
Moscow subway [2] has 17 lines and 309 stations. In newer cars, 2 USB-A sockets are available near every seat, ready for robots.
And that’s not even counting for however much I’m subsidized on the highway and road systems I don’t pay anything to use.
Public transit is definitely expensive, but the alternative is also very costly and also regressive. The goal with public transit is to provide a low-cost, high-density way to move people around the city. It’s a public service, it shouldn’t be making profit. Car ownership is more expensive in total and very space-inefficient. Cities don’t have room for space inefficiency.
A lot of people are commenting about "externalities". That's just handwaving.
The real solution is to increase the ridership and the frequency. Public transit must be _reliable_. I live in SF and experience Muni's unreliability first hand.
The reason a person would prefer to drive over taking the Muni is a simple one: she knows the car will be there when she's ready to head back. Muni, on the other hand: one never knows when the next bus will come or if it will come at all. And then the City hands out Muni passes to all homeless people, regardless of behavior. Yesterday I sat down in a Muni train and guess what? A used piece of TP (about a foot long) was blowing around on the floor and everybody was playing dodge-the-TP, trying to jump out of its way. Buses and trains are often not cleaned at the end of the day.
Question is: why doesn't the City subsidize Uber/Waymo etc. also to the tune of $6.37/trip (inside SF)?
What would be the cost of turning all those transit trips into car trips? Would rush hour start at 5 am and end at 10 pm?
JR East in Japan operates in the same way: it makes the majority of its profit from the real estate, malls, and hotels it operates adjacent to its train stations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_land_grants_in_the_Un...
This is a part of why there were so many tiny little towns out West which were essentially just a railroad stop and a few buildings.
you can get to hong kong or jspan in hours to days. the train boom is about a century away
Especially if the Waymo data feeds back to the government to plan scheduled PT on the most popular routes.
Federal and state governments own large parcels of prime NYC, LA, SF, Chicago and other metro land, most of which is underutilized. As an example, they operate or sublease numerous surface level parking lots in those places.
The federal government owns a prime parcel on State Street in Chicago, prime real estate, that is completely abandoned. There are many examples of this.
Your solution is to place this responsibility into the hands of those who have shown complete and utter incompetence across successive administrations?
If there was traffic along the last mile then it would be a good candidate for a regularly scheduled bus route. But for many areas there isn’t really traffic and not enough trips to jusitify all the bus routes it would take to fully cover the area.
And yes this is all a result of atrocious urban planning, but as a way to fix what already exists it seems promising.
There are good reasons to have choices. Driverless cars will make more sense if you have a lot of luggage or other cargo to schlep. Elderly people might find it easier. There will be routes that are awkward by bus.
Also driverless vans might make sense on some routes.
It will help if incentives encourage the use of whatever is more efficient.
I always like being the person that points out that cars have on avg 1.5 passangers.
Meaning a bus (avg size of 2 medium cars) with just 4 people is already a better use of space on the road.
So while well utilised infrastructure might look prettier, the current misuse of infra is so vast that even minor use of public transit would already bring benefits.
It seems like the best solution would be to implement registration fees to offset externalities like pollution and road wear, and have congestion fees for when the roads are busy (including for vehicles such as busses). Then let the price signal decide the optimal mix of vehicles on the road. I think if such a system were implemented, the biggest change in behavior would be people taking fewer car trips during peak traffic hours.
is road wear the only cost, or the highest cost to consider of the comparison?
is it even the right comparison, vs a 4 person street car where its running on rails?
is lowest cost even the right thing to optimize for when it might mean people lose jobs?
Is it? Total cost of buying 4 cars, maintaining 4 cars, potential piece failure across 4 cars, calculating and distributing gas for multiple stations for the gas to be available for all 4 users, parking for 4 vehicles...
you distribute the cost, but lower it is not. Having a single bus depo, where you fill them up, clean and have pieces that can be quickly swapped and repair across a fleet is much much cheaper.
Also in last mile trips or low usage areas, you can use smaller vehicles (like vans) instead of full sized buses. Which increases the advantages over cars in terms of weight and space and usage.
> since road wear scales with the 4th power of axle loading, a bus causes about 1,000x more damage to the road than a car.
Cars keep increasing in weight, with Mercedes G Wagon going over the ton
and also problems like space, parking and pollution are exponentially more worrying than road repairs. Which can even taken a step further and removed as a consideration with Trains over buses, which should be a final, last mile solutions or for lower density populations where trains might be too cumbersome.
> Then let the price signal decide the optimal mix of vehicles on the road.
When you have set up the ENTIRE system around car use, the price signalising would be entirely disregarded. If you have to get to work, and the only option is to use your car because there is no bus, then the price of the road is unavoidable.
The only possible effect is that the price signal is so loud, that they quit their job as their cost to travel is higher than their earnings. In which case businesses would suffer from only being able to hire people who can walk to work.
You would also be at the behest of lobbyist that can (and have) influenced the system to remove externalities that affect them. And oil and car manufacturing would instantly demolish your legislation making the status quo set itself up again.
And for the price signal to work, it should also be available and legible to suers, so the congestion fees should either change like the stock market (to influence real time usage) which means finding out the cost of travel is very difficult. or set up per hours, in which case essential services, and unavoidable commitments (like taking kids to school) become more expensive without a workable alternative. You can use your electronics after the price surge is down from your electric company, but you cant take your kid to school after "Peak Hour congestion charge" has expired.
However, if I need to make an appointment on time, or just reduce morning hassles, I take a Waymo, but afterwards, I may be inclined to take public transit in the return direction. Same distance, similar route, but distinct criteria for budgeting time, money, and mental health.