Buses vs Rail and Cars vs Transit

[nasa35]

not per road mile travelled. Cars murder rail in that regard. The amount of "passengers" carried by car per hour in mass is 100s of times more. Financially roads and bridges are far less expensive if you count total passengers.

Going with the fantasy, WE LIVE IN THE TWIN CITIES. Not Singapore. Maybe I should compare Minneapolis to St. Cloud??

[David Greene]

not per road mile travelled. Cars murder rail in that regard. The amount of "passengers" carried by car per hour in mass is 100s of times more. Financially roads and bridges are far less expensive if you count total passengers.

Going with the fantasy, WE LIVE IN THE TWIN CITIES. Not Singapore. Maybe I should compare Minneapolis to St. Cloud??

You're changing the subject. Your original objectionable statement was, "Our buses are on time and go just about everywhere." That is demonstrably false. Ask anyone in Morth Minneapolis how easy it is to take the bus out to a job in Eden Prairie. Ask anyone in East St. Paul what it's like to try to get to MoA.

No one here is opposed to buses. No one wants to build rail everywhere instead of buses. We need both.

And we absolutely do need more transit funding. The core bus system is over capacity and it doesn't go everywhere we need it to go. The only way to fix that is to buy more buses and hire more drivers.

[nasa35]

not per road mile travelled. Cars murder rail in that regard. The amount of "passengers" carried by car per hour in mass is 100s of times more. Financially roads and bridges are far less expensive if you count total passengers.

Going with the fantasy, WE LIVE IN THE TWIN CITIES. Not Singapore. Maybe I should compare Minneapolis to St. Cloud??

You're changing the subject. Your original objectionable statement was, "Our buses are on time and go just about everywhere." That is demonstrably false. Ask anyone in Morth Minneapolis how easy it is to take the bus out to a job in Eden Prairie. Ask anyone in East St. Paul what it's like to try to get to MoA.

No one here is opposed to buses. No one wants to build rail everywhere instead of buses. We need both.

And we absolutely do need more transit funding. The core bus system is over capacity and it doesn't go everywhere we need it to go. The only way to fix that is to buy more buses and hire more drivers.

I'm all for more buses and more drivers. Imagine the bus system if we wouldn't have wasted all that money on LRT?

Change the subject? Are you mad. I was responding to this factually incorrect comment:

"^^ The amount of subsidy for rail or any other transit by far pales in comparison to the amount we prop up oil, roads, bridges, SF homes, and on and on. Not even close."

[mattaudio]

You guys can keep going all you want in this thread.

[Visualizer]

Bus can go anywhere. Rail interupts the flow of traffic and is locked down. Not sensible solution in a sprawl.

Efficient transit eliminates the very need to drive.

[RailBaronYarr]

You guys can keep going all you want in this thread.

Good call.

Change the subject? Are you mad. I was responding to this factually incorrect comment:

"^^ The amount of subsidy for rail or any other transit by far pales in comparison to the amount we prop up oil, roads, bridges, SF homes, and on and on. Not even close."

Believe whatever you want. The fact that per user subsidization is lower is a direct result of the fact that we've built 95% of our places to be either car-dependent or made driving by far the more economical choice through massive subsidies in so many ways. If 90% of all trips in the US were made by rail, do you think the subsidy per user would be more or less than driving? Do you think there would even be a subsidy per user?

[ECtransplant]

We live in a sprawl.

Not sure what "we" you refer to. I live in a fairly urban neighborhood.

[Visualizer]

We live in a sprawl.

Not sure what "we" you refer to. I live in a fairly urban neighborhood.

[RailBaronYarr]

^^ Favorite Rammstein music video ever. Ok, maybe after Sonne.

[emcee squared]

For the sake of more off-topic-ness, I'd like to say, Rammstein rules.

[UptownSport]

Fier Frei

[UptownSport]

We need massive investment in transit and Autos.
I think more Freight rail would help us be competitive, too many semis.

A few areas need premium rail- There's just too many people moving- And the buses interfere with Autos.

I agree poor implementation of LRT has cost hundreds more hours of productivity than it's saved-

In short, there shouldn't be a choice between transit- rail and buses should be made as efficient as possible to allow more autos

[Nathan]

Here's a pretty good article about the cost benefit of rail for a city!

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-a ... hink/6532/

[mulad]

I remember a couple years back when some group (probably the APTA) was saying that each dollar of additional operating budget support resulted in around $7 of economic activity. I'm not sure I'd take their number, but some back-of-the-envelope math I did around the same time seemed to point to at least $3 or $4, so it's probably in the ballpark. But of course, different systems and routes have different subsidy levels. Still, it's pretty likely that Metro Transit alone, with its ~$200 million annual operational support, turns that around into $600 million to $1.4 billion in annual benefit to the region.

So, assuming that the study referenced in the article uses the massive transit network emanating from New York City as their high-water mark at $1.8 billion, they may be undershooting by a wide margin...

[Nathan]

Another article about car usage being down again.

http://www.wwltv.com/news/221629561.html

[helsinki]

[Didn't know where to put this]

Evidence of the Strong Towns thesis coming to fruition:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/loca ... full.story

Representative quote: "[f]or many years, residential development helped subsidize Long Grove's roads".

An affluent mid-western suburb with 8,000 homes lacks the tax base to support 29 miles of public roadway.

[Anondson]

It seemed much like the village, like many, was a Ponzi scheme. Fund city operations significantly from income from new construction that was attracted partially because of no property taxes. What can't continue won't.

[mulad]

The covered bridge in the article made the "village" seem a bit too idyllic, so I decided to look the place up on Google Maps. It's considerably more sprawling than other Chicago suburbs. Much of the southern area is set up as a golf community, though it looks like a chunk of the golf course(s) is/are either in unincorporated territory or part of an adjacent city.

[helsinki]

I decided to look the place up on Google Maps. It's considerably more sprawling than other Chicago suburbs.

The implication being that it is an isolated instance of under-funding road maintenance, and not indicative of an imminent trend?

Note how the nearby suburb of Schaumburg is cited as having managed to repair its roads with the sales taxes from a regional mall until recently. The revenue raising mechanism and the purpose for which the funding is dedicated are completely divorced from each other. Not a recipe for success either.

[mulad]

Well, Long Grove is a strange community. They are hardly struggling to get by -- the 2010 census says that there are 2,368 households, with a median income is $191,522 (they have quite the gender split, though: median male income is $139,309, while the female median is $80,066 -- men earn 74% more). They don't collect property taxes on residences. The article wasn't precise in describing the monetary shortfall beyond saying "more than $1 million" -- If it was exactly $1 million, each household would need to contribute an average of $422 and change to meet the challenge (the median value would only be about 80% of that -- perhaps around $338).

So they could pretty easily just impose a property tax. I'm sure many/most households are currently in neighborhood associations which fulfill the government role to some extent, so they are being "taxed" already, but an additional $400 or so per year is not going to cause these folks any harm. There is a significant amount of private roadway in the city already, and they seem to want to go whole-hog on that idea. It's more of an example of a conservative-leaning anti-tax community taking the libertarian route of privatizing everything. It's not the type of place I'd like to live -- I wouldn't be able to afford it anyway.

I certainly don't like the typical suburban pattern of development very much. Like I mentioned in my previous post, I tend to scoff whenever a suburb is described as a "village" -- I sure wish more places followed the traditional "village" -> "town" -> "city" model. Relying on a single big income source like a shopping center is a bad idea. Many of those single-use zones really need to become more mixed-use and be modified to be comfortable for people on foot, on bike, or taking buses/trains, though it often probably wouldn't hurt to just let the commercial zones die and either let them go fallow and turn into parks or open space, or have them redeveloped as traditional neighborhoods.

Wealthy suburbs like Long Grove are an outcome of the hypermobility offered by the car and the highway/freeway system. Certainly there were wealthy suburbs in the streetcar era, though they were still built more along the true "village" model, with denser street grids and proper main streets rather than cul-de-sacs and other residential pods of suburbs and exurbs. While I don't like the way they've laid out that town, the big concern I have is that they're trying to effectively wall themselves off from the greater metropolitan community. In Minnesota, we have the Fiscal Disparities Act which redistributes the income from property taxes among metro-area communities. I presume that requires all suburbs to impose property taxes, unlike the Chicago metro area. So we probably won't see suburbs privatize all of their roadways around here, since they'll all be getting some income from that and still have some ability to tune it to meet their local needs. Metro-area residents shouldn't be allowed to essentially hide their money under the mattress -- I'm sure Long Grove's neighboring suburbs wish they could tap the wallets of those wealthy families to some extent, but currently they can't (well, I assume...). I do worry that things like the Fiscal Disparities Act can end up encouraging sprawl, though -- or at least not do enough to prevent it.