The problem is that as a passenger/consumer, with a car, it's very easy to decide how much to pay for my own personal level of ride quality.
I can spend $2k on an old Camry, or I can spend $200k on a Bentley, but either way, I have almost total control (potholes notwithstanding).
It's really not possible to have that kind of personal control when you're looking at public transit.
I use them just fine on my bicycle.
I agree with everything you say but you're missing a key point - the active hostility that a significant number of drivers have for bikes.
I biked in Canada for ten years, and drivers there (at the time) were mostly indifferent to bikes.
(And yet I say this, and then I remember that one of Canada's rising bike stars at the time was permanently paralyzed by a driver who had repeated tried to force him off the road before (in his small community) and who had been reported to the police many times for it, and yet suffered no penalty other than a temporary license suspension. This was in the early 80s, and I haven't thought about it in 30 years, but I still feel a rush of rage.)
Now I live in the Netherlands, and cars are actively solicitous of bikes. Let me tell you that the center of Amsterdam has a lot of cobblestone streets with no separation between bikes and cars, not even a line on the street, but (nearly all) the cars treat cyclists as if they are delicate and breakable, which is actually the case.
Cyclists keep getting promised the world around the country. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Some long distance trains you can pay for a private cabin with decent meal service, or just a single seat and access to a vending machine.
Wikipedia confirms that distinction is sometimes made.
If you can't bring yourself to solve your parking situation after spending 200k on a Bentley, you spent too much on the Bentley.
To this day, I've never seen a Valet Full sign.
US highways do pay for themselves <https://web.archive.org/web/20170712175437/www.rita.dot.gov/...>, and help pay for other modes of transportation. Transit receives the biggest subsidy per passenger-mile, with rail and airlines in between.
(For those wishing more detail: From the executive summary <https://web.archive.org/web/20170628114204/http://www.rita.d...>:
>*Highways*
>* Users of the highway passenger transportation system paid significantly greater amounts of money to the federal government than their allocated costs in 1994-2000. <https://web.archive.org/web/20170628114204/http://www.rita.d...> This was a result of the increase in the deficit reduction motor fuel tax rates between October 1993 and September 1997, and the increase in Highway Trust Fund fuel tax rates starting in October 1997.
>* School and transit buses received positive net federal subsidies over the 1990-2002 period, but autos, motorcycles, pickups and vans, and intercity buses paid more than their allocated cost to the federal government.
>* On average, highway users paid $1.91 per thousand passenger-miles to the federal government over their highway allocated cost during 1990-2002.)
The real costs are tied up in surface roads and what lies underneath them. Repaving, sewer, cable, electricity, drainage... all that stuff has to be replaced regularly, and when it does, it's a massive subsidy from the people who don't drive cars on those roads, to the people who live or drive heavy trucks on them.
Public policy should try to make people's lives better, not worse.
It is much better for 80% of the people living today and 100% of the people living 50 years from now who will be dealing with the devastation caused by our CO2 emissions.
There is no incentive to minimize construction and maintenance costs at all. No pay-as-you-go model like busses and trains have.
As a result our roads have become chaotic to drive on.
Lightfoot = The Trump like mayor that we have (She's a democrat but still thinks she can just bully her way through making deals)
https://www.infranken.de/ueberregional/deutschland/kein-wc-k...
https://www.berliner-kurier.de/panorama/der-blanke-9-euro-ti...
https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/auto-verkehr/9-euro-t...
9€ for you, €2.5 billion+ for us. That's the most expensive "almost" free thing.
I'm not against trains, I'm not against bikes. I'm against the government doing populism and burning our money like that.
Well, my experience is also fact. I use trains every week now, I have visited half a dozen cities with this ticket and used local public transportation there. It's crowded but otherwise fine. Just because these experiences aren't reported on the news does not make them less real.
> 9€ for you, €2.5 billion+ for us.
"us" does a lot of lifting here because "us" is literally millions of people (including I). This statement also compares costs of a ticket for a single month with the total subsidization over three months.
> I'm against the government doing populism and burning our money like that.
I think we have to agree to disagree here. I think it is money spent well.
TL;DR:
"The Transport Ministry is providing €2.5 billion over three months to compensate for the loss of revenue caused by the artificially low ticket price — and yet no money was made available for extra personnel, buses or trains." With that in mind, he does not see how the scheme can feasibly continue after August. At least not at €9 per ticket."
References:
[1] https://berlinspectator.com/2022/07/02/germany-summer-vacati...
[2] https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-9-euro-travel-ticket-success-...
Point is, it reduced automobile use by a significant amount because people do prefer to use the train when the price is right.
Which means that with appropriate subsidies you can seriously improve the existing transport infrastructure. 10B a year is a pittance compared to the good it would do - Especially with the looming energy crunch.
The results until now: 3/4 of the people still driving their cars: https://www.focus.de/auto/news/ergebnis-ueberrascht-umfrage-....
So 2.5 billion euros (actually much more, see https://www.stern.de/panorama/-9-euro-ticket-macht-krank----...) is the most expensive "almost free" train ticket in the world...
There is an interesting, very American, solution, which is ubiquitous, active surveillance on every form of public transport. Not just for violent threats, but for enforcing (current) vandalism, littering, and even assault laws cheaply and at scale. For the low low cost of a dystopian panopticon you could have, theoretically, a cheaply maintained public transportation system. (The other option, which many other countries employ, is a rigorous culture of respect for public places and public facilities -- for example Japan and Northern Europe.)
Does not follow!
I have a beautiful bridge ten minutes bike ride from my house. This was a significant investment by the municipality. It would not be improved by being a toll route.
Right now the city is digging up the street in front of my apartment in order to completely redo electricity, plumbing, sewers and telecom. This task would not be improved by our block having to pay for it.
Public goods are not an "investment" because they bring in revenue.
If you're a hard-core capitalist, you believe that they are an investment because they dramatically facilitate profitable businesses with very low friction. Other people believe that public goods like bridges, roads, transportation, schools and parks are an intrinsic good in and of themselves because they make everyone's lives better.
The only economic case for user fees is to deliberately throttle a scarce resource. But given the climate emergency, all our societies should be building public transportation as quickly as humanly possible.
The reason to expect money to change hands is not economic - it's purely the moral idea that everything has to involve money.
Point two, I've now a daughter, and in a car I can stop whenever she needs, find comfortable places to fix whatever the issue is, and resume journey.
Also, for what it's worth: as someone who uses the NYC subway extensively, it does not feel unsafe.
They should charge fees and subsidize poor people instead.
Money to improve quality has to come from somewhere.
People rarely choose to use train because it is free.
Hello from Amsterdam! I've lived in five countries, including the Netherlands for the last five+ years.
Your statement is so false to the fact that I have no trouble calling it a deliberate lie.
First link I found:
https://analyticsindiamag.com/why-92-6-dutch-trains-arrive-t...
"When it comes to punctuality, Dutch railways are in the top three of the world, right behind only Japan and Switzerland. The Dutch railways, also known as NS, have seen an average of one million train commuters every day with 92.6 % of trains arriving on time, an incredible stat for the Dutch railways. If you are from the Netherlands, you probably can’t make the excuse of the train being late anymore. With this level of punctuality, Dutch railways are continually looking for innovative technological ideas to keep its spot in the top three."
All of this is well-known. I think the reddit term for "telling lies to push car ownership" is "carbrain".
You should be ashamed of yourself. Really. Do you have nothing better to do than go out and tell the most transparent lies on the Internet?
You're missing the point: even a "top three" railway kinda sucks compare to point-to-point car usage.
I don't know if you just don't have perspective, or if your comment is a joke and I just didn't get it.
You can get there faster because everyone else is taking the train. Hopefully one day the train will be the fastest way for you too.
"When it comes to punctuality, Dutch railways are in the top three of the world, right behind only Japan and Switzerland. The Dutch railways, also known as NS, have seen an average of one million train commuters every day with 92.6 % of trains arriving on time, an incredible stat for the Dutch railways. If you are from the Netherlands, you probably can’t make the excuse of the train being late anymore. With this level of punctuality, Dutch railways are continually looking for innovative technological ideas to keep its spot in the top three."
Secondly, I complain about NS a lot about delays and about not being able to sit. I am not going to argue that it isn't a problem that has to be improved. During rush hour (and plenty of times, outside) it is sometimes impossible to find a seat. But, horrible unreliable? that is not how I would call it.
Along with that, don't forget that our train system is extremely busy. For example, the trains that go from Amsterdam Zuid to Schiphol is the 7th busiest station in the country and it has only 4 lines, all of them which are almost constantly in use. The moment anything goes wrong, that has a domino effect on all other trains.
Personally, I own a car and I use it quite a lot. But I also use public transport quite a lot. For point to point travel outside of cities a car is a no brainer, if you stay within the cities, it is probably not worth it to have a car.
Finally I want to point out that our train system has problems, it has delays quite often, there aren't enough seats, and it is expensive. These are all things that we really have to improve. But It is nowhere near as bad as you make it out to be.
I think what gets missed is the market signal or imperative to respond to that signal. But then, I'll make the uninformed assertion that private rail companies aren't that good at that anyway, and/or the industry doesn't lend itself well to that.
And if rail was "free" I'd definitely use it more. It's not necessarily about the money, although that matters, it's the freedom to "just go" (ignoring there'd probably still need to be a booking system due to high demand)
You cannot have 10 companies competing on the same stretch of rail, which leads to weird attempts to bring the 'market' into play. I'm thinking of the UK in particular.
The light tram I use often (https://www.vltrio.com.br/) has a sensor above each door which counts how many passengers get in and out of the vehicle at each stop (the payment is done within the vehicle through NFC card readers near each door; the count from the door sensors allows estimating the amount of fare evasion). So these kinds of sensor do exist, and don't need facial recognition to do their job (this particular one wouldn't be able to do facial recognition even if it wanted to, due to its placement looking straight down).
(The presence of these sensors on that particular tram line isn't well known, so it's a bit hard to find more information; a quick web search found https://www.semanadetecnologia.com.br/25semana/wp-content/up... which has on its page 4 some sample images from these sensors, plus photos of the NFC readers).
This level of indiscriminate surveillance is absolutely abnormal from a historical perspective -- it's "weird" they have it in the first place! There's no reason to think that it's necessary. (And since most public transport systems are at least partially government run, and your travel card is associated either implicitly or explicitly with your real identity, travel cards have become an excellent way for the government to surveil every member of the public indiscriminately, allowing for retroactive surveillance -- though of course rubber-stamp courts would give them access to this information from private companies too.)
Most public transport systems have not had access to this information for the vast majority of their existence (and managed to botch expansions just as well as they can today with the benefit of all this data) and have only gained access (along with law enforcement) to it recently.
The issues with increasing public transport coverage is not a lack of data, it's a lack of funding and interest.
Only if they were entirely built in the last decade and a half. During the hundred years before that, nobody was tracking riders with anything approaching that type of precision, and public transportation was better.
Very few systems that I've ridden on in the US track this kind of information. Most of the time you buy a one way ticket and ride for however many stops you want. There's no tracking for when people get off.
> Travel Time Systems work through the analysis of collected traffic data. This data can be collected via cellular providers, GPS vendors, mobile app vendors and most popularly through Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Scanning. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi scanning technology makes use of non-intrusive roadside sensors to detect the unique addresses of the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios inside of driver's vehicle and smartphone. By picking up a unique radio ID at one sensor location and then another these systems are able to calculate the travel time experienced from sensor A to sensor B for that unique vehicle/driver. These systems collect and calculate thousands of data points like this in order to determine the average travel time between any two sensors on the road.
* https://stinson.ca/its-solutions/bluetooth-wifi-travel-time-...