Now, if you hate buses like I do, that doesn't seem like a good road. But I find it amusing that the first thing they did was to set up a free-market style insurance scheme, whereby you're indemnified against the cost of getting caught breaking the law by jumping turnstiles.
The group calls itself Planka.nu (rough translation: "dodge the fare now"), and they’ve banded together because getting caught free-riding comes with a steep $120 penalty. Here's how it works: Each member pays about $12 in monthly dues—which beats paying for a $35 weekly pass—and the resulting pool of cash more than covers any fines members incur.So what if nobody pays for the buses? Don't they go away? No, of course, because the use fees aimed at the poor can never cover the cost of their operation. They always depend on taxes on people who never use the damn things.
So what about the other people? I've drunk beer in Zamboanga in daylight during Ramadan, and traveled in rural Tawi-Tawi and Sanga-Sanga, where gasoline is sold in little plastic baggies because a gallon is far too great a sum, and nobody can buy an underground tank's worth.
People still had motorcycles. Trucks, even, sometimes.
12 comments:
What all these public transit utopians never seem to realize is that for most people, as bad as traffic is, a car is still faster, and where the young, single folks have time, married people with kids don't- the extra time you would need to take public transit is too big a price to pay- it isn't about money...
Yeah, it's a huge pain. Also, buses just make traffic worse by blocking whole lanes. Between driving slow and stopping every few feet for a while, they're a major disturbance.
Between driving slow and stopping every few feet for a while, they're a major disturbance.
Well, if you all were on the bus, like you're supposed to be, there'd be no traffic to be disrupted. There might even be express routes, that skip every third stop....
Eric Hines
Parking around the Madison campus is hard to come by, and in the the Isthmus it is $$$. I drive partway in (no buses out to our town) and take the bus from there. Get a little more rest, or a little reading, make notes for the day, pray...
The street I come in on is 6 lanes wide plus turn lanes, so buses don't disrupt traffic even at railroad crossings.
The bus system in Geneva runs mostly on the honor system, though there are hefty fines if you get caught without a ticket. Maybe that just works in Switzerland, though. I like the system they have, but one thing I never could discover in online records was whether and how much it was subsidized. I'd be surprised and delighted if it wasn't, and ask people over here to take notes. Some things might not be so easy to imitate--the honor system undoubtedly provides some savings in fare collection expenses if your population is honest.
"Well, if you all were on the bus, like you're supposed to be, there'd be no traffic to be disrupted. There might even be express routes, that skip every third stop...."
Yes, yes, and also it leaves room for all the bicyclists. Utopia indeed.
James, in Switzerland you could run almost anything on the honor system and it would work- one of the most extreme examples of how Europeans have a deeply instilled sense of one's place in culture and your obligation to abide by it. I give this example from when I was a student for a semester in Switzerland- I was working in the garage shop on our 'campus' and up the street some kids were playing outside. Come 7pm the church bells rang to mark the hour, and immediately- and I mean without any perceptible delay- those kids stopped playing and headed off to their homes. It was dinner time. Good luck getting a meal if you're hungry outside of regular mealtimes in Switzerland- when we arrived we got off the train and were hungry, but it was about 3:30pm. Restaurants weren't open, too late for lunch, too early for dinner, and they just looked at us oddly for even asking if anyplace else might be open.
ALL public transport is heavily subsidized- from the article: " In the U.S., where government subsidies cover between 57 and 89 percent of operating costs for buses and 29 to 89 percent of those for rail" In Europe it's even more the case and that's a big part of the reason gas costs about three and a half times as much there.
I am intimately involved in public transportation these days, and I'm getting a kick out of these replies.
Those stats in the article are a bit off, from the numbers I see, as most transit systems do manage to pay for their employees, but yes, public transportation gets a bunch of money for infrastructure and sometimes vehicles, just like public monies paid for all those roads that everybody drives their cars and motorcycles on. (You didn't think those roads just magically appeared did you?)
So, we ought to say that all transportation in this country is in part subsidized by the government.
And count yourself lucky that you have the resources to have your own vehicle.
EB, so what are the correct figures? Of course I have the resources for a car, but only one right now, which is difficult in L.A. a used car can be had for a few hundred bucks if that's all you've got. The money for operation isn't much different than the combined cost of public transport and the value of the time lost to it's slowness, and that's just for commuting to the job, never mind that public transportation would be useless for getting my family around on a daily basis unless we never went anywhere but school, work and the grocery store on the way.
So it's not that I don't realize that we also pay for the roads we drive on ( I'm reminded every time I get gas to the time of about 18 cents a gallon here), it's that the public transit only works for about twenty percent of the population in this city because of geography, lifestyle, cost, time, or all of the above.
It's always good to count your blessings, but bear in mind that I come from one of the poorest parts of the country. It's true that the rednecks may have a half-dozen broken cars parked in their yards sometimes, but that's because they're cannibalizing them to keep one or two (or four) running. They do their own work, scavenge in junkyards or keep spares to tear down, and so on and so forth, but they manage it.
So yeah, resources, but also there's an issue of technical know how that you can substitute for money in some cases. And access to junkyards or a place to store spares, which is less common in the city -- but that's a solvable problem with public resources too, if you wanted to approach the problem that way.
Like Douglas, though, I'm curious to hear what numbers are correct. I'm guessing you do know a lot more about this than I do -- I'm not intimately involved in it, I just hate buses.
For the Portland bus system, the subsidy is about 62% (passenger revenue per ride $1.10, subsidy per ride $1.82 for FY 2014).
It should be noted that this doesn't count things like "roads" and "infrastructure". The subsidy is defined as the difference between passenger revenue and operating costs per ride, and operating costs are defined as "Transportation costs and maintenance costs (all related staff and materials). For bus and rail also includes facilities, field ops, fare inspection, field ops admin, and security costs."
That article had a lot of odd numbers as well as using some odd places for their "baseline". Los Angeles? Ha.
Anyway, Jaed is on the right track--one has to look at these systems one by one. They are all different.
Most of the literature in the industry that I see speaks of "recovery". That is, what part of the particular agency's budget the fares pay for. The numbers I've see are from 44% to 18%, and alot in between.
I can't speak to Portland, but No large city existing today could exist without a mass transit system. Sort of like how no tall building could exist with out elevators.
Some, I suppose might say that would be a good thing, but those cities are here to stay.
I don't think anyone was proposing that all buses and municipal light rail lines be eliminated, it's just that when people (and I don't mean EB) act as though if we just had more buses and rail and we should do things like eliminate auto lanes from some roads to accommodate more cyclists (as had been happening here recently), all our traffic problems would go away. They're just so sure they know better than the rest of us.
I don't think anyone was proposing that all buses and municipal light rail lines be eliminated, it's just that when people (and I don't mean EB) act as though if we just had more buses and rail and we should do things like eliminate auto lanes from some roads to accommodate more cyclists (as had been happening here recently), all our traffic problems would go away. They're just so sure they know better than the rest of us.
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