While it's true that a 12t bus does more road damage than a 2t car, I'd be surprised that the bus does more damage than 100 cars. Or, even 50 cars if we assume an average occupancy of two per car.
My source for the claim that road damage scales like the 4th power of axle weight is a US GAO report, which I've seen widely cited. If that's the case, then a single 12t bus does as much damage as 1300 2t cars. Or, to reply to @Curiosity killed, a bus full of people does 13 times as much road damage per passenger as if they were all in individual cars.
Of course, 100 cars cause more congestion than one bus, and produce more emissions.
However, as we learn more, the issue is becoming more urgent. There is this article from today's Guardian (link) reporting that the way economics considers the world needs to change and urgently.
From the article, quoting the Treasury review:
The world is being put at “extreme risk” by the failure of economics to take account of the rapid depletion of the natural world and needs to find new measures of success to avoid a catastrophic breakdown, a landmark review has concluded.
Prosperity was coming at a “devastating cost” to the ecosystems that provide humanity with food, water and clean air, said Prof Sir Partha Dasgupta, the Cambridge University economist who conducted the review. Radical global changes to production, consumption, finance and education were urgently needed, he said.
And our transport choices feed into the depletion of the natural world, as a far greater problem than many other choices we can make.
@Leorning Cniht - I'm not sure your sums are right, from the calculations now done on engineering courses that build in those environmental damages into bus or other transit design. But I didn't do them, I've only heard about them.
@Leorning Cniht - I'm not sure your sums are right, from the calculations now done on engineering courses that build in those environmental damages into bus or other transit design. But I didn't do them, I've only heard about them.
If you have a source for road damage from heavy vehicles that disputes the widely-quoted fourth power law, I'd be interested to hear it. I think my sums are right, but it's perfectly possible that my initial assumption may have been superseded by a better model.
Why should you, the libertarian, be forced to pay - through worse health, lower house prices, higher transport costs - for my individual choices? You'd have every right to present me with a bill for the extra costs you've incurred.
On the other hand, a moral person recognizes that selfishness does often mean that others are inconvenienced, harmed, and they have to spend time and money clearing up other people's shit. And they're not going to want to inflict that damage on their community.
Obviously I'm B rather than A, but if putting the case for change in purely monetary terms gets us the change we need, then okay.
The nice thing about monetary terms is that it's quantifiable. It's not a perfect metric by any means, and I think it's always worth thinking a bit about the result your monetary comparison gives you rather than just accepting it at face value uncritically, but it's useful to have a quantifiable way of measuring the amount of shit various possible choices produce.
If we don't have some quantifiable metric that we can agree on, then what we have is a rather unedifying and unproductive battle of flailing assertions.
You can't change human nature by government edict.
You assume all decisions are based on maximizing benefit to self. @orfeo's egg story puts paid to that. People do take other things into account beyond pure selfishness. And that is part of human nature.
I would also suggest that car use tends to increase our more sedentary lifestyles* and leads to dormitory towns, which are societal ills not added into the calculations. I have in my time walked, bussed, cycled and commuted to work using the Tube, and travelled around for my job in several of those roles, one of which was peripatetic across London. I worked on the tube regularly, using a laptop on my lap. I wasn't the only one. Another one I cycled, and usually, across the short distances we were mostly travelling, faster than the drivers.
Yes, when I lived in London, I found that cycling was by far the fastest way for me to get around. It did make coming home from B&Q a bit interesting once or twice, though.
I've never been able to work on the tube with a laptop without impinging on the space of the people sitting next to me or opposite me - let alone trying do use a laptop when there's someone standing in the aisle. I have, on occasion, made small edits to talks I was due to give and the like, but it was neither easy nor comfortable.
The only place I've been able to reasonably use a laptop on transport is on an intercity train, sitting at one of the seats arranged as a four around a table. Which wouldn't have worked if there was someone opposite me wanting to use a laptop too.
I don't find shopping to be the issue many of you are suggesting. I would normally shop several times during the week, although I'm limiting my trips out currently.
I suspect this is a function of the number of people you're shopping for. When I was a graduate student, I'd cycle past Sainsbury's on my way home, and would stop, with a 60l backpack, typically 2-3 times a week. But in those days, I didn't have any obligations in the evening most days, so it didn't matter if I was half an hour later getting home, and I was just shopping for me.
With a wife and kids, my shopping volume has increased quite considerably, but my carrying capacity has not increased (I'm less fit than I was then, so it's probably decreased a bit.) My time constraints have also increased considerably - I have more evening commitments, Mrs C has more evening commitments, and the kids each have evening commitments. Put together, these produce a significant absence of "a spare half hour or so to pop in to the shops" during the week, and I'm not even sure that if I shopped every day, I could carry a week's shopping home in a week.
That's consistent with all the hidden subsidies paid to car owners.
That's the other bit I don't understand. Anything paid for from general taxation (rather than at point of use) amounts to a subsidy for users by non-users.
Yet all these left-leaning Shipmates who believe as a matter of general principle that government should pay for more things through general taxation are going on about subsidies as if they're a bad thing...
Yet all these left-leaning Shipmates who believe as a matter of general principle that government should pay for more things through general taxation are going on about subsidies as if they're a bad thing...
We're against subsidies going to bad things, not that subsidies are in themselves bad things. Do keep up.
Subsidies that support the public good are good things. Subsidies that benefit a few and draw funding away from things that benefit society are less so. It's difficult to see how individual liberty to kill others has as much social benefit as public transport which has a much smaller impact on society but at the cost of reduced individual liberty (the time taken to get somewhere increases).
Also hidden subsidies need to be talked about in the open when you're trying to compare two options, especially on price. If someone is bitching about a rail system that costs the government money, it is definitely important to bring up the point that the infrastructure for cars is not free.
Also hidden subsidies need to be talked about in the open when you're trying to compare two options, especially on price. If someone is bitching about a rail system that costs the government money, it is definitely important to bring up the point that the infrastructure for cars is not free.
Quite. The point is to compare on an equal playing field, and then decide what things are worth subsidizing - where do public funds do the most good?
Alan chooses to characterize private cars as "individual liberty to kill others" and public transport as "a smaller impact on society" at the cost of "reduced individual liberty (increased journey times)".
This might be a passable bit of sloganeering, but it lacks a certain substance that would be required from an argument.
His last bit (journey times) isn't even true in all cases. In congested city centres (London is a fine example, but it is by no means alone), too many people want to travel in too small a space for individual cars to be a tenable solution. If you try and put everyone in a car, journey times become infinite because of gridlock.
But when it is true, increased journey times is an impact on society. If it takes longer to get to places, and becomes harder to get to places, that affects society, just like traffic noise affects society, or pollution affects society, or traffic accidents affect society.
Society is not different from "all of the people". If you increase everyone's travel time, that was a bad impact on society (it may well come with benefits that outweigh this cost, but you don't get to just ignore this cost). If you increase the travel time for some people, and reduce it for others - well, now we're in to the same kind of argument as we have for redistributive taxation. Taking some of Peter's money to heat Paul's house isn't terribly different from slowing Peter's journey in order to ensure that Paul can get somewhere at all. It's a perfectly fine principle, but you need to have a transparent discussion in order to ensure that what you're doing is helping Paul out in a fairly efficient manner, without doing unnecessary harm to Peter.
There has been, internationally, an ongoing issue with judging everything on a monetary basis: the difficulty of putting a monetary value on such things as compassion, human contact or environmental damage has meant accounting systems have regarded them as negligible. Hence the Das Gupta report for the Treasury (link).
I'm not sure it's still true, but when I was training as an accountant decades ago, I found it incredibly frustrating that the usual mathematical modelling for various accountancy functions was only accurate for up to a decade, which obviously meant everything had short-termism built in, when I knew of many things that needed to be considered over a much longer time-scale.
There are big drawbacks to only considering costs in monetary terms.
As to the public transport issues, I asked the railway engineer offspring and she said she couldn't remember the calculations in full, they came from a lecture some time ago, and conversations with a fellow PhD student and no, she wasn't going to look it up. However, in looking for information, I found this Dept of Transport 2018 (pdf link) document considering traffic estimates in Great Britain which is interesting in reviewing trends.
In congested city centres (London is a fine example, but it is by no means alone), too many people want to travel in too small a space for individual cars to be a tenable solution. If you try and put everyone in a car, journey times become infinite because of gridlock.
Some of course might say that there's only congestion because government hasn't provided enough roads. But that's as wrong as saying that public transport is only unattractive because government hasn't provided/funded enough of it.
You have to look at real costs and real benefits. In city centres the cost of the land to park a car on is much higher than in rural areas. But still the delusion persists that one mode of transport or another is The Answer everywhere.
Some of course might say that there's only congestion because government hasn't provided enough roads.
To which the answer usually becomes "which of these historic buildings should we remove to make way for a bigger road"? Not every city is full of historic buildings, but there are a sufficient number of buildings that we'd like to keep that make widening the roads sufficiently to eliminate the congestion something of a non-starter.
Or we could spend a vast amount of money, and hide the roads underground. It would make the cities much more walkable or cyclable, if you hid all the cars, but the cost would be rather prohibitive.
You can't change human nature by government edict.
You assume all decisions are based on maximizing benefit to self.
Yes, but each individual also decides what is beneficial to themselves. There's no reason why that has to be a purely economic decision for everybody.
Which kind of defeats your argument.
I’m arguing about what the majority do. Your rebuttal was that not everybody acts that way. I agreed. I’m not sure how my argument is invalidated thereby.
The problem is that we don’t agree about which things are bad.
I don't even think that's true. I think the arguments are about how heavily to weight different kinds of badness.
Everyone agrees that being able to get to where you want to go when you want to go there, in a short time, is a good thing, and changes that make that harder are bad. Everyone agrees that more people being able to travel is a good thing. Everyone agrees that congestion and pollution are bad.
But changes that just make things better are scarcer than unicorns. Most changes have some effects that we'll all agree are good, and some other effects that we'll all agree are bad. We just disagree on how to weight the sums.
But at least if we're all open and agree about what the subsidies are, and how we're weighing the good and bad points, we have grounds for a rational discussion.
But at least if we're all open and agree about what the subsidies are, and how we're weighing the good and bad points, we have grounds for a rational discussion.
"Rational discussion" suggests to me an approach that is more technocratic than political. That recognises that different forms of transport work better in areas with different densities and land-use patterns. And it's a worthy aim.
But achieving it means consigning to the dustbin where it belongs the prejudice in favour of public transport as the socially-responsible solution.
The problem is that we don’t agree about which things are bad.
The problem is not lack of agreement but the displacement of rational thought by ideological consensus. Too many otherwise-intelligent people who have all swallowed the dogma that buses are good (and should thus be subsidised) and cars are bad (and thus shouldn't).
Among the reasons given above are because cars provide benefits for individuals but need roads paid for by society (like buses) and cars pollute (like buses) and cars congest the road (like buses).
Sorry chaps, I may be overstating it here. Just get sick of all the leftist crap sometimes. LC is being very reasonable and (as often) making a lot of sense.
Then stop creating it and trying to pin it on other people.
Literally no one has argued for a one size fits all, bus good car bad solution. The argument has always been for a mix, but a mix that is more accessible, more reliable, safer and less polluting. Public transport is a crucial part of that, and when it works (London, for example) it means a city can function.
Oxford's Park and Ride scheme, where the council have deliberately throttled car use in the town and instead provide large car parks on the periphery linked to frequent and fast bus journeys into the centre is a perfect example of what can be achieved within the current strictures.
But at least if we're all open and agree about what the subsidies are, and how we're weighing the good and bad points, we have grounds for a rational discussion.
But achieving it means consigning to the dustbin where it belongs the prejudice in favour of public transport as the socially-responsible solution.
<snip>
Sorry chaps, I may be overstating it here. Just get sick of all the leftist crap sometimes. LC is being very reasonable and (as often) making a lot of sense.
Sorry, what? What prejudice? On what are you basing that?
As @Doc Tor said, you are arguing with strawmen. Try engaging with the actual arguments.
Take a different example then. Why are in work benefits always considered a problem of the individual rather than a corporate subsidy ?
If your business model only works if you pay so little the state needs to top up your worker’s income, it is you rather than your workers who are being subsidised overall.
Because we think, for example, the state should subsidise food - but somehow don’t want to admit we’re doing that.
Likewise, housing benefit is more a subsidy to landlord than tenant. If your business is based on charging rents that are not affordable - we were we happy to let everyone rot on the streets you’d go bust.
Take a different example then. Why are in work benefits always considered a problem of the individual rather than a corporate subsidy ?
If your business model only works if you pay so little the state needs to top up your worker’s income, it is you rather than your workers who are being subsidised overall.
Because we think, for example, the state should subsidise food - but somehow don’t want to admit we’re doing that.
Likewise, housing benefit is more a subsidy to landlord than tenant. If your business is based on charging rents that are not affordable - we were we happy to let everyone rot on the streets you’d go bust.
"Rational discussion" suggests to me an approach that is more technocratic than political. That recognises that different forms of transport work better in areas with different densities and land-use patterns. And it's a worthy aim.
But achieving it means consigning to the dustbin where it belongs the prejudice in favour of public transport as the socially-responsible solution.
I think you're overstating this a bit. However rational a discussion we have, there's going to be a point where we weigh the countervailing interests of different groups of people, and that's ultimately going to be a political choice. But I think that kind of choice belongs at the end of the process rather than as dogma at the start.
@Doc Tor mentions Oxford's park and ride scheme, which has done a good job of making the city centre more usable. It also suffers from a bad case of bloody-stupid-itis: you can purchase parking in the park-and-ride car parks with a credit card from a ticket machine. But you can't buy a bus ticket with a credit card at the same time, despite the fact that the vast majority of people who park in the car park are about to get on the bus.
@Doc Tor mentions Oxford's park and ride scheme, which has done a good job of making the city centre more usable. It also suffers from a bad case of bloody-stupid-itis: you can purchase parking in the park-and-ride car parks with a credit card from a ticket machine. But you can't buy a bus ticket with a credit card at the same time, despite the fact that the vast majority of people who park in the car park are about to get on the bus.
Eh, pretty certain that when I last was there in 2019, I could get a combined ticket. If you look at the first option (family ticket), it allows you to do just that.
Eh, pretty certain that when I last was there in 2019, I could get a combined ticket. If you look at the first option (family ticket), it allows you to do just that.
There was some reason that didn't work for us when we were there (in 2019, as well). Perhaps because the family ticket doesn't allow us enough children? It's an outside possibility that we didn't actually park at the park-and-ride, but merely wanted to catch the bus from it.
I certainly remember being rather surprised that I wasn't able to buy a suitable ticket from the big machine at the bus stop, followed by being even more surprised that my UK card with contactless logo didn't actually work for contactless payment, followed being disappointed but less surprised that my US card with the equivalent feature didn't work in the UK, followed by being very grateful to the nice couple that lent us a fiver so that we could get to a place that had a cashpoint...
One of the things improving public transport is that it improves life for car users as well. The more people switch to public transport the fewer cars on the road and the less congestion.
One of the things improving public transport is that it improves life for car users as well. The more people switch to public transport the fewer cars on the road and the less congestion.
Perhaps. It depends what you do - if you add a couple of new bus routes, and a load of people decide that they can now take the bus rather than drive, then you've reduced congestion, which probably means things are better for the remaining car users.
If you do what Oxford is doing, there's a fairly hefty use of the stick involved: Oxford's plan is to make it increasingly difficult and expensive to take a car anywhere near the centre of Oxford. It doesn't make things better for the remaining car users, and is not intended to - it's intended to make things better for all the people on foot or bicycle.
One of the things improving public transport is that it improves life for car users as well. The more people switch to public transport the fewer cars on the road and the less congestion.
Perhaps. It depends what you do - if you add a couple of new bus routes, and a load of people decide that they can now take the bus rather than drive, then you've reduced congestion, which probably means things are better for the remaining car users.
If you do what Oxford is doing, there's a fairly hefty use of the stick involved: Oxford's plan is to make it increasingly difficult and expensive to take a car anywhere near the centre of Oxford. It doesn't make things better for the remaining car users, and is not intended to - it's intended to make things better for all the people on foot or bicycle.
I'd think it's better for drivers not to go into the city center and get bogged down in gridlocked traffic. By keeping them out the city is helping them get where they're going faster.
If you do what Oxford is doing, there's a fairly hefty use of the stick involved: Oxford's plan is to make it increasingly difficult and expensive to take a car anywhere near the centre of Oxford. It doesn't make things better for the remaining car users, and is not intended to - it's intended to make things better for all the people on foot or bicycle.
It's still the case that the more people take their cars off the roads in response to the stick the better the actual experience of driving in becomes for those for whom driving in remains the better option despite the stick.
I'd think it's better for drivers not to go into the city center and get bogged down in gridlocked traffic. By keeping them out the city is helping them get where they're going faster.
If, before the changes are made, the drivers are choosing to drive through the city, then presumably they think getting bogged down in gridlock is the most efficient way of getting where they're going (otherwise they'd go the other way).
Making "the other way" faster (widening a bypass etc.) helps them. It's possible, but not guaranteed, that eliminating traffic terminating in the city reduces congestion enough on the periphery that "the other way" becomes faster.
But just "keeping them out of the city" by itself is by no means guaranteed to help them get to where they're going faster. And it isn't particularly intended to.
Drivers are not using the city as a short-cut to somewhere else. It's their destination. So by making them park their cars on the outskirts and then catch a fast bus into the centre, they're removing car journeys - the danger they present, the pollution they cause, and the parking they need.
A further benefit is that the public transport system improves for everyone, not just because of increased investment and more reliable travel-times, but because previous car drivers will complain if the service they're now using is inferior to the one they used to have.
I’m reminded of the saying about democracy being two wolves and a sheep deciding what’s for dinner. How does their equal ownership work out for the sheep?
Actually, democracy is more like two wolves and a hundred sheep deciding what's for dinner. In what passes for capitalist democracy, the sheep get to vote on which of them will be the entree...
On the question of subsidies and externalities, I happened to listen a podcast episode today (the show is Gastropod) about how a huge amount of the USA's agriculture occurs in desert regions and how the water supply for said agriculture is handed out so cheaply (despite the extensive engineering required to secure the water supply reliably) that there's almost no incentive to choose water-efficient crops.
This is a perfect illustration of how policy settings are used to shape the playing field right now, in what we can falsely think of as 'normal' conditions. This is every bit as much a 'government edict' as anything else.
The current situation probably isn't sustainable because ultimately it won't matter how cheap the water is if there simply isn't enough water available. So sooner or later the cost of water will have to be taken into account when it's currently not. It would also be possible to create positive incentives to switch to water-efficient farming - actual subsidies. Where certain crops are grown might also shift, when the benefits of all that sun are finally outweighed by the difficulty of irrigation.
Huge parts of our economy are affected by what we choose to make people pay for and what we choose to let people have at a discount from the true cost or without paying (sometimes because assessing the economic value is trickier). Until recently there was no need to pay for dumping gaseous waste into the atmosphere and so everyone happily did it without thinking about it.
On the question of subsidies and externalities, I happened to listen a podcast episode today (the show is Gastropod) about how a huge amount of the USA's agriculture occurs in desert regions and how the water supply for said agriculture is handed out so cheaply (despite the extensive engineering required to secure the water supply reliably) that there's almost no incentive to choose water-efficient crops.
This is a perfect illustration of how policy settings are used to shape the playing field right now, in what we can falsely think of as 'normal' conditions. This is every bit as much a 'government edict' as anything else.
The current situation probably isn't sustainable because ultimately it won't matter how cheap the water is if there simply isn't enough water available. So sooner or later the cost of water will have to be taken into account when it's currently not. It would also be possible to create positive incentives to switch to water-efficient farming - actual subsidies. Where certain crops are grown might also shift, when the benefits of all that sun are finally outweighed by the difficulty of irrigation.
Huge parts of our economy are affected by what we choose to make people pay for and what we choose to let people have at a discount from the true cost or without paying (sometimes because assessing the economic value is trickier). Until recently there was no need to pay for dumping gaseous waste into the atmosphere and so everyone happily did it without thinking about it.
Exactly this.
Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize winning economist who has written extensively about how we shape markets and hidden subsidies. I will see if I can dig out a suitable reference. I have a book of his somewhere.
Either way, you have articulated really well the whole concept. So many of the critiques of "Socialism" argue against subsidies of various forms whilst ignoring completely the other subsidies that are hidden.
This is a very effective rhetorical technique but doesn't help you to get to the truth.
By keeping them out the city is helping them get where they're going faster.
I know nothing about the Oxford park-and-ride system, but I do know that very often in similar circumstances the "faster" doesn't take into account waiting time.
So if driving from the park-and-ride car park to the city centre would take 30 minutes with traffic and the bus only takes 20 because there's less traffic, that's claimed as a faster journey - but if you have to wait 15 minutes for the bus then it's actually taking 35 minutes, which is slower.
Don't get me wrong, I think park-and-ride schemes are firmly in the Good Thing category. Especially when the P&R car park is free, as most are around here, making it considerably cheaper than trying to park in the city centre. But the issue I mention above is another example of ignoring or downplaying the negative costs of a system because it happens to be the one you want to see implemented.
Whenever circumstances force me to drive into a city centre, I'm struck by just how unsuited to cities cars are, despite the lengths we've gone to to design cities around cars.
And whenever I go into a city by any means I'm struck by how so much of what I dislike about cities is a result of designing for them.
It seems like a two-way lose to me. Currently most cities are horrible to get around by any mode.
But you're downplaying the cost in pollution and danger and noise and congestion and providing city centre car parking. In fact, you're ignoring it.
By no means. I've said recently (can't remember of it was this thread or one of the similar ones) that technological change is essential in order to reduce pollution*, and in the post you're replying to I said that P&R schemes are a good thing, which is because they reduce congestion. I also favour underground parking (no lost space or visual cost above ground) and significant pedestrianisation of city centres.
City centers are seldom quiet places anyway, so I'm not convinced noise is a significant cost.
I would love to see more and better public transport, especially in cities where the majority of journeys follow predictable routes into and out of the center, and I fully expect that providing it would reduce car usage. But I want that to happen because car users have been offered something that is genuinely better than what they have now, not because car use has been made so much worse that other transport options merely start to look better in comparison.
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*= though I'll point out again that private cars (especially modern ones, which are surprisingly clean) are a relatively minor cause of climate change. The real baddies there are agriculture (because of deforestation) and freight transport (especially lorries and container ships).
But you're downplaying the cost in pollution and danger and noise and congestion and providing city centre car parking. In fact, you're ignoring it.
So here's the thing. It's not obvious how to compare journey time to a city centre full of cars. How much environmental gain is worth delaying everyone by 20 minutes every day? I don't think the answer is clear, which means that I think one should present both the gains and losses separately.
@Marvin the Martian is absolutely correct that wait time must be considered when considering the journey times for public transport. It doesn't actually matter to me whether I spend 10 minutes sitting on a bus, or 10 minutes waiting for a bus to come - both of those are 10 minutes of my journey. In the general case, you must add at least half the service spacing as wait time. In some use cases, you might need to add more than that.
Part of the slowness of busses is having to compete for road space with private vehicles. You need to take into account the improvements there if there are fewer such private vehicles inside the cities.
Whether I'm on the bike, on foot, on the bus or driving, the main thing slowing me down inside urban areas is private cars.
But you're downplaying the cost in pollution and danger and noise and congestion and providing city centre car parking. In fact, you're ignoring it.
So here's the thing. It's not obvious how to compare journey time to a city centre full of cars. How much environmental gain is worth delaying everyone by 20 minutes every day? I don't think the answer is clear, which means that I think one should present both the gains and losses separately.
@Marvin the Martian is absolutely correct that wait time must be considered when considering the journey times for public transport. It doesn't actually matter to me whether I spend 10 minutes sitting on a bus, or 10 minutes waiting for a bus to come - both of those are 10 minutes of my journey. In the general case, you must add at least half the service spacing as wait time. In some use cases, you might need to add more than that.
Or you could just read the timetable. Better still, download the app which gives the real-time positions of the buses and their estimated arrival at your stop.
Part of the slowness of busses is having to compete for road space with private vehicles.
Logically that won't slow them down any more than it does every other vehicle on the road, so if buses are still slower than the other vehicles on the road that slowness must be for reasons other than competing for road space.
The real reason is because they keep stopping to pick up and set down passengers. That won't change if there are fewer cars - quite the reverse in fact, because if they have more passengers to pick up and set down then the stops will take longer.
Part of the slowness of busses is having to compete for road space with private vehicles.
True. But it's also true that buses, by their nature, have to stop a lot more often to set down or pick up passengers, and they often tend to take a less direct route (the bus that picks you up at your street corner will probably visit several other people's street corners before it takes the main road in to town). Dedicated bus lanes can go a long way to allowing buses to bypass congestion, but you're right that you have to include changes in journey times because of a change in congestion in your calculations.
(On all the cycle commutes I've had in the UK, I used to beat the bus that travelled the bulk of my route, because it would stop frequently to set down or pick up passengers, and I wouldn't. If I was going to consider taking a car, I'd need to have left the night before!)
*= though I'll point out again that private cars (especially modern ones, which are surprisingly clean) are a relatively minor cause of climate change. The real baddies there are agriculture (because of deforestation) and freight transport (especially lorries and container ships).
And I'll point out that your sources are terrible, and utterly self-serving.
Bluntly put, you're wrong. In the EU (of which we were a member when these figures were drawn up), 30% of emissions were due to transport. Of which 70% were due to road transport. 60% of that was due to passenger cars, and only 38% due to lorries.
The OECD reckon that agriculture is responsible for 17% of global emissions, and a further but lesser amount (7-14%) due to land use change. So, no: it's agriculture itself which is the main problem, not deforestation. Globally, 25% of emissions are due to transport, of which 72% was from road transport. Container ships, dirty as they are, are not a major source of emissions.
Some engagement with these figures would be good, rather than just ignoring them.
Part of the slowness of busses is having to compete for road space with private vehicles.
Logically that won't slow them down any more than it does every other vehicle on the road, so if buses are still slower than the other vehicles on the road that slowness must be for reasons other than competing for road space.
The real reason is because they keep stopping to pick up and set down passengers. That won't change if there are fewer cars - quite the reverse in fact, because if they have more passengers to pick up and set down then the stops will take longer.
In my experience, in all modes of transport I'm held up by traffic congestion, not busses stopping at bus stops.
Comments
My source for the claim that road damage scales like the 4th power of axle weight is a US GAO report, which I've seen widely cited. If that's the case, then a single 12t bus does as much damage as 1300 2t cars. Or, to reply to @Curiosity killed, a bus full of people does 13 times as much road damage per passenger as if they were all in individual cars.
Of course, 100 cars cause more congestion than one bus, and produce more emissions.
From the article, quoting the Treasury review:
And our transport choices feed into the depletion of the natural world, as a far greater problem than many other choices we can make.
If you have a source for road damage from heavy vehicles that disputes the widely-quoted fourth power law, I'd be interested to hear it. I think my sums are right, but it's perfectly possible that my initial assumption may have been superseded by a better model.
The nice thing about monetary terms is that it's quantifiable. It's not a perfect metric by any means, and I think it's always worth thinking a bit about the result your monetary comparison gives you rather than just accepting it at face value uncritically, but it's useful to have a quantifiable way of measuring the amount of shit various possible choices produce.
If we don't have some quantifiable metric that we can agree on, then what we have is a rather unedifying and unproductive battle of flailing assertions.
You assume all decisions are based on maximizing benefit to self. @orfeo's egg story puts paid to that. People do take other things into account beyond pure selfishness. And that is part of human nature.
Yes, when I lived in London, I found that cycling was by far the fastest way for me to get around. It did make coming home from B&Q a bit interesting once or twice, though.
I've never been able to work on the tube with a laptop without impinging on the space of the people sitting next to me or opposite me - let alone trying do use a laptop when there's someone standing in the aisle. I have, on occasion, made small edits to talks I was due to give and the like, but it was neither easy nor comfortable.
The only place I've been able to reasonably use a laptop on transport is on an intercity train, sitting at one of the seats arranged as a four around a table. Which wouldn't have worked if there was someone opposite me wanting to use a laptop too.
I suspect this is a function of the number of people you're shopping for. When I was a graduate student, I'd cycle past Sainsbury's on my way home, and would stop, with a 60l backpack, typically 2-3 times a week. But in those days, I didn't have any obligations in the evening most days, so it didn't matter if I was half an hour later getting home, and I was just shopping for me.
With a wife and kids, my shopping volume has increased quite considerably, but my carrying capacity has not increased (I'm less fit than I was then, so it's probably decreased a bit.) My time constraints have also increased considerably - I have more evening commitments, Mrs C has more evening commitments, and the kids each have evening commitments. Put together, these produce a significant absence of "a spare half hour or so to pop in to the shops" during the week, and I'm not even sure that if I shopped every day, I could carry a week's shopping home in a week.
Yet all these left-leaning Shipmates who believe as a matter of general principle that government should pay for more things through general taxation are going on about subsidies as if they're a bad thing...
Quite. The point is to compare on an equal playing field, and then decide what things are worth subsidizing - where do public funds do the most good?
Alan chooses to characterize private cars as "individual liberty to kill others" and public transport as "a smaller impact on society" at the cost of "reduced individual liberty (increased journey times)".
This might be a passable bit of sloganeering, but it lacks a certain substance that would be required from an argument.
His last bit (journey times) isn't even true in all cases. In congested city centres (London is a fine example, but it is by no means alone), too many people want to travel in too small a space for individual cars to be a tenable solution. If you try and put everyone in a car, journey times become infinite because of gridlock.
But when it is true, increased journey times is an impact on society. If it takes longer to get to places, and becomes harder to get to places, that affects society, just like traffic noise affects society, or pollution affects society, or traffic accidents affect society.
Society is not different from "all of the people". If you increase everyone's travel time, that was a bad impact on society (it may well come with benefits that outweigh this cost, but you don't get to just ignore this cost). If you increase the travel time for some people, and reduce it for others - well, now we're in to the same kind of argument as we have for redistributive taxation. Taking some of Peter's money to heat Paul's house isn't terribly different from slowing Peter's journey in order to ensure that Paul can get somewhere at all. It's a perfectly fine principle, but you need to have a transparent discussion in order to ensure that what you're doing is helping Paul out in a fairly efficient manner, without doing unnecessary harm to Peter.
Yes, but each individual also decides what is beneficial to themselves. There's no reason why that has to be a purely economic decision for everybody.
I'm not sure it's still true, but when I was training as an accountant decades ago, I found it incredibly frustrating that the usual mathematical modelling for various accountancy functions was only accurate for up to a decade, which obviously meant everything had short-termism built in, when I knew of many things that needed to be considered over a much longer time-scale.
There are big drawbacks to only considering costs in monetary terms.
As to the public transport issues, I asked the railway engineer offspring and she said she couldn't remember the calculations in full, they came from a lecture some time ago, and conversations with a fellow PhD student and no, she wasn't going to look it up. However, in looking for information, I found this Dept of Transport 2018 (pdf link) document considering traffic estimates in Great Britain which is interesting in reviewing trends.
Some of course might say that there's only congestion because government hasn't provided enough roads. But that's as wrong as saying that public transport is only unattractive because government hasn't provided/funded enough of it.
You have to look at real costs and real benefits. In city centres the cost of the land to park a car on is much higher than in rural areas. But still the delusion persists that one mode of transport or another is The Answer everywhere.
I am absolutely certain that no one has said this on this thread. And probably not in real life either.
Which kind of defeats your argument.
To which the answer usually becomes "which of these historic buildings should we remove to make way for a bigger road"? Not every city is full of historic buildings, but there are a sufficient number of buildings that we'd like to keep that make widening the roads sufficiently to eliminate the congestion something of a non-starter.
Or we could spend a vast amount of money, and hide the roads underground. It would make the cities much more walkable or cyclable, if you hid all the cars, but the cost would be rather prohibitive.
I’m arguing about what the majority do. Your rebuttal was that not everybody acts that way. I agreed. I’m not sure how my argument is invalidated thereby.
The problem is that we don’t agree about which things are bad.
I don't even think that's true. I think the arguments are about how heavily to weight different kinds of badness.
Everyone agrees that being able to get to where you want to go when you want to go there, in a short time, is a good thing, and changes that make that harder are bad. Everyone agrees that more people being able to travel is a good thing. Everyone agrees that congestion and pollution are bad.
But changes that just make things better are scarcer than unicorns. Most changes have some effects that we'll all agree are good, and some other effects that we'll all agree are bad. We just disagree on how to weight the sums.
But at least if we're all open and agree about what the subsidies are, and how we're weighing the good and bad points, we have grounds for a rational discussion.
But achieving it means consigning to the dustbin where it belongs the prejudice in favour of public transport as the socially-responsible solution.
The problem is not lack of agreement but the displacement of rational thought by ideological consensus. Too many otherwise-intelligent people who have all swallowed the dogma that buses are good (and should thus be subsidised) and cars are bad (and thus shouldn't).
Among the reasons given above are because cars provide benefits for individuals but need roads paid for by society (like buses) and cars pollute (like buses) and cars congest the road (like buses).
Sorry chaps, I may be overstating it here. Just get sick of all the leftist crap sometimes. LC is being very reasonable and (as often) making a lot of sense.
Then stop creating it and trying to pin it on other people.
Literally no one has argued for a one size fits all, bus good car bad solution. The argument has always been for a mix, but a mix that is more accessible, more reliable, safer and less polluting. Public transport is a crucial part of that, and when it works (London, for example) it means a city can function.
Oxford's Park and Ride scheme, where the council have deliberately throttled car use in the town and instead provide large car parks on the periphery linked to frequent and fast bus journeys into the centre is a perfect example of what can be achieved within the current strictures.
Sorry, what? What prejudice? On what are you basing that?
As @Doc Tor said, you are arguing with strawmen. Try engaging with the actual arguments.
AFZ
If your business model only works if you pay so little the state needs to top up your worker’s income, it is you rather than your workers who are being subsidised overall.
Because we think, for example, the state should subsidise food - but somehow don’t want to admit we’re doing that.
Likewise, housing benefit is more a subsidy to landlord than tenant. If your business is based on charging rents that are not affordable - we were we happy to let everyone rot on the streets you’d go bust.
Well argued.
I think you're overstating this a bit. However rational a discussion we have, there's going to be a point where we weigh the countervailing interests of different groups of people, and that's ultimately going to be a political choice. But I think that kind of choice belongs at the end of the process rather than as dogma at the start.
@Doc Tor mentions Oxford's park and ride scheme, which has done a good job of making the city centre more usable. It also suffers from a bad case of bloody-stupid-itis: you can purchase parking in the park-and-ride car parks with a credit card from a ticket machine. But you can't buy a bus ticket with a credit card at the same time, despite the fact that the vast majority of people who park in the car park are about to get on the bus.
Eh, pretty certain that when I last was there in 2019, I could get a combined ticket. If you look at the first option (family ticket), it allows you to do just that.
There was some reason that didn't work for us when we were there (in 2019, as well). Perhaps because the family ticket doesn't allow us enough children? It's an outside possibility that we didn't actually park at the park-and-ride, but merely wanted to catch the bus from it.
I certainly remember being rather surprised that I wasn't able to buy a suitable ticket from the big machine at the bus stop, followed by being even more surprised that my UK card with contactless logo didn't actually work for contactless payment, followed being disappointed but less surprised that my US card with the equivalent feature didn't work in the UK, followed by being very grateful to the nice couple that lent us a fiver so that we could get to a place that had a cashpoint...
Perhaps. It depends what you do - if you add a couple of new bus routes, and a load of people decide that they can now take the bus rather than drive, then you've reduced congestion, which probably means things are better for the remaining car users.
If you do what Oxford is doing, there's a fairly hefty use of the stick involved: Oxford's plan is to make it increasingly difficult and expensive to take a car anywhere near the centre of Oxford. It doesn't make things better for the remaining car users, and is not intended to - it's intended to make things better for all the people on foot or bicycle.
I'd think it's better for drivers not to go into the city center and get bogged down in gridlocked traffic. By keeping them out the city is helping them get where they're going faster.
If, before the changes are made, the drivers are choosing to drive through the city, then presumably they think getting bogged down in gridlock is the most efficient way of getting where they're going (otherwise they'd go the other way).
Making "the other way" faster (widening a bypass etc.) helps them. It's possible, but not guaranteed, that eliminating traffic terminating in the city reduces congestion enough on the periphery that "the other way" becomes faster.
But just "keeping them out of the city" by itself is by no means guaranteed to help them get to where they're going faster. And it isn't particularly intended to.
A further benefit is that the public transport system improves for everyone, not just because of increased investment and more reliable travel-times, but because previous car drivers will complain if the service they're now using is inferior to the one they used to have.
Actually, democracy is more like two wolves and a hundred sheep deciding what's for dinner. In what passes for capitalist democracy, the sheep get to vote on which of them will be the entree...
This is a perfect illustration of how policy settings are used to shape the playing field right now, in what we can falsely think of as 'normal' conditions. This is every bit as much a 'government edict' as anything else.
The current situation probably isn't sustainable because ultimately it won't matter how cheap the water is if there simply isn't enough water available. So sooner or later the cost of water will have to be taken into account when it's currently not. It would also be possible to create positive incentives to switch to water-efficient farming - actual subsidies. Where certain crops are grown might also shift, when the benefits of all that sun are finally outweighed by the difficulty of irrigation.
Huge parts of our economy are affected by what we choose to make people pay for and what we choose to let people have at a discount from the true cost or without paying (sometimes because assessing the economic value is trickier). Until recently there was no need to pay for dumping gaseous waste into the atmosphere and so everyone happily did it without thinking about it.
Exactly this.
Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize winning economist who has written extensively about how we shape markets and hidden subsidies. I will see if I can dig out a suitable reference. I have a book of his somewhere.
Either way, you have articulated really well the whole concept. So many of the critiques of "Socialism" argue against subsidies of various forms whilst ignoring completely the other subsidies that are hidden.
This is a very effective rhetorical technique but doesn't help you to get to the truth.
AFZ
I know nothing about the Oxford park-and-ride system, but I do know that very often in similar circumstances the "faster" doesn't take into account waiting time.
So if driving from the park-and-ride car park to the city centre would take 30 minutes with traffic and the bus only takes 20 because there's less traffic, that's claimed as a faster journey - but if you have to wait 15 minutes for the bus then it's actually taking 35 minutes, which is slower.
Don't get me wrong, I think park-and-ride schemes are firmly in the Good Thing category. Especially when the P&R car park is free, as most are around here, making it considerably cheaper than trying to park in the city centre. But the issue I mention above is another example of ignoring or downplaying the negative costs of a system because it happens to be the one you want to see implemented.
And whenever I go into a city by any means I'm struck by how so much of what I dislike about cities is a result of designing for them.
It seems like a two-way lose to me. Currently most cities are horrible to get around by any mode.
By no means. I've said recently (can't remember of it was this thread or one of the similar ones) that technological change is essential in order to reduce pollution*, and in the post you're replying to I said that P&R schemes are a good thing, which is because they reduce congestion. I also favour underground parking (no lost space or visual cost above ground) and significant pedestrianisation of city centres.
City centers are seldom quiet places anyway, so I'm not convinced noise is a significant cost.
I would love to see more and better public transport, especially in cities where the majority of journeys follow predictable routes into and out of the center, and I fully expect that providing it would reduce car usage. But I want that to happen because car users have been offered something that is genuinely better than what they have now, not because car use has been made so much worse that other transport options merely start to look better in comparison.
.
*= though I'll point out again that private cars (especially modern ones, which are surprisingly clean) are a relatively minor cause of climate change. The real baddies there are agriculture (because of deforestation) and freight transport (especially lorries and container ships).
So here's the thing. It's not obvious how to compare journey time to a city centre full of cars. How much environmental gain is worth delaying everyone by 20 minutes every day? I don't think the answer is clear, which means that I think one should present both the gains and losses separately.
@Marvin the Martian is absolutely correct that wait time must be considered when considering the journey times for public transport. It doesn't actually matter to me whether I spend 10 minutes sitting on a bus, or 10 minutes waiting for a bus to come - both of those are 10 minutes of my journey. In the general case, you must add at least half the service spacing as wait time. In some use cases, you might need to add more than that.
That's dependent on the weather, surely?
Whether I'm on the bike, on foot, on the bus or driving, the main thing slowing me down inside urban areas is private cars.
Or you could just read the timetable. Better still, download the app which gives the real-time positions of the buses and their estimated arrival at your stop.
Logically that won't slow them down any more than it does every other vehicle on the road, so if buses are still slower than the other vehicles on the road that slowness must be for reasons other than competing for road space.
The real reason is because they keep stopping to pick up and set down passengers. That won't change if there are fewer cars - quite the reverse in fact, because if they have more passengers to pick up and set down then the stops will take longer.
True. But it's also true that buses, by their nature, have to stop a lot more often to set down or pick up passengers, and they often tend to take a less direct route (the bus that picks you up at your street corner will probably visit several other people's street corners before it takes the main road in to town). Dedicated bus lanes can go a long way to allowing buses to bypass congestion, but you're right that you have to include changes in journey times because of a change in congestion in your calculations.
(On all the cycle commutes I've had in the UK, I used to beat the bus that travelled the bulk of my route, because it would stop frequently to set down or pick up passengers, and I wouldn't. If I was going to consider taking a car, I'd need to have left the night before!)
And I'll point out that your sources are terrible, and utterly self-serving.
Bluntly put, you're wrong. In the EU (of which we were a member when these figures were drawn up), 30% of emissions were due to transport. Of which 70% were due to road transport. 60% of that was due to passenger cars, and only 38% due to lorries.
The OECD reckon that agriculture is responsible for 17% of global emissions, and a further but lesser amount (7-14%) due to land use change. So, no: it's agriculture itself which is the main problem, not deforestation. Globally, 25% of emissions are due to transport, of which 72% was from road transport. Container ships, dirty as they are, are not a major source of emissions.
Some engagement with these figures would be good, rather than just ignoring them.
In my experience, in all modes of transport I'm held up by traffic congestion, not busses stopping at bus stops.