Sixteen Volts

One thing that I find rather puzzling in the English language is the way that it distinguishes between cars, vans and SUV's. Assuming that I have understood it correctly, an SUV is not a type of a "car" but a completely separate category, a strange distinction whose reason I don't quite comprehend any more than saying that a "hatchback" would not be a type of a car. So if somewhere there is a sign that says "cars only", it doesn't mean what I'd think it means. The Finnish language make no such distinction, but pretty much anything that has four wheels and is driven around is an "auto". (On the other hand, Finnish has different words for "playing" depending on whether you play flute, chess or tag, a distinction that the English-speakers perhaps find superfluous.)

Of course, in practice for me this is a moot point, since for me a nonexistent car is the very best car in the sense that it doesn't cost anything, and it never breaks down or needs any gas or maintenance. Finding a parking spot for it is also no hassle, no matter where I go. But as enthusiastically as I bang the drum for public transit, I still have to say that the points made by Steve Dutch in his new essay "Why People Don't Use Mass Transit" should be pretty damn obvious to anybody with common sense, and it's about time to understand that any attempts to develop mass transit by denying these obvious truths are doomed to fail miserably. Even in a big city, it is just not possible to create a mass transit system that could possibly be better than owning an automobile for a large number of people and families, and it is futile to pretend otherwise.

A couple of individual important points, plus my additional comments to them:

Once someone decides to buy a car, the economic balance shifts sharply in favor of driving. The only way to shift the economic balance in favor of mass transit is to create a system where it becomes feasible for large numbers of people to give up owning a car.

This is by far the most important point that professor Dutch makes, and the basis of pretty much everything else. Once you own a car and have to pay all its fixed costs, you might as well use it as much as you can, since the marginal cost and convenience of each extra mile is so low compared to using public transit. Hence, the only feasible way to advance mass transit is to identify people who are currently at the margin so that owning a car is a slightly better deal for them than giving up the car and taking public transit instead, and making public transit more attractive for these people so that they will do this trade. It is futile to even try to convert people for whom taking a car is a many times better deal than using public transit. Attempts to promote mass transit for these people through coercion will inevitably fail.

If traveling by car really does have high indirect costs not shared by public transportation, the case for making all mass transit free is so compelling you really have to wonder why advocates of mass transit don't propose it.

The simple reason why we don't advocate this is, of course, that doing so would make buses and subways urine-drenched congregation spots for drunken bums, the homeless and other assorted underclass scum, thus driving away the middle class from the public transit the same way that they were driven out of American cities by policies that gave the streets to these undesirables. Also, the transit system must enforce merciless zero tolerance against all disturbances of social order within it, instantly throwing out all panhandlers, hygienically challenged bums, graffiti "artists", rowdy teenage gangs and basically anybody who does not behave the way the middle class would behave.

As for the proper price of a ticket, we can make an economic argument that says that an overall efficient mass transport system will necessarily operate at a loss, because the marginal cost of adding one more passenger is so low compared to the marginal benefit (for the national economy, not to the transit system itself) of doing so. In this light, I would like to point out the basic mistake that the public transit opponents tend to make. That is, counting only the costs of having mass transit, while ignoring the costs of not having mass transit. One political cartoon I once saw summarized this attitude perfectly by showing a picture of a highway full of cars with the caption "Necessary investment", and next to it, a picture of a bus with the caption "Useless subsidy".

If a mass transit system of a large metropolitan city (for example, Gotham, Opal City or Metropolis) operates at a loss of (say) a billion dollars a year, I would consider this to be money god damn well spent if this saves the city and its inhabitants a billion dollars in building and maintaining roads and parking, plus five billion dollars for many inhabitants who thus don't need to own, drive and park cars at all. Of course, it certainly doesn't follow that all inefficiency is good, but the system should be made to run as efficiently as possible, while accepting that the system will produce profit only indirectly. (Once again, the phenomenon of "seen and not seen".) As for that ticket price, perhaps the single tickets should match the average cost per passenger, but an unlimited monthly pass shouldn't cost more than a hundred bucks or so, a pittance compared to the costs of owning and maintaining a car.

Also, since a major cause of urban sprawl and congestion is the middle class moving to the suburbs, the obvious cure is to eliminate the problems that drive the middle class out.

I could not agree more with this. However, we merely need to think about the people and groups who would make this policy politically impossible, to suddenly understand a lot better why so many cities are in trouble and the connotations that the words "inner city" have in America.

Corollary: Affluent Customers Will Not Use Mass Transit. It's not that they're selfish, or that they don't care about the environment. It's not cost-effective. The higher your salary, the more wasteful mass transit is.

So true. It is about time for the public transit advocates to understand that a car is a car is a car, and therefore when you try to reduce the number of cars, the resources to make people to ditch their cars and use public transit must be targeted to wherever they produce the biggest payoff. Converting a rich man to use public transit doesn't save the environment any more than converting a poor man to use public transit, but the latter is orders of magnitude easier to do. Converting one rich man or ten poor men to use public transit, now that is an absolute no-brainer which one we should try to do for the same price.

When transporting a group, cars almost always beat mass transit. Mass transit systems that fail to recognize that the unit of travel is the group, not the individual, are doing more to promote automobiles than Detroit ever could.

Also an God-honest truth, long neglegted in many places due to short-sightedness. The Toronto Transit System offers a day pass that allows the whole family unlimited travel in buses and subways for a day. Now guys, keep your eye on the overall picture and drop the silly requirement that it has to be a family with at most two adults, and allow any group of people to travel together this way.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Monday, August 21, 2006 at 4:01 PM