I'd rather quit working and go on welfare than commute by mass transit.

I live out in the country. The only bus service that is close, is the one that picks up people to take them to the Indian Casino. I take the farm truck to town, if I have to pick up something heavy or long. I drive the Geo Metro to pick up groceries or beer, and my 1966 Austin Healey for sporting purposes. Mass transit is when I ride the horse with other people on their horses.

pj:

That's between you and your conscience.

Allen:

Yes, folks who drive responsibly won't suffer.

Mass transit is a notion for people who don't live in "wide open spaces". I'd have to walk for 10 minutes, usually in 100+ degree heat to reach any conceivable mass transit portal. And I live in a normal suburb.

You've got to have mass transit to get them on, first. And in most of this country, it doesn't exist.

And for a case study in what happens when you try to jack up prices while promising to build a mass transit fantasy with that money, I suggest you pay attention to what's going on here in the Upper Left Washington.

The system will catch up to ridership demands once you create them.

oj - Nonsense, mass transit is intrinsically catastrophically costly. It can't catch up to demands.

Carries 5 million riders a day in NYC without much problem.

Here in Chicago we have the CTA. There's a waggish expression that says that there is a core of CTA riders who will ride no matter what, so the CTA gives them 'no matter what' service.

Even in Chicago, 80% of the CTA is a money-losing proposition of major proportions. Only the lakefront bus routes are consistently full. We have lots of busses that are 80% empty going around town, even in the poor neighborhoods. The subways are full in rush am/pm, half-full mid-day, and near deserted otherwise.

And this is in a city that has a relatively high population density (better than LA, not quite Boston). And the suburbs? The PACE bus system specializes in running empty busses all over the region. You can find an empty bus right in your own neighborhood.

We have the usual budget battles, and once again there's ominous warnings that the CTA will crash the whole regional transit budget unless we raise the gas tax, or the sales tax, or something. Meanwhile the expressways are absolutely jammed, and the usual NIMBY nonsense keeps us from building new roads.

Steve:

Boost ridership and they won't lose money

Disgusting, but a good illustration of how ready a would-be tyrasnt longing to place his boot on the necks of his neighbors is to employ the power to coerce and destroy.

Please ponder the extent to which the spiritual effects of individualized transportation inform the national consciousness. It is very well that we are not a people of passive, umbrella-clutching mere riders, meekly waiting for someone else to carry us where they want us to go, when they want to allow us to go there.

Lou: I don't disagree, but trying to justify driving in terms of positive societal effects is just playing into his hands. I like driving, I don't like public transportation in most circumstances, I'm willing to pay for it.

Wow, you anti mass transit types have really put a lot of thought into your position. I thought it was just about the love of convenience, I didn't realize that it rose to the level of a political ideology.

I started a new job in downtown Minneapolis in June, and I take an express bus from my suburban home. I couldn't be happier with it. I don't have to fight traffic, I have time to read the WSJ every morning, plus my consulting company picks up the tab for my busfare.

As the population continues to grow and metropolitan sprawl leads to greater congestion on the commuter freeways, mass transit will increase as the economics become more compelling. I think that the "national consciousness" will do just fine.

Robert:

Never underestimate the capacity to generate an ideology to suit one's personal predilections.

I remember, in my teen years, having to take mass transit In Los Angeles to interview for a job. It took two hours to get there, and even though I got to the interview on time, the first thing the guy asked me was How I got there. When I told him I had taken the bus, he rejected me outright, saying that although I was probably reliable enough, the bus system wasn't good enough for him.

The economic advantage of individual means of transportation is that you burn gas only when you want to go there: mass transit burns gas getting to places in hopes of finding someone to pay for the trip. After picking them up, half the time the bus goes to places they don't want to go in order to get to where they DO want to go, only in the name of hoping to find MORe people who will pay for the privilege of going, half the time, to where THEY don't want to go.

THIS is an efficent way to spend our limited time on this earth?

Ptah:

Let LA impose a congestion tax and that problem will be solved.

OJ: automobiles are our mass transit system. OTOH, there is a lot of room for improvement. We now run 50% "Light Trucks" in new vehicle sales. It would be almost painless to drop that back to its historical level of 10% and to have the Corolla/Civic/Focus class of car (~175", 2800 lbs, 2 liter 4, 30 mpg) be the mean automobile sold.

Hier stehe ish, ich kann nicht anders.

Nope, I'm not giving up. Motorcars are too much a part of our culture, along with sports and guns. We even make a major sport out of racing them. I maintain that cars are part of a seemless robe of what it means to be an American. We could not so Europeanize our culture without inflicting consequences beyond the personal inconvenience of our drivers.

As far as this being a political ideology, it is the ideology of conservatism and freedom, which means it is the absence of ideology. The burdens of production and persuasion are on those who wish to wield the organs of state coercion to transform how the rest of us live.

As long as we're swapping stories about how we handle this matter in our daily lives, let me tell you how I spent a couple of hours this afternoon.

I went to the library, then to the supermarket, the hardware store, and finally to the drugstore, and then back home. Now this is in a large city, well served all kinds of buses and such. I did these things in my A/C'd sports car, zooming past the bank thermometers indicating 101 degrees. Public transportation would have taken me not an hour, but all day, as I could not have carried the books, and the tools, and the groceries (which would have spoiled in the heat) in one trip. The fares would have run around $15, while I used about one gallon of gasoline, not leaving my quarter of the city.

For all that, I hold the spiritual significance of the motor-music to be a more compelling reason to preserve our car culture than mere convenience. I drove when I wanted, where I wanted, and with whom I wanted. The founders would have understood; the pioneers would have understood. Where are the conservatives here?

Mass transportation is old technology. Herding people like cattle. Most of us wouldn't want to give up our convenient, comfortable cars to stand at bus stops or line up for the subway, and why should we when we don't have to. I'm looking forward to better personal transportation, not trying to restore a mass transit system we discarded as soon as something better came along.

There are those who like to pretend they're living in the 17th century and live in tiny, cramped old houses without electricity. Let them. Others want to churn their own butter and make their own shoes. Let them.

Meanwhile we should stop propping up mass transit system like Amtrak that lose money. If the railroads were privatized, perhaps they’d come up with comfortable systems for taking us and our cars long distances and fast speeds.

That might be something I'd look into.

oj,
Mass transit is rarely cost effective for many of the reasons cited in above comments. In my metro area, buses loose about $4-5 per passenger carried which increases taxes and reduces other county services. Also, heavily used mass transit is an obvious target for terrorists (see Madrid, London and Israel).

How about trusting in free markets? Allowing jitneys (vans and mini-buses that pick up and drop off on request) could greatly reduce fuel consumption and the number of vehicles on the road at no cost in taxes. Thanks to cell phones and the internet, it's easy to match up riders and vehicles and let them negotiate fares.

How about encouraging information based businesses to increase their use of telecommuting? Much office work could be handled from home or from suburban office parks with high speed data pipes and teleconferencing.

Finally, one role for government could be the construction of bikeways. Bike commuting isn't practical in very hot or cold weather or in rain, but can provide a small reduction in fuel consumption.

There are probably some situations where classic mass transit makes sense, but we should avoid imposing socialist one-size-fits-all schemes that have failed repeatedly and that make us more vulnerable to our enemies.

David:

Yes, increase the passengers and the cost per drops. There are no free markets in transportation. Or do you lay down the roadway ahead of you?

I took mass transit today. It was great. The train went directly from where I was to where I wanted to be and back again. It was cheap on the trip in (the guy at the entrance just told me to throw in whatever change I had in my pockets) and free on the trip out. The train was nicely crowded both ways, but not uncomfortable.

Of course, I had to drive for an hour and a half to get to the train and then get back home. Still preferred the car but the taxpayers really did me a solid today.

Multiply times tens of millions of commuters and you start to make a difference.

New Hampshire has probably fewer buses than any state (except possibly VT) east of the Mississippi.

Try starting a campaign there before spreading the infection.

Of course the MTA carries 5 million a day - I'd ride it if I lived there. But I don't. And you better believe the subway is preferable to the bus, any day. I would rather drive in Manhattan than take the bus.

In most cities, the political 'forces' behind mass transit screw it up beyond belief. That, plus Lou's ringing defense of the prairie spirit, doom its chance with the overall population.

Now, if a conservative designed a mass transit system....

Mass transit will not be appropriate for every trip humankind takes, but enough of them to matter.

The problem with mass transit in the hub-spoke cities that have developed with the rise of the Interstate system in the past 40 years is that unlike places like New York, where both the business and shopping centers are adjacent to each other, in the cities where you have a highway loop around town, the shopping areas have migrated out to those loops and nearby feeder roads, while a number of businesses also have moved their offices out of downtown. But the new transit systems as designed still adhere to the idea that everyone wants to travel from an outer area to downtown, as opposed to routes that travel from one outer area to another.

The 29-year-old D.C. subway is a perfect example. If you want to travel, say, from Tyson's Corner in Virgina to Rockville in Maryland, by car it's about a 10-mile trip. Take mass transit, and you've got to get to the subway station a mile or so away, then go all the way downtown, then come back out into the suburbs again. While Metro moves faster than downtown D.C. traffic, and a lot of times faster than the Beltway, a detour like that is not going to get many people out of their cars.

If cities are going to expand their transit systems and actually have people use them, they have to design them to connect outlying areas more directly, and not force everyone using them to have to make a connection through a central city hub.

increase the [ number of units sold, in this instance, passengers] and the cost drops

For some products, yes; for mass transit, no. To significantly increase ridership given the way we currently distribute ourselves, you'll need many more routes that all lose money. To make more routes that make money you'll have to change the way we distribute ourselves. You can't make this one up on volume, oj.

Changing the distribution is built-in, because commuters will have to get to the departure points, as David pointed out.

Mass transit is a non-starter.

Travelling by auto cannot realistically be made so expensive that people will want to board a bus, which is the only mass-transit option in most urban areas.

If the cost of gas or taxes increased significantly, people would just buy cheaper, smaller, lighter cars, and pay whatever taxes get imposed - up to the point where they simply change the the people who make tax law.

It would be just as realistic or useful to argue about how many angels can fit on the head of a pin, as this topic, since both are going to remain completely theoretical.

Michael:

You don't need to use just gas taxes--you can also use congestion fees, parking taxes, & tolls. American cities will follow London's lead.

People will complain bitterly, and pay the fees and tolls.

NYC is about the only place in the U.S. that I know of where it's really too expensive for the common person to keep a car.

Michael:

Hopefully. It would allow us to replace income taxes with sin taxes to some extent.

People will complain bitterly, and pay the fees and tolls.

NYC is about the only place in the U.S. that I know of where it's really too expensive for the common person to keep a car.

Lou, you can have both a car and mass transit. I do own a car, it isn't an either/or. Your shopping scenario is the perfect one to highlight the benefits of personal transportation. However commuting to work, where it is the same trip at the same time every day, shows the benefits of mass transit. Not in every situation, but in the cases where the travel is along a well-traveled and congested roadway, mass transit is ideal. Especially when the buses can access HOV lanes or drive down the shoulder when all the other traffic is gridlocked.

Michael, your scenario sounds right for people who have enough excess income to eat the added fuel bills, but many of the people commuting on the freeway every day are driving 1980's era beeters to low paying jobs, and any added expense will hurt a lot. With worldwide wage deflation, American middle class workers will find themselves increasingly squeezed by rising oil prices. Last year I correctly predicted $50 oil and was ridiculed on this blog. I also predicted $80 oil this year, and was told that it would soon be heading south of $30. We're a lot closer to $80 than $30.

Even if you can afford to commute by car everyday, which I can, why pay the added expense in gas and having to replace a car every 5 years if you don't have to? When did thrift become un-American?

Another comment back to Lou. Driving a car may make you feel more independent, but you are still dependent on the larger society to pay for the roads you drive on and provide the other services you need in order to get around.

What happens when the bridge you cross every day is down for repairs, and you have to drive 15 miles out of the way and sit in bumper to bumper traffic for an hour. How independent do you feel then? Or when the roads are snowed in and you can't travel until the plows clear your neighborhood? Or when the voters turn down a bonding bill to widen the freeway, and your commute gets longer and longer due to congestion?

Independence is an illusion.

Robert:

Tut-tut...roads, highways, bridges are put there by infrastructure fairies at no cost to anyone.

That's a strong point OJ made. Automobiles are subsidized extensively indirectly.