Buses? PAH. Begone with your filthy peasant-wagons A bus is a fantastically efficient way to move a large number of people. Buses however are not. They are a dreadful system for getting people to work. The difference is not as subtle as that sentence may make it seem. What lies behind it is that when you want to move a large number of people from one place to another all at …
I did this back when I rode the bus. I was curious how efficient buses actually are. It turns out that in my city on average the passengers in the bus were 'burning' more fuel than the ones in the cars. IIRC it worked out to 10-12 passenger miles per gallon (sorry, I'm too lazy to convert to midget furlongs per olympic pool.)
Most city centres and densely populated areas would be in a permanent state of gridlock without the relief provided by public transport. The lack of 'acceptably good' public transport has huge implications in fuel consumption, pollution, citizens health, time spent while commuting, productivity, road accidents, parking space availability, you name it.
Regarding the efficiency argument, the closer you get to a densely populated area the most efficient public transport becomes. I've never been in the city centre in a bus with less than ten passengers, and double or treble that minimal number of passengers for peak hours. I live in a suburb of a smallish (~250,000 people) city in Northern Spain but also have some experience with public transport in other Spanish and European cities. I've used public transport in Madrid, Bilbao, Barcelona, Cork, Dublin, London, Paris, Nice, Rome and several other places, and the same thing happens everywhere.
Cabs: They aren't either totally efficient. There is time spent waiting for customers. The further they are from densely populated areas, the longer they have to wait for new clients, the least efficient they're. Something similar happens with peak hours. In peak time cabs are very efficient. The same thing happens with buses.
Parking: How much do you pay daily for parking? How long does it take you to find parking space? How much fuel are you wasting in this Musical Chairs game for adults?
In my opinion the efficiency of a public transport system has to be considered globally, obtaining an average from every part of the system. Incidentally, the same -but reversed - is true about private cars. The closer they are to the city centre, the less efficient they become.
Considering these factors, it probably makes sense for City councils and Governments to subsidize public transport. They're probably receiving back dozens of times what they invested. And now that I think of it, a perpetually congested city centre would probably send commerce away to Malls built in the outskirts, removing a source of taxes from City councils. Ditto about residents.
But here's the flip side of the coin. When a city gets dense, things get closer together, meaning it becomes less and less necessary to take motorized transit at all unless you defeat the purpose of density by transiting across the city or in and out of it. This again brings up the bicycle element.
You forgot that as cities get dense, land prices soar up, pushing all but -sometimes- the very wealthy out of city centres. So most of the people that want to [work, buy, study, go to a doctor, ...] there have to come from outside those city centres, worsening the traffic problem and negating your point.
There are many other factors involved and discussing them all would probably take weeks, but in my opinion it's clearly a chaotic problem. Many complex balances interacting with each other. We know some of the attractors, though, and one of them is that a good public transport system shows a stubborn tendency towards making things better both for citizens and government.
Or if not completely a fallacy, it's a state which very, very rarely exists when there are assorted alternatives.
The green brigade regularly trot out "if it wasn't for us all the cities would be gridlocked", and use the phrase as a scare tactic. If it really was so imminent all the major cities would have shut down long ago.
What actually happens is people have a tolerance for how far they commute. I worked on a project at Motorola where we spent two months understanding how people commute and their attitudes towards it.
The magic figure is 70 minutes.
Below that people think it's a fair door to door travelling time, beyond that it's unacceptable and they will look for a different method or even job. The perfect commute is one you don't remember, and the ideal is a ten minute walk. Second best is a ten minute drive. Introducing a need to rely on other people to create the transport (taxi, train, bus) adds frustration.
As an aside we did this work in 2002 to took at what technology we might want to sell commuters. As most people spend at least 40 minutes of their commute sitting on a bus or train we thought there might be something in these "tablet" things but the product management people dismissed the idea.
Back to the point, the reason we don't get gridlock is that before we get to that stage we get journeys regularly taking so long they pass the 70 minute pain point at which time people find alternatives.
So we end up with a situation where cities are often on the verge of gridlock but never actually get there.
How does the system then account for externalities like job crunches and housing shortages that could prevent people from having alternatives when the comfort zone is breached. In a job crunch, one may not be willing to switch jobs since they don't want to lose their job in hand. In a housing shortage, the long commute may be the only one available or affordable, meaning the price to move is too high or it simply isn't an option. And since people value face time, telecommuting may not be in the cards, either. And if fuel prices rise again, the cost of the commute may eat into the household budget, reducing commuting tolerance.
So the worst-case scenario is one where commuters are in an unacceptable but unavoidable situation.
...please don't forget to take into account the needs of visitors to your home town. You know, tourists, people who come on business, people visiting relatives and friends, etc. Revenue generators, all of them, among other habits and qualities that are generally beneficial to the locals' lifestyle (well, IMHO).
I doubt visitors can be expected to have the right app in the right language for your area on their smartphones or, indeed, to spend a fortune on exchanging data packets with the company operating driverless taxies or with Uber-like private car owners. When I travel, privately or on business, I care less for coming to a bus station less than a minute before departure than for knowing in advance which bus to take, where the stop is, and how much it will cost (preferably without involving PayPal for every bus ticket) to get where I need to go. Figuring out ad-hoc, personalized solutions in an unfamiliar place without the possibility to ask around or make a simple phone call and explain oneself to a human does not look attractive at all. And I would also want a friendly, convenient environment for the visitors to my town - I like it when people come to visit.
I am not saying it kills the whole idea, just that it is much more complex than you getting to and from work. I see this missed all the time. Where I live, there are toll roads but no toll booths. When you use a toll road your license plate is scanned at entry and exit points and you - the vehicle owner - will get a bill in the mail - pay it over the Internet, by phone, at a post office, whatever. Very advanced hi-tech, works beautifully. Just don't drive on toll roads in a rental car though - the bill will be mailed to the rental company, usually long after you leave - and they will bill you for processing fees, rightly. Oops...
"Just don't drive on toll roads in a rental car though - the bill will be mailed to the rental company, usually long after you leave - and they will bill you for processing fees, rightly. Oops..."
That's when it pays to do the homework. If you know you're going somewhere, research it and see what you need to know. If you're going to a place where the roads have ETC, that may cue you to look for a car rental agency that rents ETC-enabled cars (Avis, for example, has ETC support). That said, there are very few roads that are ETC-only, and those that exist usually have alternative routes for those without ETC since it's not exactly universally supported.
WTF is going on with this website? Every time I read an article like this, it makes it less likely I'll bother returning.
Does the Reg realise that London isn't the centre of the universe?
Does the Reg realise that the Daily Heil turns out self-centred crap like this every day and makes a better job of it?
Loads of cities do this, with some success. I think there are about 6 of these dotted around York, and they get quite a lot of use. It's relatively cheap for a bus ticket, buses are frequent, and avoids having to take your car round car-unfriendy medieval streets and council parking at £2.00 an hour. There are still traffic problems and lots of congestion, but the city would grind to a standstill without Park and Ride.
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