[another_someone]

quote:Originally posted by VAlibrarian
As an American living in Virginia, I believe there is another reason why public transit is lacking here. Really there is no public transportation in my local area. Some politicians are very hostile towards it. Have you ever heard a Republican say anything good about any form of transportation other than air or car? I have not. They do suggest that we can eventually replace gasoline with alcohol or hydrogen, but they do not like the idea of asking people to make the sacrifice of giving up the individual convenience of the car for something that works on someone else's schedule. They are willing to spend billions of dollars on highway construction, but not a dime on bus, train, or subway service.

We are not yet serious about possible solutions to our petroleum addiction. Those solutions are not necesarilly going to be cheaper and more convenient than what we have now, but we are eventually going to have to do them anyway. Or maybe we could all have rocket sleds that work by magic if we wish hard enough.

chris wiegard

I would actually contend that airlines (as distinct from private air travel) come under the classification of public transport – but ofcourse popular prejudice will not regard it as such.  If it is usable, and people are willing to pay good money to use it, then it cannot be regarded as public transport; this seems to be the popular prejudice.

The reason public airlines do work is because of the enormous distances that they cover, which makes the relative inefficiencies of the network insignificant in comparison the to advantages of scale they produce (the only perceivable benefit of public transport, apart from the lack of personal capital investment, is the advantage of scale associated with pooled resources)..

As I said, the biggest problem the USA has with public transport is the overall space population density across the USA.

You may complain about a lack of public transport availability in your area, and I do not know what the local population density in your particular area is, but I can well imagine there are vast areas within the USA where population densities are sufficiently low that the inefficiencies of providing public transport to such areas (by any measure of inefficiency – not only in monetary terms) would substantially outweigh any efficiency of scale.

As a comparison, it make absolutely no sense to build a massive factory that can efficiently produce millions of units of some gadget, when there is only a market for 100 units – such a factory may well be regarded as more efficient in an optimum situation (i.e. running at full capacity), but is grossly inefficient when operating at 1000th or less of its optimum capacity.  The transportation system is like a factory for moving people (and goods) from one place to another, and it has to be designed to be optimum for the scale of production it needs to achieve, and where that scale is small, it is best that it operate on a small scale.

As for being willing to adjust journey times to available schedules – this will have an impact not only upon what you are able to do for yourself, but what others are able to do for you.  If, every time you call out a plumber or electrician, they have to take into account the public transport schedules, this will not only effect the length of time you have to wait for them to arrive to fix your problem, it will also effect the number of customers the plumber or electrician can service in a day, and thus the cost he has to charge each customer in order that he can make an adequate living.

Ofcourse, there are lots of other areas where we can improve efficiencies of scale by reducing personal choice.  For instance, do we really need such a wide range of clothing and furniture styles available to us.  If we drastically reduced the number of styles of these items, we could then increase the scale of manufacture, and thus the efficiency of manufacture; but we could also improve the efficiency of the distribution network (including the transportation costs) because there would be fewer lines of stock that retailers need to hold, fewer sources of supply, less wastage in terms of unpopular lines, etc.  If people are really that worried about efficiency, then why have they not suggested such (by the way, I believe that much of this is clearly in line with Marxist philosophy, so it has actually been suggested before, but not part of the Environmentalist creed).  Oh, and ofcourse, you should prohibit people from building low density communities that cannot be efficiently serviced by high capacity transportation systems.

One interesting issue regarding efficiencies of scale that is happening here in the UK (I do not know how this is reflected in the USA) is the move towards ever more centralised super-large schools and hospitals (the same issue arises in a slightly different guise with regard to super-large out-of-town shopping centres and hypermarkets).  Clearly, bigger is (at face value) more efficient, but the knock on effect of centralising these facilities in order to gain the advantages of size is to increase the demand that people place on the transportation systems in order to reach these highly efficient super-large facilities.  Sometimes, simply looking for economies of scale is not sufficient to measure the overall efficiency of the system.

George