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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34973 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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the average person paying $716 a month on new car payments

Doing a bit of googling to confirm this: that's for a five year loan. A new car lasts a few times as long as that. Google says the average age of a modern vehicle is 11.4 years. So pay $716 for 5 years and then get a paid off car for a hell of a lot longer. And most Americans buy used anyways. I guess my point is this crushing financial burden falls on relatively few people and only strictly by choice if they frequently buy new cars.

The average person isn't paying that much for a car. The average person who recently purchased a new car is, but they are a minority.

“Transit: The Urban Parasite"

I nominate O'Toole King of the Libertarians.

But more seriously: I can't find it now, but I saw a Federal agency's list of per passenger mile fuel consumption for various means of transportation and public busses were shocking bad. Worse than a single person driving a big truck. A full bus is very fuel efficient per passenger mile. But most city busses are mostly empty most of the day, so they are horribly inefficient uses of fuel on average. Anecdotally I've seen almost empty public busses driving around all the towns I've lived in my entire life. Maybe O'Toole is on to something here.

Flush train cars blow actual cars out of the water on every metric we care about

The things you care about.

Doing a bit of googling to confirm this: that's for a five year loan. A new car lasts a few times as long as that. Google says the average age of a modern vehicle is 11.4 years. So pay $716 for 5 years and then get a paid off car for a hell of a lot longer.

Thanks for crunching that out, others have also pointed out my table napkin math was (predictably) off, so I switched to O’Toole’s Bureau of Economic Administration stat that in 2017 drivers spent $1.15 trillion on cars.

I saw a Federal agency's list of per passenger mile fuel consumption for various means of transportation and public busses were shocking bad. Worse than a single person driving a big truck. A full bus is very fuel efficient per passenger mile. But most city busses are mostly empty most of the day, so they are horribly inefficient uses of fuel on average.

You’ve described the long and the short of it really: transit is much more effective than cars when full, but less efficient when empty, which raises the question if we should keep pushing policies that distort the market away from the most efficient form of transit, like single family zoning, municipal parking minimums, and diverting sales and property tax to road infrastructure.

The things you care about.

Affordability, efficiency, pollution, and use of public space are things that people on all sides of this debate are comparing, from Randal O’Toole to the most militant /r/fuckcars poster.

transit is much more effective than cars when full, but less efficient when empty

Surely one can find reports of fuel expenditures by transit systems and divide by passenger miles. That would give a ballpark idea.

But most city busses are mostly empty most of the day, so they are horribly inefficient uses of fuel on average.

Correct. But you have to run them (or at least some of them, and it's not always obvious which ones), or people drop out of the system entirely and you lose ridership from the more-utilized buses.

Which is why you have to calculate efficiency based on typical ridership rather than assuming everything is going to be at full capacity all the time. One of those urbanist YouTube channels ran a video a while back complaining about Chicago's transit system, particularly one suburban spot on the Metra that had trains running at intervals so infrequent that if you missed the train you'd be stuck there for two hours before the next one came. Yeah, obviously it's an argument against taking the train if there's a possibility you get stuck at work late and are SOL. But while running trains at fifteen minute intervals on every line, and having enough lines to reach most of the in-demand places may increase ridership, you're also going to be running a lot of empty or near-empty trains.

I’d need to see the workings out here. If the carbon usage of a bus is as bad as ten times the normal car, it starts to come better than a car at ten passengers. Or slightly more since not all car journeys are single passenger (although most are). Whatever about US cities that would be rare in most countries for city or regional buses to be that empty - think a London double decker off peak.

There's a point when the quantitative change in the schedule becomes a qualitative one. These near-empty trains greatly increase ridership at other hours, because more people are willing to use a service they can rely on.

No argument from me there; I'm just saying that these empty trains need to be factored into efficiency calculations.

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