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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34989 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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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.

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