[randoomed]

Yes and no. Cars are indeed the fastest way to travel, if we disregard some aspects like the time needed to park and throughput limits. (also disregarding very large distances where high speed trains and airplanes out compete them)

So for spread out places with lost of space cars will usually be the fastest.

However if we look at dense city centres you have a lot of people competing for parking and a lot of people competing for road throughput.

Say we want to move from A to B, assuming infinite throughput the car is fastest. Take the same route, but it can handle only 200 cars/hour and 10000 people want to take it, we end up with a lot of cars waiting for each other. In this case, slower but more efficient modes of travel will be faster at getting all these people to their destination.

This leads us nicely to the Downs–Thomson paradox. When people in the above scenario start to take other modes of transport it reduces the load on our bottleneck. Eventually reaching an equilibrium where the speed of different modes of transport balances out (as people stop switching from one mode to the other)

The hate for traffic calming is an interesting point, as it assumes cars are the only thing that exists. Unfortunately our cars don't exist in a vacuum, but interact with other object in the world like buildings, and people. The goal of traffic calming is to make it so that other things are protected from cars. (mainly by lowering speed in places where there is lots of other stuff, you wont see traffic calming on a highway)

[AnthonyMouse]

> This leads us nicely to the Downs–Thomson paradox. When people in the above scenario start to take other modes of transport it reduces the load on our bottleneck. Eventually reaching an equilibrium where the speed of different modes of transport balances out (as people stop switching from one mode to the other)

The premise here is that travel time can be the only trade off, but suppose we make a different one: Stop charging fares for mass transit. Then more people take it because it costs less rather than because it's faster and it can be less expensive (and only slightly slower) even when the roads are minimally congested.

[Xylakant]

Public transport is already largely cheaper than owning a car in many places, yet people drive. One good example to study is Germanys 50 EUR Ticket - now 58 EUR. It's a flat rate for all of Germanys public transport, including regional trains. You can get anywhere in Germany with this, and 58 EUR is not even remotely achievable as monthly cost for a car. Yet, while it has increased ridership, the majority of people drive.

The problem is that transportation system quality matters more for a lot of people. The problem ends up as people owning a car for the last mile - that is from the rapid transit to their porch. And once they own a car, the calculus changes - you already incure the cost for the car.

So what you need is a reliable way to get door to door - and that requires more than slapping down a few light rail tracks. It requires connections that cover the last bit as well - and they will often run unprofitable. In the end, building such a system requires the (political) will to regard public transport as a common good infrastructure like road that gets paid from taxes and is not considered an enterprise that (could potentially) make money. In the end, this could also be made free, but free alone will not make that happen.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Public transport is already largely cheaper than owning a car in many places, yet people drive.

This is not a binary distinction. If you save $0.20 by taking public transport but it takes an hour longer, of course people drive. If you save $3 by taking public transport and it only costs you five minutes, that's different math.

> You can get anywhere in Germany with this, and 58 EUR is not even remotely achievable as monthly cost for a car.

When most people have a car you have to compare it not to the amortized cost of owning a car but the marginal cost of driving one you already have.

The majority of trips might be suitable for public transport but then people have a car because it's such an inconvenience to go to Costco and carry back everything you buy there on a bus, or they occasionally go somewhere the bus doesn't. So they get a car and then the insurance, tax, depreciation, etc. are all sunk costs and to get them to take the bus instead of driving themselves it has to beat the cost of gas.

Which it can, if you make it zero. Which in turn increases ridership, allowing you to justify more routes, which reduces latency, which causes even more people to take mass transit. By making mass transit more attractive instead of making driving less attractive.

> It requires connections that cover the last bit as well - and they will often run unprofitable.

Or you can just handle 85% of the cases that would have a justifiable amount of ridership and then let people drive a car or get an Uber in the 15% that would be mostly disused, instead of leaving it how it is now where people drive the majority of the time.

[cyberax]

> Which it can, if you make it zero.

But you can't. Transit costs A LOT, its costs are just pushed onto car owners.

Instead, we should be honest and price it at the full 100% recovery rate, with 100% capital cost return. People will then start to think: "Should I continue paying that $20 per trip on a light rail, or should I get a car?"

"bUT poOR peoPLE@@!!!" - poor people also deserve comfort. I'm all for sponsoring car purchases for poor people and/or giving them money to buy transit passes at full cost.

[AnthonyMouse]

> But you can't.

Well sure you can. We know how much it costs, the budgets are public. Completely zeroing out fares would be a single-digit percentage of the government budget. Meanwhile it would save the public money on net, because collecting the cost as taxes has lower overhead than operating a parallel fare collections infrastructure. And it benefits drivers by giving them exactly what they've always wanted -- an incentive for other people to use mass transit:

https://theonion.com/report-98-percent-of-u-s-commuters-favo...

> Instead, we should be honest and price it at the full 100% recovery rate, with 100% capital cost return. People will then start to think: "Should I continue paying that $20 per trip on a light rail, or should I get a car?"

Which is exactly the problem with your plan. If you build a rail line and set the price at $20/trip then people don't use it, so the amortized cost of the rail line becomes $30/trip because you have to pay for all the same fixed costs with fewer riders. But a $30 fare reduces ridership even more and soon there is no mass transit which in turn makes it suck to drive because there are too many people in cars and your commute is 20 miles in two hours.

Whereas if you set the price to zero, the actual cost per trip which is now being covered by taxes comes out to $4/trip, because at lower cost you get higher ridership and more usage to spread the fixed costs over. Which in turn means less traffic congestion on the roads for the people in cars.

> I'm all for sponsoring car purchases for poor people and/or giving them money to buy transit passes at full cost.

You're all for subsidies as long as they're paying the full cost? Subsidies are the thing where they're not paying the full cost.

Moreover, you want the same incentive for everyone -- if a free fare would get someone at the 70th percentile income to take the subway instead of a car, give it to them so they do that.

The converse where you use means testing is not only bringing in high administrative costs, it creates a poverty trap where making a little more money causes you to lose the subsidy and thereby removes your incentive to do it. Means testing is effectively a scheme to impose high marginal tax rates on the poor.

[cyberax]

> Well sure you can. We know how much it costs, the budgets are public.

Nope. A realistic public transit network can NEVER be as efficient as a car network in a city. It's mathematically impossible, unless you sabotage your city so much, it's a hellscape (e.g. Manhattan).

> Completely zeroing out fares would be a single-digit percentage of the government budget.

So would be giving everyone a (cheap) car.

> Which is exactly the problem with your plan. If you build a rail line and set the price at $20/trip then people don't use it

Good, then don't build it! Easy peasy. Price is a GREAT signal. Subsidies, hidden fees, misplaced incentives and other crap lead to suboptimal outcomes.

You basically have a circular argument: transit is needed because it allows density, and density is good because it allows transit. And since we need transit, it must be cheap.

> But a $30 fare reduces ridership even more and soon there is no mass transit

Great, we need exactly that.

> which in turn makes it suck to drive because there are too many people in cars and your commute is 20 miles in two hours.

Nope. People will adapt and start to move out office space out of Downtowns.

And yes, this can work even at a gargantuan scale. Greater Houston Area has comparable population to New York City, yet it has faster commutes and far better living conditions.

Ideally, though, cities should stay reasonably small. 300k seems to be the sweet spot from the efficiency standpoint.

> Which in turn means less traffic congestion on the roads for the people in cars.

Nope. It just doesn't. Research shows that more transit use does NOT decrease traffic, except in very narrow cases (on arterials immediately parrallel to fast transit). Moreover, over time it leads to MORE traffic, as transit brings in density, and density results in more traffic.

> You're all for subsidies as long as they're paying the full cost?

I'm OK with giving poor people money so they can THEMSELVES decide on what they can use it, instead of trying to social engineer them by giving them "free" rides. When each ride costs $20 just in op-ex (true cost for Seattle, btw).

Richer people should pay the full cost of rides. This also applies to cars (although in my state car user fees already pay for 98% of all road maintenance and construction).

> The converse where you use means testing is not only bringing in high administrative costs, it creates a poverty trap where making a little more money causes you to lose the subsidy and thereby removes your incentive to do it.

That's exactly what transit is achieving. It keeps people trapped in poverty, by reducing their economic choices.

[Mawr]

Oh hey, I actually agree! By all means, let's compare fairly and price in all costs and externalities of car ownership vs public transport. You may not like the result, but that's life.