Public transit, once it’s built with sufficient coverage, is a lot cheaper and more effective than private transport.
What makes you believe so? The better coverage public system has, the less effective it is. At very low coverage, where you cover only a handful of popular routes, it is indeed much cheaper than private SOV transport. At the other extreme, where you have a regular bus coming every hour to every house in very sparsely populated area, it wil obviously be very expensive and inefficient. Thus, somewhere between these two extremes, there must be a break even point. Public transit can be definitely be cheaper and more effective, but it isn’t always automatically so.
Vehicles cost half a dollar per mile to operate. Excluding the cost of labor for the driver, public transit will be in general cheaper if there is at least some demand for it. After a certain point, moving towards a shuttle system over a fixed route system might be best.
> Excluding the cost of labor for the driver, public transit will be in general cheaper if there is at least some demand for it.
Yes, if you arbitrarily exclude the labor, which is a big fraction of the total cost, and conveniently assume enough demand (capacity factor) to cover for higher vehicle costs and higher fuel costs, then yes, public transit will be cheaper. That's what I meant when I said that for highly popular routes it will be more cost-effective.
In real world scenario though this rarely works out for real systems out there. For example, I live in Seattle. The metro bus system is quite extensive and offers good coverage, by national standards. The bus fare here is $2.75 per ride. The farebox recovery is 27%. This means that to cover all operational costs of the bus, the fare would have to be $10.20. Suffice to say, it is much more expensive than total cost of owning and driving a car, as long as your trip is less than 20 miles. Bus trips this long are here absolutely miserable: 20 miles bus ride in practice means at least one transfer, and so instead of 20-30 minute drive, you're looking at 1:30h journey, assuming no traffic of course.
Public transit typically costs more than that in the US, because that labor you’re leaving out is unionized and very expensive: https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=88.
Let me give you a datapoint and hopefully some intuition. I used to live in Calgary, which is an extremely car-centric city. Population is 1 million and city transit had about a 1000 buses plus two train lines, making it about 1000 people per bus. There are about a million cars in the city.
Let's say that the city got 10 times more buses i.e. 10,000 total. That's 100 people per bus, which should be adequate for everyone to use transit, even with the constraints of how bad the city design is (really wide roads, too many curves and deadends, spread out suburbia). Buses cost about half a million which is maybe 25x the cost of a car. So, the 10k buses would be equivalent to about 0.25 million cars in terms of capital cost. Which is a factor of 4 improvement on the number of cars in terms of capital cost.
Yes, busing people around in multiple occupancy vehicles does in fact reduce capital costs. That's why public transit networks in Eastern bloc countries were so extensive, often reaching every little town and village: communist economies couldn't afford to produce enough personal vehicles, so they ran buses instead.
But, reduced capital costs is evidently not what people in developed economies are actually necessarily after. Turns out, people are perfectly happy to spend extra resources to acquire exclusivity rights to a vehicle, because of flexibility it affords them. Having a private transport allows you to go where you want, when you want, and in almost all circumstances do it much faster than via a bus. The opportunity cost of time spent walking to bus station, waiting for a bus, and then taking longer to travel is for many people very significant, thus they pay for private transportation to recover some of that time.
Yeah, of course if you build coverage everywhere it is not cost effective. There is definitely a point where cost effectiveness peaks. What I mean is that when you get there, it is much cheaper. It very rarely gets to that point in most of the world
It almost always gets much farther beyond that point. In Seattle, where I live, farebox recovery is just 27%, which, given that fare is $2.75, means that riding a bus is much less cost effective than driving.
Yeah, because Sound Transit only covers a handful of the most popular routes. The agency that actually tries to have good coverage of the city is Metro Transit.
No, because greenhouse emissions are free. When we do start paying for carbon emissions, it might be worthwhile to revisit this question, but right now I’m talking about actual costs, not some hypothetical value assigned to externalities.
The estimates of externalities related to CO2 emissions range between $0.10-0.50 per gallon, so they can hardly make much of a difference here. Cars cause more congestion, but the cost of congestion is mostly in time wasted in traffic, and if we actually grade cars vs public transit on time wasted, cars win easily because public transit is slow.
> At the other extreme, where you have a regular bus coming every hour to every house in very sparsely populated area
Obviously mass transit makes less sense without the masses, in cases like that there are many places that offer community bus services that operate more like taxis. You call and say you want a pick up and the bus will pickup and drop off anyone else along the way. Think uber pool but half a century older.
There are even private companies that run free shuttles just to get old ladies pumping their pensions into poker machines.
Right, but this is not a "public transit", it's effectively private transit with a chauffeur, and it's obviously much more expensive and less efficient than driving yourself (because it saves a little on vehicle amortization, but loses a lot on extra labor cost).
No it's still public transport, it's resources are shared by the community, you don't have exclusive access even while travelling/booking and it may make several stops to pick up other people or drop them off. It's a bus with no fixed route and schedule, that doesn't make it private transport with a chauffeur.
What makes you believe so? The better coverage public system has, the less effective it is. At very low coverage, where you cover only a handful of popular routes, it is indeed much cheaper than private SOV transport. At the other extreme, where you have a regular bus coming every hour to every house in very sparsely populated area, it wil obviously be very expensive and inefficient. Thus, somewhere between these two extremes, there must be a break even point. Public transit can be definitely be cheaper and more effective, but it isn’t always automatically so.