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This appears to be part of a general trend, transit costs in the US have been massively subject to "cost disease" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease. However, the effect is much more pronounced for mass transit in the US than in Europe or elsewhere http://trrjournalonline.trb.org/doi/abs/10.3141/2541-01?journalCode=trr. While there are some arguments that how the US treats trains has advantages over Europe http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=11847, the cost difference in new ones is gigantic. In this particular case, it is combining very badly with other issues, including the insanely high prices of land in California.

[citation needed]

This post summarizes cost per passenger miles quite well and provides sources: http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=8...

And tell me, where would those highways go?

Ripping out BART and replacing it with roads and buses would be a start. There is plenty more space.

Then try moving somewhere there are no taxes. See how much better off you are. Toodles!

I have no problem with paying taxes per se (that means "by itself"). I have a problem with rent seeking, corruption, waste, and forcing people into poverty.

Anon because I modded you as above.

Having your cake and eating it too.

Paying the bill: there are other ways.

No, there are no other ways. It costs money to run radio ads. It costs money to run a website. It costs money to run print ads. SOMEONE has to pay for that. There is no other way.

If you say that the wealthy and corporations will not participate in equal election funding, then answer why they wont.

If I say what? That if you prohibit the use of money to pay for effective speech the rich won't be able to participate in speech? That should be obvious. If the poor cannot buy airtime because they don't individually have the money and you prohibit them from forming groups (like CU) with the intention of pooling their money, and you prohibit the rich from using their own money to buy airtime, then yes, you've silenced both groups. You haven't made it easier for the poor to speak.

Or that silencing people you don't like isn't the solution to people you do like not being able to pay for their speech? That should be obvious, too. But I don't know what this "participate in equal election funding" nonsense is, or how it is supposed to remove the requirement for money to have effective speech from the system.

Requirement to have money to have speech: see above, and why does it *have* to be that way?

I love "see above" arguments, because they are so meaningless. What "above" shows that money isn't necessary for effective speech? Nothing. You simply declare "there are other ways" and don't quite get around to saying how you'd cover the costs of the speech. It has to be that way because newpapers and TV stations and websites don't get free electricity and newsprint and servers, and the people who run those media don't all donate their time.

Bribery and graft: Those laws are not really working and the wealthy are working hard to dilute them further, ( Citizens United, the recent ruling on overall contribution limits ).

What utter and complete nonsense. CU wasn't about bribery or graft or anything in furtherance of either. CU was about a corporation that was CREATED FOR THE EXPLICIT PURPOSE OF BUYING AIRTIME FOR A MOVIE still being allowed to buy that airtime because the people who made up that corporation HAVE THE RIGHT TO FREE SPEECH. Just as the Sierra Club has the right to dump $200,000 into a campaign against a conservative. And the Teamster's Union spent their member's money on a hatchet job on the same candidate:

However, the special Senate election took an interesting turn a few weeks before election day A union group ran a radio ad that accused Smith of murder ...

Now, maybe you were vocally opposed to that use of money, too, but I don't know many people who were. Wyden slid out from the mess by claiming the people who were spending money on his behalf weren't under his control. Apparently Ron Wyden doesn't think money is corrupting or buys influence because he relies on it for his campaigns.

For someone who is so adamant that silencing people is bad you seem very in favor of policies that do exactly that.

Nonsense. CU being allowed to buy airtime for a movie is hardly how one silences anyone. It means that more people can speak because more people can join with others to pay for that speech. A movie that shows Hillary Clinton in a bad light doesn't stop you from buying an ad that shows her to be the Next Coming of the Messiah.

That's the real way to counter that speech that you are so opposed to. Not silencing people because you don't like what they say or how they pay for the media to say it. Making your own speech and banding together with others of like mind to make your single voice more effective.

But the one fact remains: it costs money to have effective speech in these modern times. There is no way around that. Someone has to pay for it.

The same applies to gasoline combustion vehicles.

How so? The Federal Highway Trust Fund is routinely looted for mass transit projects, meaning car users are paying for mass transit riders.

If I could sue GM, Ford and Toyota out of existence for the harm they've caused people, then they'd be out of business. Instead they're protected by courts.

Translation: The courts keep throwing my bullshit lawsuits out.

What harm are you talking about? Henry Ford alone did more to improve the life of the working man than every Union leader combined. By giving the working man access to cheap transportation, horses and transit were too expensive for them to afford, they were no longer hostage to living in tenements within walking distance to the local factory. They now had options. Instead of having to work for the factory 1 mile or less from home he could drive to any factory or employer within 20 miles of home. Instead of having the choice of one or two employers, he now could have over a dozen possible employers to chose to work for and those employers had to compete to get the best workers. The company store became a distant memory as workers could drive to other stores to buy what they needed at competitive prices. If conditions in one local area became bad they could easily pile all their important belongings into the car and drive somewhere else.

Have there been negatives from the advent of the automobile? Certainly, but you're going to have one hell of a time making the case that the overall effect has not been positive.

As for subsidies for roads, I agree, lets get rid of them. But subsidies for roads only amount to about a penny per passenger mile. Increasing gas taxes a few cents would mean the elimination of road subsidies. Mass transit however is subsidized by tens of cents per passenger mile, sometimes close to a dollar per passenger mile. Eliminate subsidies there and mass transit would dissapear almost instantly.

http://www.buses.org/files/Summary%20-%20Federal%20Subsidies%20for%20Passenger%20Transportation%20final.pdf

http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=5002

What we need to do is spend our money wisely and not just bury our heads in the sand and pretend that gasoline works without costs that are very extreme, yet ignored because they don't hit you right in the face.

Nobody is saying that gasoline doesn't have costs. However, it is the best technology that we have today. What are these "extreme" costs you keep spouting off about? Environmental damage? Yea, there's that, but the West has that that largely under control. Any alternative is either unworkable or causes more environmental damage than what we have now. What are you suggesting? That 5 billion people just sit down and die by not using fossil fuels for transportation? What is your alternative?

Personally I see Alge diesel being perfected sometime in the next few decades, we have at several hundred years of fossil fuels of all types left so there is time. Throwing money at projects trying to do the equivalent of, building a 747 in the year 1908, are just going to be a waste. There are plenty of other problems that need to be addressed using technology we already have. Expand road capacity where needed to reduce fuel wasted in gridlock. (Make sure this is done only with user fees so the mass transit twits can't bitch.) Employ congestion pricing to reduce traffic during peak times. Build new Generation III nuclear reactors so we can retire or at least be less reliant on our old Generation II reactors. Reprocess the waste to get the long half life useable fuel out of them, the 3% left that is waste can be easily buried for the 300-400 years it takes to decay to save levels. Encourage Gasoline/CNG dual-fuel vehicles to take advantage of the abundance of natural gas in the US. Any number of things can be done with current technology in the US that are far more cost effective.

Yes. I should have put it in the first post. Here is an article by the Antiplanner on the costs of cars. I don't agree with everything he believes (like private roads), but he does have some good points about costs and efficiency. He does this calculation based on numbers from the US Government.

I was agreeing with the author of the article, and thinking it was pretty interesting, until I got to the part at the end advocating mass transit.

Efficient mass transit, unfortunately, requires that we all work in a dense downtown area where a critical mass of people shows up. I don't think that's true of most of Houston. Mass transit is also unpleasant to use and generally very slow. Despite billions being thrown at it, mass transit still has an average market share of around 3%. More and bigger roads, logically enough, would be the better solution. Reducing congestion would save an enormous amount of money, almost certainly more than we could ever save from an impossible task like increasing mass transit market share to, say, 10%. This web site has lots of information on this and related issues.

When I got a new, high-paying job when I lived in California, my solution to the problem was to buy a house that was 10 minutes from my office. I highly recommend that as the fastest and most ecologically sound solution. I could drive my 1991 Mercedes 420SEL (14mpg) with a clear conscience, knowing I was using less gas than many Prius drivers with long commutes.

Now I work out of my home in the country, with about a meeting a week in the city, and that works out fine too, especially since my boss is fairly nocternal. Late night commuting is, of course, very fast.

D

Suburbia has largely mutated into Edge City without most people being aware of it. So for example, I live in Woodland Hills, California, in a very cool house on top of a hill. I live about 3 miles away from my workplace. That's Edge City; my job is where I live, so I don't commute far at all. You might notice that in the Slashdot poll mentioned above, about 30% of people live within 6 miles of their work. This is the reason.

You don't need to squeeze everyone in massive high-rise apartment blocks or characterless row houses to let people live near their work. You do have to accept somewhat high density - I live on a 5200 square foot lot, not an acre (which is about 9x as much).

I really love the single-family home lifestyle and wouldn't give it up without a fight. It really is great to have genuine control over your own domain instead of being in an ugly, characterless block. Here is the kind of building "New Urbanists" want to squeeze us into. By comparison, here's where I live today.

It's unfortunate that the New Urbanism looks progressive compared to what's normally being built by today's builders. I feel very fortunate to be in an area built up during the 20s through the 60s, where builders took pride in what they constructed and big profits were not the sole motivating factor.

But this all being said, I don't think the New Urbanism is the answer to our nation's ills. In my view, the merits of suburbia - privacy, the potential for individualty and some nice outdoor space to stay in on a sunny day - outweigh the disadvantages.

D

Well yes. That's because the word "public" has been a misnomer for "government" for most of the disastrous 20th century, and now remains a misnomer in the 21st. Government transportation systems will always be a mistake, and here are the reasons why:

1. Government is always about 10 years behind the curve. If governments decide to build highways, they build them with little or no buffer for traffic growth. If the decide to use a 19th century technology like rail (and monorail), they forget to tell people that the system-wide average speed is 14mph. People ride them once or twice for the novelty, but then decide that the waste of time isn't worth it and the trains run riderless.

2. Government transportation systems are coercively funded, meaning that politicians and bureaucrats, not the needs of the transported "public", decide where projects are built, how much coerced money is used to build them, and who gets the money for construction. Because government systems always require competitive bidding, awarding the "lowest price" bidder with the business, construction starts about a year lather than it otherwise would, and takes forever because the lowest price bidder is also usually the lowest quality. The resulting low quality system breaks down frequently (potholes, anybody?) and requires huge amounts of coerced funding to make it merely usable. A free market owner of a transportation system would take into account the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of the system. Government bureaucrats have never even heard of TCO.

3. Public Utility Commisions consistently reject free market solutions to transportation problems like jitneys, toll roads (it's illegal to toll a federal Interstate highway), profit-making vanpools, and the billions of other ways to profit from transportation that would spring up if the monopoly-protecting fascism of the PUCs was removed.

It's about time we got government out of the transportation business. Look at how the Internet took off when the ARPA and DARPA controls were removed and the free market took over. The same would happen if government transportation controls were removed.