Dirt and a rock? DIRT AND A ROCK? Oh, you had the silver-spoon life, didn't you? We had to pull out our own teeth and use them to carve our notes into our own chests, and then sell the dripping blood to fund our own research. Bunch of fairy-footed pansies, the lot of you...
My boss loves teaching and wishes he had MORE time for it, but can't teach but maybe one class per semester because of research time, lab management, grant proposals, and other commitments.
That RIGHT THERE should tell us how fucked up the US university system is... When a professor's job of teaching is secondary to everything else, what has become of a university? Is it nothing more than a high-end Government research lab (with free/low cost lab techs called students), or should it get back to the original goal of learning and teaching?
Also, don't forget about taxes! The Federal Government actually ran a small surplus in 1957 (the last time that actually happened), and the national debt dropped as well. Taxes, adjusted for inflation and per capita, were about 45% of what they are today ($3100 in 2005 dollars, versus $6600 today in 2005 dollars). And State income taxes, and sales taxes, were considerably lower as well. Taxes are taking a much bigger chunk of our income today, than it did for our parents and grandparents (which really makes one question why our deficits are so sky-high).
And in 1940, they didn't have $100/month cell phone bills, $150/month cable and Internet bills, $400/month car leases, 2-3 week long overseas vacations every year, microwave ovens, multiple TVs, etc. We buy a LOT more stuff and spend a LOT more percentage-wise in ongoing "services" than was common back in 1940...
Please see the original BTS paper - rail transit is heavily subsidized, whereas cars are a net revenue generator. It would definitely do lower damage because there aren't any roads needed - but there are significant costs with deployment and on-going subsidies required. Any realistic approach needs to acknowledge these basic facts.
Good cherry-picking. Now perform the same analysis for NYC.
I'm sorry, when has New York City built a new light rail line? The latest light rail system in the US was in relatively flat and easy Phoenix, and it was $70 million per mile. I would assume building in New York would be considerably higher, given the amount of water and population density relative to Phoenix.
So for Phoenix, instead of being 17 times as expensive as highways, it was only 7 times as much. And we still ignore the fact that rail is heavily subsidized (including light rail - see the Phoenix link. I don't know of any light rail/subway system in the US that actually runs at break-even, let alone a profit - which roads do.
I'm not opposed to mass transit, but to try to put forth it's a lower cost solution in the US than highways simply isn't supported by the facts.
Besides the "other mass transit besides buses" reply...
From my understanding from the concept, there are other factors besides weight. There's the axle lengths (between front/back, left/right) and tire width, and number of tires (some buses double-up the tires) to take into consideration. Did you factor those in? Or did you just plug in basic weights.
The study assumes legal axle load limits for road damage. So that is factored out via the general 4th order power.
Assuming we still skew things a factor of 10 because we somehow increase contact area of the bus by that amount, the bus still does 3.3 times more damage to the road, per passenger mile, as the car. And that's assuming the bus is at 100% capacity and the car is at minimum (driver only) capacity.
Yeah, and I didn't even get into the fact that it's not just one bus replacing one car on the road, it's one bus replacing 96 cars (presuming a fully loaded bus) on the road. So, using his math that a bus does 33 times more damage to the road than a car, it does not do more damage than 96 cars.
The math is pretty simple:
Weight ratio of a bus to car: 12000 kg / 1600 kg = 7.5
Damage goes as the 4th power of weight, meaning the damage of a bus is (7.5 ^ 4) 3164 times higher than the car
Assume the car has 1 person, the bus has a full load of 96. Divide the damage of the bus by (96/1 ) to get the damage per passenger mile: 32.96
A fully loaded bus, maximizing it's passenger capability, versus a car with the absolute minimum passenger capability (driver only), does ~33 times more road damage per passenger mile as compared to the car.
Put another way, you would need to put ~3100 people on a bus to have it equal the damage, per passenger mile, of the car.
And put yet another way, taking 96 cars off the road and putting all those people in a single bus results in only 33 times more road damage, as compared to the individual cars.
It's that 4th power function of weight that really kills your road - weight is the killer of roads, not number of vehicles. If you ride a scooter or motorcycle (like me), then take comfort in the fact the typical car is doing a lot more damage to the road than you - in my case (380 kg fully loaded scooter with rider), 314 times more damage to the road.
If you'll look at the original BTS report, specifically the per passenger mile breakout you'll find that passenger rail is subsidized at a rate higher than that for buses, per passenger mile. And with the experience of the latest light-rail construction in the US (the Seattle Link Light Rail) costing over $176 million per mile to build (approximately 17 times the cost to build a 6 lane highway). Rail can be a good option, but to think it is lower cost than highways - either in deployment or ongoing costs - isn't backed up by reality.
The Feds pay for any federal highway - interstates, forest/government access roads. And they kick in large amounts of cash to municipalities in the form of transit grants - which comes from the same pot of cash. Go investigate http://www.dot.gov/ and you'll find billions sent out for things like bus rapid transit, State highway improvements, light rail.
Wouldn't mass transit reduce wear and tear on the roads and ultimately reduce costs?
Actually, no. Damage to roads goes as the fourth power of weight (you can find lots of other sources with the same conclusions). A typical city bus weighs around 12000 kg; a typical car weighs around 1600 kg. Thus a bus does around 3100 times more road damage that a car. Assume that the car carries one person, and the bus carries a full load (seated and standing) of 96; you end up with ~33 times more damage per passenger mile in a bus as a single person in that car.
Weight is what destroys roads, and heavy vehicles really tear it up. A move to more mass transit would not only greatly increase the subsidies required, but seriously accelerate the damage done to the roads.
It's not cars that cause the deficit, it's subsidies for buses and trains that are depleting the Highway Trust Fund. Congress authorized spending from that pot of money for mass transit - and it's a massive drain on the system. Conversely, cars actually generate net revenue for the system.
I'm disappointed that someone who feels that the free market will provide is using roads that are provided by the tax payers. We should cut this budget cost and move it to the road users.
Great! Because in the US, cars are a net revenue producer for the highway system. I guess we need to seriously bump up the costs of planes, buses, and trains however to make them also pay for the costs of using the systems provided by the tax payers...
My Ford Escort proves you wrong. If I lock it with the remote, and then stick the physical key into the lock on the door and unlock it, the alarm goes off.
Hmmm... Looking at the list, for Europe it's Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden, Finland) and Estonia who have lower population densities than the US. Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Austria all have 3X or more the population density of the US. Yes, we have a few crowded areas (LA basin, BOS-DC corridor, SF area), but those have trains and light rail already working. Between cities, it's REALLY far compared to Europe. When I lived in Brussels, it wasn't a big deal to go to Paris or Cologne (200-300 km). To go from one "big city" in the NW (Portland, OR) to the nearest in CA (San Francisco) is over 1000 km. We're really spread out.
I am assuming that's not counting the 0% tax rate on aircraft fuel, and large amounts of tax breaks for the aircraft builders ?
Do you have a reference for the 0% tax rate on aircraft fuel? I find that it is 0.043 per gallon for commercial aviation. And that is in addition to the listed 7.5% ad valorem tax on your ticket cost, all all the other fees and taxes. Far from being 0%, it's quite high. Anyone who's flown recently would know that fact.
My most recent flight, from Shanghai back to Los Angeles, had a $717 base ticket fare, with $199.90 in taxes added, for a total of $916.90. The 777 I flew on consumes about 0.02 gallons per passenger mile. That means my 6485 mile flight used ~130 gallons for me - with the additional fuel tax being $5.72. Total Federal taxes for my flight would be $205.62. A far cry from zero.
The Federal DOT's Bureau of Transportation Statistics says the subsidies are an order of magnitude or higher for passenger rail over passenger air. And the FAA certainly charges fuel taxes as well as additional ad valorem taxes that are not charged for rail (7.5% base on the ticket). Quite a different picture than you paint!
HSR are not developed to compete against automobiles.
For shorter trips up to about 300km, automobiles will be faster, even though in the grand scheme of things, rail is probably the cheapest is in terms of dollars per passenger per kilometer (no source, but the economy of scale, relatively cheap equipment (operating cost of one HSR train set, versus the operating cost of 100 automobiles), track maintenance may be more expensive than road maintenance?).
HSR is meant to compete against Air travel.
Trains is without a doubt cheaper, and less demanding on resources than airplanes.
And safer in theory.
Not only cost, train will be faster for any trip less than about 2,000km (provided you can do 300kmh type speeds), and may even be preferable for >2k km trips for the above cost and safety reasons.
The Japanese, Europeans, Chinese seem to like to tinker with HSR.
While we are guzzling resources jetting around the country, and wondering why the Chinese have surplus income.
It's too bad America has lost its edge.
The highway system. It is actually a net tax revenue generator (per the DOT's own numbers), while passenger rail is highly subsidized. And it was certainly faster for me to drive from Seattle to Santa Barbara, than it was to take the train (20 hours versus 33). Not to mention cheaper ($217 spent on fuel and a night in Redding, CA versus $408 for the train and a shared sleeper). Not to mention I was able to pack all my belongings in the back of my Ford Ranger at the same time - AMTRAK wouldn't let me do that.
Jet fuel (called "kerosene for aviation" by the IRS) is taxed at 21.9/gal for the 2007 tax year unless it is used for commercial aviation (airlines such as American Airlines and US Airways and small chartered commercial jets). Because such commercial operations are subject to the federal transportation tax, they are subject to a reduced fuel tax of 4.4/gal. Source.
Planes are heavily subsidized and burn fuel at rates that will not continue to be possible. The advantage is if we build HSR now we can still use it when we don't have the oil to spare for jets.
Per the Bureau of Transportation Studies (a part of the Federal DOT), rail is subsidized at a 10+ times rate over planes, per passenger mile. If HSR was able to cut that subsidy by an order of magnitude the best you could do is become competitive with planes, in terms of Federal subsidies.
Wow, already in the first couple sentences you are wrong.
Look at the actual numbers, for population density then think about it again. France 303/sq mile vs NY state 412.3 inhabitants per square mile. Spain is even lower. Germany only slightly higher. We have states that have very comparable population rates and relatively few hub cities.
Our two most populous states, CA and TX, are considerably lower in population density that France. The US as a whole is about on-par with that of Spain, save for being 20 times as big. And from my time spent in Europe (mainly Belgium in the mid 2000s, with a lot of trips to Spain and Portugal for vacation), the Spanish train system wasn't anything to brag about!
Slashdot Mirror
Dirt and a rock? DIRT AND A ROCK? Oh, you had the silver-spoon life, didn't you? We had to pull out our own teeth and use them to carve our notes into our own chests, and then sell the dripping blood to fund our own research. Bunch of fairy-footed pansies, the lot of you...
My boss loves teaching and wishes he had MORE time for it, but can't teach but maybe one class per semester because of research time, lab management, grant proposals, and other commitments.
That RIGHT THERE should tell us how fucked up the US university system is... When a professor's job of teaching is secondary to everything else, what has become of a university? Is it nothing more than a high-end Government research lab (with free/low cost lab techs called students), or should it get back to the original goal of learning and teaching?
Also, don't forget about taxes! The Federal Government actually ran a small surplus in 1957 (the last time that actually happened), and the national debt dropped as well. Taxes, adjusted for inflation and per capita, were about 45% of what they are today ($3100 in 2005 dollars, versus $6600 today in 2005 dollars). And State income taxes, and sales taxes, were considerably lower as well. Taxes are taking a much bigger chunk of our income today, than it did for our parents and grandparents (which really makes one question why our deficits are so sky-high).
And in 1940, they didn't have $100/month cell phone bills, $150/month cable and Internet bills, $400/month car leases, 2-3 week long overseas vacations every year, microwave ovens, multiple TVs, etc. We buy a LOT more stuff and spend a LOT more percentage-wise in ongoing "services" than was common back in 1940...
The links I've provided say it tends to be more expensive to build rail and subways than for roads. Do you have data otherwise?
A move to more mass transit would not only greatly increase the subsidies required, but seriously accelerate the damage done to the roads.
Unless that mass transit were, say, on rails.
Please see the original BTS paper - rail transit is heavily subsidized, whereas cars are a net revenue generator. It would definitely do lower damage because there aren't any roads needed - but there are significant costs with deployment and on-going subsidies required. Any realistic approach needs to acknowledge these basic facts.
Good cherry-picking. Now perform the same analysis for NYC.
I'm sorry, when has New York City built a new light rail line? The latest light rail system in the US was in relatively flat and easy Phoenix, and it was $70 million per mile. I would assume building in New York would be considerably higher, given the amount of water and population density relative to Phoenix.
So for Phoenix, instead of being 17 times as expensive as highways, it was only 7 times as much. And we still ignore the fact that rail is heavily subsidized (including light rail - see the Phoenix link. I don't know of any light rail/subway system in the US that actually runs at break-even, let alone a profit - which roads do.
I'm not opposed to mass transit, but to try to put forth it's a lower cost solution in the US than highways simply isn't supported by the facts.
Besides the "other mass transit besides buses" reply...
From my understanding from the concept, there are other factors besides weight. There's the axle lengths (between front/back, left/right) and tire width, and number of tires (some buses double-up the tires) to take into consideration. Did you factor those in? Or did you just plug in basic weights.
The study assumes legal axle load limits for road damage. So that is factored out via the general 4th order power.
Assuming we still skew things a factor of 10 because we somehow increase contact area of the bus by that amount, the bus still does 3.3 times more damage to the road, per passenger mile, as the car. And that's assuming the bus is at 100% capacity and the car is at minimum (driver only) capacity.
Yeah, and I didn't even get into the fact that it's not just one bus replacing one car on the road, it's one bus replacing 96 cars (presuming a fully loaded bus) on the road. So, using his math that a bus does 33 times more damage to the road than a car, it does not do more damage than 96 cars.
The math is pretty simple:
Weight ratio of a bus to car: 12000 kg / 1600 kg = 7.5 /1 ) to get the damage per passenger mile: 32.96
Damage goes as the 4th power of weight, meaning the damage of a bus is (7.5 ^ 4) 3164 times higher than the car
Assume the car has 1 person, the bus has a full load of 96. Divide the damage of the bus by (96
A fully loaded bus, maximizing it's passenger capability, versus a car with the absolute minimum passenger capability (driver only), does ~33 times more road damage per passenger mile as compared to the car.
Put another way, you would need to put ~3100 people on a bus to have it equal the damage, per passenger mile, of the car.
And put yet another way, taking 96 cars off the road and putting all those people in a single bus results in only 33 times more road damage, as compared to the individual cars.
It's that 4th power function of weight that really kills your road - weight is the killer of roads, not number of vehicles. If you ride a scooter or motorcycle (like me), then take comfort in the fact the typical car is doing a lot more damage to the road than you - in my case (380 kg fully loaded scooter with rider), 314 times more damage to the road.
If you'll look at the original BTS report, specifically the per passenger mile breakout you'll find that passenger rail is subsidized at a rate higher than that for buses, per passenger mile. And with the experience of the latest light-rail construction in the US (the Seattle Link Light Rail) costing over $176 million per mile to build (approximately 17 times the cost to build a 6 lane highway). Rail can be a good option, but to think it is lower cost than highways - either in deployment or ongoing costs - isn't backed up by reality.
The Feds pay for any federal highway - interstates, forest/government access roads. And they kick in large amounts of cash to municipalities in the form of transit grants - which comes from the same pot of cash. Go investigate http://www.dot.gov/ and you'll find billions sent out for things like bus rapid transit, State highway improvements, light rail.
Wouldn't mass transit reduce wear and tear on the roads and ultimately reduce costs?
Actually, no. Damage to roads goes as the fourth power of weight (you can find lots of other sources with the same conclusions). A typical city bus weighs around 12000 kg; a typical car weighs around 1600 kg. Thus a bus does around 3100 times more road damage that a car. Assume that the car carries one person, and the bus carries a full load (seated and standing) of 96; you end up with ~33 times more damage per passenger mile in a bus as a single person in that car.
Weight is what destroys roads, and heavy vehicles really tear it up. A move to more mass transit would not only greatly increase the subsidies required, but seriously accelerate the damage done to the roads.
It's not cars that cause the deficit, it's subsidies for buses and trains that are depleting the Highway Trust Fund. Congress authorized spending from that pot of money for mass transit - and it's a massive drain on the system. Conversely, cars actually generate net revenue for the system.
I'm disappointed that someone who feels that the free market will provide is using roads that are provided by the tax payers. We should cut this budget cost and move it to the road users.
Great! Because in the US, cars are a net revenue producer for the highway system. I guess we need to seriously bump up the costs of planes, buses, and trains however to make them also pay for the costs of using the systems provided by the tax payers...
My Ford Escort proves you wrong. If I lock it with the remote, and then stick the physical key into the lock on the door and unlock it, the alarm goes off.
Well there's your problem right there!
Hmmm... Looking at the list, for Europe it's Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden, Finland) and Estonia who have lower population densities than the US. Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Austria all have 3X or more the population density of the US. Yes, we have a few crowded areas (LA basin, BOS-DC corridor, SF area), but those have trains and light rail already working. Between cities, it's REALLY far compared to Europe. When I lived in Brussels, it wasn't a big deal to go to Paris or Cologne (200-300 km). To go from one "big city" in the NW (Portland, OR) to the nearest in CA (San Francisco) is over 1000 km. We're really spread out.
I am assuming that's not counting the 0% tax rate on aircraft fuel, and large amounts of tax breaks for the aircraft builders ?
Do you have a reference for the 0% tax rate on aircraft fuel? I find that it is 0.043 per gallon for commercial aviation. And that is in addition to the listed 7.5% ad valorem tax on your ticket cost, all all the other fees and taxes. Far from being 0%, it's quite high. Anyone who's flown recently would know that fact.
My most recent flight, from Shanghai back to Los Angeles, had a $717 base ticket fare, with $199.90 in taxes added, for a total of $916.90. The 777 I flew on consumes about 0.02 gallons per passenger mile. That means my 6485 mile flight used ~130 gallons for me - with the additional fuel tax being $5.72. Total Federal taxes for my flight would be $205.62. A far cry from zero.
The Federal DOT's Bureau of Transportation Statistics says the subsidies are an order of magnitude or higher for passenger rail over passenger air. And the FAA certainly charges fuel taxes as well as additional ad valorem taxes that are not charged for rail (7.5% base on the ticket). Quite a different picture than you paint!
HSR are not developed to compete against automobiles. For shorter trips up to about 300km, automobiles will be faster, even though in the grand scheme of things, rail is probably the cheapest is in terms of dollars per passenger per kilometer (no source, but the economy of scale, relatively cheap equipment (operating cost of one HSR train set, versus the operating cost of 100 automobiles), track maintenance may be more expensive than road maintenance?).
HSR is meant to compete against Air travel. Trains is without a doubt cheaper, and less demanding on resources than airplanes. And safer in theory. Not only cost, train will be faster for any trip less than about 2,000km (provided you can do 300kmh type speeds), and may even be preferable for >2k km trips for the above cost and safety reasons.
The Japanese, Europeans, Chinese seem to like to tinker with HSR. While we are guzzling resources jetting around the country, and wondering why the Chinese have surplus income. It's too bad America has lost its edge.
Actually, in the US rail is subsidized much higher than commercial air or automobiles, by several orders of magnitude, on a per-passenger mile basis.
We were going 186 miles an hour and hit a little chink on the rail.
That's racist - the proper term is person of Chinese descent.
The interstate highway system is paid for by the federal government. $425 billion. Apparently the largest public works system since the pyramids.
How much would the proposed HSR system cost? Would it operate at a surplus like the highway system does?
The highway system. It is actually a net tax revenue generator (per the DOT's own numbers), while passenger rail is highly subsidized. And it was certainly faster for me to drive from Seattle to Santa Barbara, than it was to take the train (20 hours versus 33). Not to mention cheaper ($217 spent on fuel and a night in Redding, CA versus $408 for the train and a shared sleeper). Not to mention I was able to pack all my belongings in the back of my Ford Ranger at the same time - AMTRAK wouldn't let me do that.
According to the DOT's Bureau of Transportation Statistics, probably not. Rail is subsidized at a 10-40 times higher rate, per passenger mile, than air. Note that cars are actually a net revenue generator, with a negative subsidy.
Jet fuel (called "kerosene for aviation" by the IRS) is taxed at 21.9/gal for the 2007 tax year unless it is used for commercial aviation (airlines such as American Airlines and US Airways and small chartered commercial jets). Because such commercial operations are subject to the federal transportation tax, they are subject to a reduced fuel tax of 4.4/gal. Source.
Planes are heavily subsidized and burn fuel at rates that will not continue to be possible. The advantage is if we build HSR now we can still use it when we don't have the oil to spare for jets.
Per the Bureau of Transportation Studies (a part of the Federal DOT), rail is subsidized at a 10+ times rate over planes, per passenger mile. If HSR was able to cut that subsidy by an order of magnitude the best you could do is become competitive with planes, in terms of Federal subsidies.
Wow, already in the first couple sentences you are wrong.
Look at the actual numbers, for population density then think about it again. France 303/sq mile vs NY state 412.3 inhabitants per square mile. Spain is even lower. Germany only slightly higher. We have states that have very comparable population rates and relatively few hub cities.
Our two most populous states, CA and TX, are considerably lower in population density that France. The US as a whole is about on-par with that of Spain, save for being 20 times as big. And from my time spent in Europe (mainly Belgium in the mid 2000s, with a lot of trips to Spain and Portugal for vacation), the Spanish train system wasn't anything to brag about!