Right on Goracle. Sitting in traffic in a V8 Suburban next to a few thousand others doing the same is surely much more appealing than riding public transit with people who, OMG!, may be of a different race, religion or social status than you. Try France as your model instead of Cuba or the Soviet Union. Affluent, native French people regularly ride public transit and, although the country has its flaws, it is certainly not about to implode like the Soviet Union did. Why do they do this? Because it is safe, clean, usually faster than driving and always cheaper.

public transit is always slower (frequent stops for load/unload, low top speed (20-30 mph). inconvenient (15-60 minute wait times, never goes where you go), is more expensive (needs a minimum of 7-8 people on bus for every mile the buss travels in a day to match the energy use of 1 person in a 30 mpg car. if a bus wastes an hour of your day, it cost you about 50$ or however much you value your time. you can buy a lot of motorcycle at 50$/day)

I drive off peak so I almost never sit in traffic in my 30 mpg vw golf.

if you look at the costs, buying all riders electric cars is cheaper, more energy efficient, takes advantage of existing infrastructure and does less damage to the landscape than any mass transit. best of all is that e-cars can be put in place now, not 10 years from now.

okay Peter here is one model. If you live 5 miles from the train station i.e. Lowell Massachusetts and surrounding towns, it's a 30 Minute Drive but there isn't enough parking. So you need to find a parking space near a bus stop which makes your transit time to the train stop a minimum of one hour. If you are going into Boston, it's another hour on the train. Time between trains during rush hour (1.5 hour hour window. is 30 minutes, otherwise, it's one hour. Transit time from a train station via subway to most business destinations in Cambridge or Boston is approximately 30 minutes to 45 minutes not including waiting time. So, at best, you have a two hour commute in either direction or four hours per day. If you drive, the same commute takes 40 minutes to one hour.

when I worked in Cambridge, I tried to take the train. I had to get up and be at the train station by seven o'clock in order to make it to work by nine which meant the roads were completely empty and I could get to work in 40 minutes and leave one or two hours early.

A bus typically gets 3.5 to 4.5 miles per gallon. I estimate their speed to be somewhere around 15 mph between city traffic and all of the stops they make. You need seven people on that bus to get roughly 30 person miles per gallon. One car, one passenger at 30 miles per gallon has the same energy efficiency.

as a simple model, let's assume that three hours of the workday, the bus is full (50 people). For six hours of the day (between rush-hour etc.) the bus has about 10 people. If the bus runs around the clock, as it would if it was a personal transportation substitute, it would probably spend something like seven hours out of 24 empty.

24*15 360 miles / 4 mpg = 90 gallons According to the model, we have 210 passenger miles or one half gallon per passenger per mile average. Obviously you can tweak the passenger load profile but consider what tweaking means. The only way to increase average passenger load reduce the number of hours the bus runs which increases pressure for people to use cars as an alternative, increase average population density which can lead to system overload at peak transit times which increases pressure to use a car instead.

cheaper is more than the price of transit. My time is worth between $50 and $100 per hour depending on what project I'm working on. if someone wants to buy more of my time in the day, the price goes up because I get tired and I want to have a life. So, choosing public transit is selling that time for nothing. It could literally cost me as much as $100-$200 per day because I can't use that time to work for customer (no connectivity, no privacy, or have confidential data that must remain encrypted in public places). transit time is a dead loss for me so I want to make that as short as possible.

independent of my time value there is the basic cost of infrastructure. If you look at how much it costs to lay in a subway, or any other form of rail-based transit, it could be cheaper to heavily subsidize electric cars. If you look at Brad Templeton's article on robot cars, you'll find that light rail has roughly the same per-person efficiency as a 50 mile per gallon car. Electric cars will start clocking in at 100 to 300 miles per gallon equivalent. Cheaper, faster transit, faster to deploy, and better because it opens up opportunities that rail and public transit denies you.

If you want to make public transport viable as an alternative to a car, I believe you'll need to make door-to-door transportation time 25 to 50% faster than an automobile. It must accommodate the current suburban landscape because I don't see anybody paying me to give up my house and give me grub stake to live in city spaces. last, this transit system must fund itself entirely out of fares.

you do have a point on congestion. city life is unbearable enough as is that congestion wouldn't make it all that much worse. I cannot tell you the number of times my wife has had her ass grabbed by perverts on the subway. I've had my pocket picked. I've had people try to take things out of my laptop case while I was holding the damn thing. I couldn't have caught more colds if I had spent a couple of hours in a day care center. I would gladly pay a premium to escape living that life.

I cannot emphasize enough that you should take a look at Brad Templeton's website on robot cars. He does the calculations quite nicely and you might build a move them around a little bit but I think he's pretty much on the mark. Also, look in the archives of Green car Congress. Search for Chinese electric bicycles and public transit. In that article it shows how using a $400 electric bicycle instead of taking public transit, you can save enough money to pay off that bike in one year. everywhere I look I see the evidence that personal transportation is a win for individuals with regards to the jobs, grocery shopping, education, and medical treatment. Artificially restricting choice to public transit will reduce people's quality of life and scope of experience in the world.

An advantage of public transit is that you can read there (if you are sitting), so you're not wasting time.
For people who read anything (except at work) it's something.
I noticed especially high percentage of people reading on subway in Paris and Boston.

The big story is how transit systems bought rail cars and sold them to banks and leased them back. This allowed the banks to write off depreciation, but now the banks are imposing fine print in contracts and demanding 100s of millions of dollars from already strapped transit systems.

These comments against public transportation don't make any sense at all. There are 10.7 billion rides that prove it. In these times of economic stress, ridership is going up, not down. If personal transportation was more cost effective overall, public transport increases wouldn't be happening in trying times. 10.7 billion extra car rides in the US would cause even more massive delays requiring huge amounts of cost and the increased requirements of public money for infrastructure. Having cars are not free.

Public transportation is a business like any other. They do not support low routes if at all possible so these artificial support numbers are nonsense. I've never been on a subway or bus or rt which had these low numbers. At all. Never.

A suburban to suburban scenario, with low interconnect times is also artificial in the extreme. These uban islands which have distributed services and jobs create a situation where cars almost become a necesary item. But this is a recent phenomenon and not necessarily a norm. New york city suburbs grew with the extension of the lines along the subway lines, creating their own sustainable routes. These suburban public transports run mostly at the times you expect them to run. Rush hours. You take a risk if you require the service at other times. But it is a typical opportunity cost decision, whether the occasional need weighs against the cost of buying and maintaining a vehicle. No one made anyone move to a suburban no man's land that requires a car just to buy a jug of milk.

This use of fear for public transportation is fear mongering at its worst. Wallets being stolen, whatever. In NY, Bloomburg has always taken the subway. You don't think he can't afford better?

People say their time is worth x amount of dollars? People waste huge amounts of time doing whatever they want and most of it is unproductive.

Personal transportation and todays horrible urban developement was subsidized by short sighted planning and cheap fuel creating infrastructure that really doesn't work.

It's great news that these public transportation systems which have been developed for areas that can support them, exist and were kept up against the vociferous BS claims of their detractors so that they can save society as a whole money in these trying times.