mindstalk | Entries tagged with transportation

This post is inspired by Ivan Illich, but with my own numbers from scratch.

Say the average American driver drives 10,000 miles a year, and averages 1 hour of commute for each of 250 work days, and 150 hours a year of non-work driving. 400 hours, 10,000 miles, average speed 25 MPH. Not too bad.

But. According to the AAA, the average driver spends more than $9000 a year on car ownership, too. Let's say the driver earn $30/hour. That's 300 hours -- 400 considering taxes -- to pay for the car.

Now the driver is spending 800 hours a year of their life, in or working for the car. Net speed 12.5 MPH -- hardly faster than bicycling. At $600/year on new bikes or maintenance, a bicyclist would spend only 27 hours a year paying for the bike.

"Hey, I've got a great deal for you" says the devil. "You can spend an extra 400-27 = 373 hours -- over 9 work weeks -- of your year, to pay for the right to go no faster overall than a bicycle. Wanna sign?"

Oh, and this is in the context of a society that engineers itself for free car parking, by spacing out uses or by dedicating curbside space to parking rather than sidewalks or bike lanes or bus lanes. A fair cost of ownership should probably be at least $100/month higher, taking another 53 hours a year to pay for.

If you earn less than $30/hour, this deal is even worse for you. If you live in a dense city and don't drive that much, then it's also even worse for you (and the current parking subsidy is likely even bigger, up to $300/month).

The car sometimes lets us go faster -- but because the car makes things further apart, and because it is highly space inefficient in motion and gets stuck in congestion very easily, it ends up not saving any time on our overall trips, compared to a foot/bike oriented lifestyle. _And_ it costs more time, irreplaceable hours of your life, paying for that.

As Illich notes, bicycles are pretty much peak efficiency for personal transport. Faster and almost as flexible as walking, and far more energy efficient. Not as fast (for most people) as an unimpeded car, but allowing things to be placed closer together without being impeded, and also far more energy efficient than driving too, since you're not hauling excess mass at excess velocity.

[Edit: elevating from a comment:

I may need to clarify that I meant this as a social cost criticism rather than a personal one. Not "an individual is wasting their money by buying a car instead of a bike", because things are so spaced out that they probably _can't_ use a bike (and get the same travel times, anyway). But "we're collectively wasting our money (and life-time) by orienting around cars instead of bikes".]

I've looked up or modeled max throughput for various transportation modes, e.g. 1 car every 2 seconds = 1800 cars/hour for a car lane, 900 if stopping for cross traffic. Pedestrian and bike capacities have been murkier, though. But today Burnaby had a "Hats Off" street fair, closing Hastings, and I collected some data.

Standing as a traffic counter, I got 72 people/minute over 2.5 minutes, only counting people in one direction. That was involving all of Hastings, though. When I tried to count just one lane... well, it was murky, because people kept going at diagonals, but I got maybe 40 people/minute for the lane, or 2400/hour. But it was hardly a crush.

Perhaps more useful was walking near people in a lane, and estimate that 4 people could walk abreast without much trouble. 2 seconds following distance respects personal space nicely; this gives 2 people/s, or 7200 people/hour. And might allow enough space that intersecting streams could cross without hassle, though I'm not sure.

A stream of people going to one place could do 1 second distance safely, and 14,400 people/hour. And dense streams do interleave rather than using pedestrian stop lights, though I feel it might curb the people-per-second passing a point.

People in a crush probably do more than 4 people abreast; OTOH to avoid *feeling* crowded, I'm not sure if 4 might be too high (unless you're friends) with 3 better.

Going really conservatively we might have 3 people abreast, with 3 seconds following for easier interleaving, and 3600 people/hour per lane. Still a lot better than cars unless you're filling all the cars, and no parking space needed either.

Check it out.

You can sort by the various columns, unless you're on a phone. Madrid, Barcelona, and Berlin have 30+% of people walking to work. And these are metro areas of more than 1 million people, not small towns. NYC is #9 at 28%; the next American one is San Francisco at just 5%, then Boston and DC and some more. Granted that's more than the city proper -- but that's true of NYC too!

For biking we have Osaka and Berlin at 20 and 18% (I'm sticking to First World cities, on the grounds of more people having the money for cars, which was maybe less true in 2005 Beijing.) NYC and Portland are the first US cities at 3%.

For metro areas between 250,000 and 1 million, there are a bunch at more than 25% walking. The first US city is Buffalo, at 6%. Biking starts at 48 or 40% for Dutch cities, a bunch have 25%, the first US is Buffalo again, at 1%... granted, Buffalo is apparently the only US metro in that range listed, so it's not super comprehensive.

For least car use, we have Hong Kong and Tokyo at 12% (mostly transit for HK, Tokyo has a lot more walking and biking), Osaka 18%, Paris 20%, NYC 32%.

Canada looks pretty US, except for higher transit use.

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/576124.html

Ridehail being a more accurate name for Lyft and Uber than 'rideshare'.

Some people talk as if ridehail is the wave of the future, to become a dominant transit mode, despite neither company reporting profits yet. Let's see what that would be like.

The average American driver drives 15,000 miles a year. Ridehail cost per mile component is around $1. Total cost of urban trips (based on a sampling of the apps in Boston and LA) is $2-4/mile, going down the longer the drive is, maybe around $2/mile for 10 mile trips. If you replaced your car with ridehail, you'd be paying $30,000/year. Trés affordable! /s Now, maybe a lot of those miles are longer road trips you wouldn't use ridehail for, so your local driving might be 10,000 miles; that's only $20,000.

Different approach: the app prices are more constant in time units, about $1/minute. The average commute to work is 30 minutes; if you ridehailed to work, you'd be paying $60/workday, or $15,000 over 250 workdays (a year). That's just for your commute, never mind groceries, taking kids to school or things, going out...

That's all for the original product, single person on demand. If you do the Lyft Line/Uber Pool approach, that can halve costs. A mere $7,500 for your work commute! ...assuming no rush hour surge pricing. And car pooling has more time variability, of course. For the 10,000 miles of local driving, $10,000/year. Not that far from estimates of total cost of car ownership for 15,000 miles/year.

Urban car trips tend to be 15-30 MPH, I figure; 10,000 miles is 20,000 to 40,000 minutes, so $20-40K/yeared, or $10-20K pooled.

Competition is fierce, neither company is profitable, and there's doubt as to whether it's really profitable for drivers if they accounted for all costs, so prices are more likely to go up than down.

My T pass is $1014/year. Granted it's often slower (not at rush hour!) It's also 90-99% less likely to mangle or kill me, but most people don't worry about that.

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/519105.html

British source. Nice because it looks at per trip, per hour, and per km. OTOH it doesn't separate intracity and intercity modes -- and a 10 mph city bus is a lot different from a 60 mph coach on the highway. http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/risks_of_travel.htm

An American source, press-releasing a couple of PDFs. This leads with personal safety: you, personally, have <10% the death risk if you take transit rather than a car. http://www.apta.com/mediacenter/pressreleases/2016/Pages/Hidden-Traffic-Safety-Solution.aspx
The linked fact sheet says cars at 6.5 deaths per billion passenger-miles, all buses (transit, intercity, school, charter) combined are 0.2

And another American one http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2011/jun/11/peter-pantuso/bus-association-head-says-buses-safest-mode-commer/
Gives 6.1 for cars, 0.5 for *commercial* buses. This implies that transit and/or school buses are below 0.2, for that to be the overall average. I'd have said "way below", but transit buses might be responsible for most of the bus mileage.

Cars kill close to 40,000 Americans a year; if we used buses for almost all local trips, that might be 4000. Or 1300. The price of car freedom is 36,000+ lives a year.

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/497496.html

I've been reading a bunch of kchoze posts the past couple days. This one is on the economics of transit, and transit efficiency.

'if transit is economically inefficient, why are third world cities dominated by transit and not by personal cars? Why do the Japanese pay 10% of their income on transport versus 20% for Americans and Canadians?'

There are some numbers, and discussion of cost per mile vs. cost per trip. But there's one thing which I sort of gut felt that he spells out: transit friendly cities are denser, so they're more walkable as well.

Let me spell that out. In a sprawling car-centric city, up to 100% of trips may be taken by car. Actual numbers are more like 90%. [Caveat: that's share of trips to work, not all trips.] But you'll never see a city that's 90% transit mode share. (Some cities listed do get up to 70% transit, but again, that's commuting to work.) A city that has lots of transit is a city with lots of walking, too, especially if uses are decently mixed.

(I'm sort of imagining a degenerate case where there's no point to walking around one's residential neighborhood, not even for groceries or school or church, and having to catch transit elsewhere...)

So the reasonable target is not getting transit share really high, but car share low, with the slack being taken up by a mix of transit, walking, and bikes.

This has an extra economic effect: in Sprawlville, the cost of cars (roads, parking, cars, gas...) can be spread over almost all trips. Naively, the cost per trip of transit is doing to have a smaller denominator, only 40% of trips rather than 100%, even though the other non-car trips are part of a coherent dense system that must include transit.

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/488099.html

https://medium.com/p/9316abbd5735
after 15 million miles traveled, the Citibike program has still caused not a single fatality for either pedestrians or riders, and fewer than 30 serious injuries, while helping to improve the overall safety of the city’s streets.

In each of these cases, a thoughtful, intelligent observer is prodded by a mix of fear and anger to give an alarming anecdote more weight than an abundance of evidence, or even common sense. On a street carrying thousands of 3000 pound vehicles a day at 40mph or more, we focus our fears on the handful of 30 pound vehicles moving half that fast.

The CDC reports that 59,925 pedestrians were killed by motor vehicles between 1999 and 2009, while bikes (which are used for about 1.6% of all trips in the US) killed 63 in that same period, or roughly 0.1% as many.

drivers do rolling stops too
http://blog.oregonlive.com/commuting/2009/04/so_you_think_cyclists_are_the.html
A 2002 study by England's Transport Research Laboratory found that when bicyclists violated a traffic law, motorists saw it as symptomatic of reckless attitudes and incompetence among people who choose to bike. However, when they saw another driver breaking the same law, they tended to see it as somehow required by unpredictable circumstances.

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/404961.html

Is Elon Musk's Hyperloop proposal just massively naive, the result of an arrogant superstar who thinks he can wander into another field without doing the research, or an attempt to sabotage the HSR project?

http://stopandmove.blogspot.com/2013/08/hyperloop-proposal-bad-joke-or-attempt.html
Proposal doesn't actually connect SF and LA, but the east Bay and Sylmar. "Amusingly enough, the California HSR budget for the Central Valley is under $10 billion. Ie, in the same ball-park as this proposal. The reason the HSR project is going to cost $60 billion is because it has to face an uncomfortable truth; actually getting to LA and SF is expensive." Given this, the "35 minute" travel time is also wrong:

"Hyperloop trip between downtown LA and downtown SF:
1 hour from LA to Sylmar via Metrolink
20 minute transfer
35 minutes to Dublin
20 minute transfer
1 hour 10 minutes from Dublin to SF via BART

Total: 3 hours 25 minutes"

If you do build into SF and LA, you're talking about multiple multi-billion dollar costs: urban right of away, stations, Bay crossing...

Proposal also ignores NIMBYs and lack of enthusiasm for aerial structures blocking views. And ignores politics: proposal has no stops between SF and LA, a good way to lose votes. It's politics that has HSR using viaducts (like Hyperloop!) and building connections to every major city it can.

"Should we trust that man who claimed that California building the world's slowest bullet train (false) and the world's most expensive rail line (also false) as his inspiration?"

http://www.cahsrblog.com/2013/08/hyping-the-hyperloop/#comment-195825
0.5g is more like a roller coaster, less like an elevator or subway. Realistic acceleration means longer sections.
"Show Stopper #7: There is little in the document that discusses the cost, size or weight of environmental control and life support systems" "This vehicle subsystem would not be unlike a business jet’s environmental control system, which is neither small, simple, light-weight, nor cheap."
How do you do branching or intermediate stops? How do you do maintenance without shutting down the whole system?
Headway calculations seem naive.

http://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/loopy-ideas-are-fine-if-youre-an-entrepreneur/
"My specific problems are that Hyperloop a) made up the cost projections, b) has awful passenger comfort, c) has very little capacity, and d) lies about energy consumption of conventional HSR."

"In principle, Hyperloop is supposed to get people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in half an hour, running in a tube with near-vacuum at speeds topping at 1,220 km/h. In practice, both the costs and the running times are full of magic asterisks. The LA end is really Sylmar, at the edge of the LA Basin; with additional access time and security checks, this is no faster than conventional HSR doing the trip in 2:40. There is a crossing of the San Francisco Bay, but there’s no mention of the high cost of bridging over or tunneling under the Bay – we’re supposed to take it on faith the unit cost is the same as along the I-5 corridor in the Central Valley."

"There is no systematic attempt at figuring out standard practices for cost, or earthquake safety (about which the report is full of FUD about the risks of a “ground-based system”). There are no references for anything; they’re beneath the entrepreneur’s dignity. It’s fine if Musk thinks he can build certain structures for lower cost than is normal, or achieve better safety, but he should at least mention how."

"In reality, an all-elevated system is a bug rather than a feature. Central Valley land is cheap; pylons are expensive, as can be readily seen by the costs of elevated highways and trains all over the world."

Some paragraphs about accelerations, again comparing Musk's numbers to a roller coaster or barf ride, far higher than real rail systems.

"The proposed headway is 30 seconds, for 3,360 passengers per direction per hour. A freeway lane can do better: about 2,000 vehicles, with an average intercity car occupancy of 2. HSR can do 12,000 passengers per direction per hour: 12 trains per hour is possible, and each train can easily fit 1,000 people (the Tokaido Shinkansen tops at 14 tph and 1,323 passengers per train)."

"The chart has a train consuming nearly 900 megajoules per person for an LA-San Francisco trip, about as much as a car or a plane; this is about 1,300 kJ per passenger-km. This may be true of Amtrak’s diesel locomotives; but energy consumption for HSR in Spain is on average 73 Watt-hour (263 kJ) per passenger-km (see PDF-page 17 on a UIC paper on the subject of HSR carbon emissions), one fifth as much as Tesla claims. Tesla either engages in fraud or is channeling dodgy research about the electricity consumption of high-speed trains."

"I write this to point out that, in the US, people will treat any crank seriously if he has enough money or enough prowess in another field. A sufficiently rich person is surrounded by sycophants and stenographers who won’t check his numbers against anything."