This is an essay I have gradually worked up in blog debates:

Look, every half truthful study on this issue comes up with the following realities.

The true cost of running public transport is so high that if fares were "user pays", nobody would use it.

The true cost can be calculated simply by dividing total running costs of public transport (just like a business would have to; not omitting the cost of financing infrastructure) by total fare revenue: then just multiply every fare by that factor.

If it is cheaper for a given traveller to run a given car rather than pay true-cost reflecting public transport fares, then that car uses less resources than public transport; not even counting the energy used to get to and from bus stops.

The cost benefit ratio of getting a shift like 10% of car users, to public transport, is exponentially worse than the cost benefit ratio of simply providing new roads and lanes; if there is even a benefit at all. Because most travel is done only at certain times of day, huge "investments" in rolling stock would be necessary to cope with such a shift. Roughly ten times as many people use cars as what use public transport. This means that a 10% decline in car use, shifting to public transport, requires nearly a 100% increase in public transport subsidies. It is a myth that increased patronage will bring efficiencies sufficient to negate this need, as long as public transport is not having to compete in a free market.

If we attempted to run a public transport based, car-free transport system, the cost would be greater than our entire current GDP and/or the lost flexibilities of individual motor vehicles would lead to massive economic contraction. Look at the former USSR. Do you think that their public transport was more efficient than our car use? Did you know that they were far worse wreckers of the environment on every measure, and used more resources per unit value of GDP, than capitalist countries?

Car-free societies absent totalitarian planning, were (Victorian England) and are (Slumdog Millionaire) mixed-use land use societies with people and animals living above and around factories and offices. We will only reach the stated aim of resource conservation and emmissions reductions to the extent we return to such a society. Long distances are the main problem, not modes of transport.

Limiting sprawl does not achieve the desired result because of the effect on land prices. Alain Bertaud's work on urban density profiles show that average commute lengths have increased in cities like Portland precisely because of this effect. The cost of land closer to the urban center becomes prohibitive, and most of the infill development takes place closer to the more affordable fringes. Seriously, take a look at his graphs.

Cities that have been allowed to develop closer to Lassez-Faire principles actually end up with lots of mixed use land use and multiple nodes and much lower average commute distances, and urban density profiles that slope evenly from the highest at the centre, to the lowest at the fringes. The low density at the fringes means that the commuting done by these people is of minimal effect, while the affordability of land is retained over the whole urban area, meaning that many people who could not have afforded to live closer to work under the controlled scenario, can do so under the "free" one.

Trains initially served the use of getting wealthy people over longer distances faster and in more comfort than horse drawn carriage. Trains have had their day long since. But we are doing ourselves serious economic and environmental harm with our mistaken assumptions about all public transport.

People run their own cars by choice. The taxes they pay for petrol alone, covers the cost of roads and externalities. It is public transport that does not pay its way even for running costs let alone externalities.

No-one would use public transport by choice if they had to pay the true cost.

The worst thing here is that people are being lied to about what their hard-earned rates and tax money being spent on public transport, actually achieves. It has never achieved cost-benefit justifiable reductions in road congestion and it has never achieved real reductions in resource use or emissions, let alone cost-benefit-justifiable reductions. We would have been better off in every way to have never spent a cent on public transport subsidies, and simply built more roads and lanes and had lower congestion.

If there were no public transport subsidies, and no government interference in transport, entrepreneurs would identify opportunities to run appropriate vehicles on appropriate routes at appropriate times of day, and make a profit on it.

If you understand economics, you will understand that if people buy product A because it is cheaper than product B, it is simply because the making of product A is a more efficient use of scarce resources than the making of product B. It is not necessary to attempt to trace the whole process from one end to the other: (refer to the essay "I, Pencil" by Leonard Read: to see how complicated it is to calculate all the inputs into making a pencil) the price is the quick answer.

If public transport fares absent subsidies would have to be more than people would pay, then it is not an efficient user of scarce resources. Actually, you do not have to look very far into the way Public Transport is run, to get a gut confirmation of this.
It is NOT a question of running 30 people from A to B by bus, compared with 30 people running their cars from A to B, and it never has been.
The 30 people get from 30 different "A"'s to 30 different "B's". To get the bus to pick them all up and drop them all off, would take so long that nobody would use it. The only people that use the bus today, are the small minority who it really suits.
The bus has to start somewhere empty and finish somewhere empty. Its average loading for the 1 trip is more like 15 people. Then it has to go back to the start mostly empty; average loading drops to below 10. That is just for the peak times of the day, which are the only times when running these services might make any sense at all. But then we have the lunacy of running that same bus around all day, with average loadings not exceeding 3 people. And I said "buses", the same thing applies, only worse, to trains.

Why don't ratepayers and taxpayers realise this? We are being fleeced for no good reason. The environment is not being saved and there are stuff all less cars on the road; if public transport use increases 10% there are only 1% less people on the road. It is exponentially cheaper to build new roads for the 10% odd people who do not yet use cars for their travel, than it would be to provide buses and trains for the 90% of people who do not use public transport: in fact the latter has been calculated to cost more than our entire GDP.

As for the social objectives of running buses and trains for poor people to use during the day, this is so expensive that we could provide hired stretch-limos for them at a lower cost, to pick them up at their door and drop them off where they want to go.

Public transport in its current subsidised, "social objectives" form, is actually doing more harm than good. It is a pretty good economic rule of thumb that if it needs subsidising at all, it is not an efficient use of resources.

We can make huge gains in average vehicle efficiency yet; there are still people who buy V8's by choice. Price rises will accompany resource depletion, and average vehicle efficiency will rise. Even with today's technology, we could gain 70 or 80%. But of course there will be further technological advances. Heck, Greenies themselves talk about this out of one side of their mouths, when it comes to energy SOURCES, but they talk out the other side when it comes to energy CONSUMPTION by private vehicles using roads. I believe that new technology, electric cars and so on, will be very quickly supplied at affordable prices through manufacture in Chindia; at the moment they are made in small quantities in the USA or Europe and are just unaffordable. Think of the first one-piece carbon fibre bicycle frames and what they cost (Kestrel; $10,000?).

Internet-based car pooling/ride sharing alone, is an answer that public transport is not. ANY full car is already more efficient than even the fullest bus or train, and any car with two people in it is already more efficient than the current public transport average. I think if the authorities want to get serious about this issue, taxi licensing regulations should be abolished to allow anyone to carry a passenger for a fee. That would incentivise participation by all those drivers with spare seats.

Then we must return to more flexible uses of land. It makes no sense to force lengthy commutes through rigid zoning that was based on a previously popular ideology; society has taken one step forwards and two backwards. Along with dispersion of sources of jobs, we need interconnectedness to minimise trip distances and times by road. It is an economic impossibility to provide this interconnectedness by public transport.

The model being pursued by our planning classes now is just so wrong-headed that one suspects that they are driven by ideologies other than genuine concern for humanity and its environment. Their model will only work under conditions of such population density, that totalitarian rule would be necessary to achieve it. Alain Bertaud's study on Atlanta concluded that Atlanta would need to abandon two thirds of its existing housing and retract back into the remaining one third, if public transport was to be viable. But of course the reconstruction that would be necessary, would consume so much resources that it would be doubtful whether recouping them would be possible through the alleged efficiencies of the higher density.

William Eager's study in my list below, shows that increased population densities result in more road congestion, not less, for the simple reason that greater majority of the increased population moving into an area still opt for car use. The exceptions may be downtown Hong Kong and Manhattan.

Such high densities bring their own environmental and quality of life problems. It is far from certain that the resource efficiency and emissions of high density living are superior to urban sprawl. Urban sprawl is partly the result of choice and partly the result of zoning fashions of the past. Free market choice is actually a very good allocater of resources. I believe that those zoning fashions of the past have given us the longer commute distances that are our main problem today: under a freer market in land use, we might have had more urban sprawl but we would also have lower average travel distances.

We don't have a "school zone" that we all pack our kids off to 30 km's away by train; I fail to see why we have to have "workplace zones", if we really do have such a "crisis" of resources and emissions to confront.

Isn't it funny how the political classes favoured "solutions" to any problem invariably involve reductions in human freedom, even when an increase in human freedom would be a better solution, knowledge of which needs to be suppressed accordingly?

The reality is that even if peak oil is real and AGW is real, public transport is no fix. The same factors that will make free use of private vehicles less feasible will also apply to public transport. If we really do have to confront such a crisis, we will be forced to resort to freely mixed uses of land; it will simply be impossible to continue an urban planning model that implies lengthy commutes and focuses myopically on the mode of travel. It is absurd to imply that massive investments in electric rail or any kind of rail or even in buses, is responsible planning for an anticipated future crisis of resources or climate.

I have actually read every one of those articles, essays, and reports I have listed below; that is how I came to make the list over the years.
I heartily recommend these online essays:

Wendell Cox: "The Illusion of Transit Choice"
David S. Lawyer "Does Mass Transit Save Energy?"
Brad Templeton "Is Green US Mass Transit a Myth?"
Ali Modarres "Commuting Patterns in Multi-Centered Urban Settings"
Ari Vatanen and Malcolm Harbour: "European Transport Policy: Strangling or Liberating Europe's Potential?"

Alain Bertaud:
"The Costs of Utopia"
"Clearing the Air in Atlanta"
"Sprawl and Urban Spatial Structures"
"Urban Transport and Cities Spatial Structures"
"Efficiency in Land Use and Infrastructure Design"

Owen McShane:
"The End of Cheap Oil and Urban Form"
"Why Urban Planners Love Global Warming, and, as usual, have got it all wrong"
"Alternatives to Smart Growth"
"Back to the Future"
"Why Planned integration of Land Use and Transport will not achieve its goals"
"Petrol Prices, Driving Habits, and Public Transport"
"Double-Bubble, and Oil, and Trouble"
"Applying Systems Intelligence to Transport"

Randal O'Toole:
"Real Global Warming Fix"
"Debunking Portland"
"Roadmap to Gridlock"
"Does Rail Transit Save Energy or Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions?"

Joel Kotkin:
"Opportunity Urbanism"
"Back To Basics"
"The New Suburbanism"

David J. C. McKay "Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air"
Steve Polzin: "Energy Crisis Solved"
Ted Balaker and Sam Staley: "How Traffic Jams are made in City Hall"
William Eager: "Population Density and Reduced Road Congestion"

JH

The point Phil was making is that you can't bolt on public transport to the current structure and expect it to be some form of panacea, ie nailing 4 legs on a dog does not make it an octopus. The fundamental problem lies in the fact that oil burning public transport is possibly less energy efficient than private has the capacity to be, what dismays me about the green muppets is that they refuse to see this, their dogmatism appears to be driven by a primal socialist need for universal suffering.

Long haul electric trains are probably the only exception as a replacement for aircraft (which BTW are also "Public Transport")

Neven

Julie

Good points, are you a professional in this area?, I agree with your view on the bias (Hugh P keeps quoting the same sources). Unfettered urban sprawl based on cheap fuel will bite eventually, I find the Phil/Hugh show noisey and misleading, sort of like the inductive process of someone falling off a 20 floor building, 16th, 17th floor everything is fine. or in Hughs case it would be great if every city was just like Houston.

The contra is of course some of the equally misleading justifications for Public Transport (parking cost is included, as is cost of car accidents), which ignore the energy cost/efficiency. The point being that a bad solution is probably worse than the problem

Neven

Notice the Freudian Slip about 2.21Mins through the video... 84% of New Zealanders got to work by Motorway ah, ah... Strikes me, Mr Joyce is:-

1- A one dimentional thinker... who is yet to get his head around the concept of Peak Oil... or,

2- Cllimate Change...and The Fact that fm 1990 to 2006 NZ had the highest increase in Green House Gas Emissions as a result of Transport fuels in the OECD. at roughly 70% makes me wonder is Steven stupid or culpable?

I have a question for Mr Joyce... Q: Can you part of the Solution, or are you part of the problem?

mouse.

Interestingly... Mr Joyce is planning to designate a Mororway through Mr Hughes electorate before Christmas... or at least that is what he idicated in his speach to the Electra Business awards last week.

This Motorway has been rejected by the Local council [KCDC] as unnecssary based on independant modelling [given 30 yrs at 2%growth will a return on Investment @ 50 cents in the Dollar]...and

A recent Treasury Paper concluded that whilst Building the RONS [roads of national significance would reduce congestion, it was not an effective allocation of Capital...

Meantime... a very large share of that 84% who travel on SH1 motorway do so because:-

1- They risk death if they walk or Cycle between the Coasts Communities.
2- There is only one train Service into Wellington between Palmerston North and Waikanae...so no other options than Car.
3- There are not Rail Stops where the population density is.... i.e Raumati.... inspite of the train passing through.

and SMILE!... because you the taxpayer are going to be on the Hook for this motorway for approx 3 billion NZD...

So consider the loss of Health, Education, Pension spending you are going to have to forego to subsidise what is either,

a- Pork barrelling for Mr Friedlanders road transport lobby group or,
b- Mr Steven Joyce's [and Nathan Guy's] inability to understand Climate Change and Peak Oil and the challenges of everyday people.

Yesterday's solutions from yeserday's men?

mouse