Cars vs. transit - apples and oranges or dollars and cents

Every so often, the newspapers publish a letter or opinion strongly against transit.  The current favorite target is the Green Line between Minneapolis and St. Paul.  At least the critics are writing about the costs and not about “government taking our cars away”.

I would like to turn the last phrase around and say that “government took our street cars, buses, and trains away”.  “Government” did this by building bigger and faster freeways and reducing transit service.  Why take a bus that runs every hour or half-hour when you can arrive at your destination in your car in fifteen minutes?

I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and got around by foot, bicycle, street cars, and buses.  I rarely bothered with a schedule because service was rather frequent.  By the time I got to graduate school, most service had deteriorated to the point that I could walk to school faster than I could take two buses.  In bad weather, I drove.

Those who complain about “government taking our cars away” should look at it as “making room for me”.  If more people took the public transit, there would be more room for those who chose to drive.

Think about how a bus makes more space for drivers.  Suppose a forty-foot bus has an average load of twenty-five passengers.  Suppose a fifteen-foot car has an average load of two passengers.  Assuming that all vehicles are traveling at 55mph with a safe-stopping distance between them, then a bus would need less than fifteen feet per passenger but a car would need sixty-eight feet per passenger.  See, government can be efficient!

I use the load of twenty-five passengers above because that was my usual load driving a bus between Maple Grove and downtown Minneapolis.  If buses were carrying forty passengers instead, which some do, then the comparison would drop to nine feet of highway per passenger.  I’ll let you do the comparison for four passengers per car.  However, my first figure is generous in that so many cars have a single occupant.  Using that figure shows us that a single occupant uses almost ten times as much highway space per passenger as a bus carrying twenty-five passengers.

Think about the parking space needed. A forty-foot bus will need about 360 square-feet of parking space at the terminal.  They would all be jammed together.  A fifteen-foot car would need over 200 square-feet of parking space in a lot or garage.  That is around 100 square-feet of parking space per passenger.  On the other hand, if a bus made three runs, it would only need less than five square-feet of parking space per passenger.

It’s a bit of a slog to find CO2 emissions and fuel efficiency figures, but from Wikipedia I found a 2008 Toyota Prius has a rating of 46 mpg and 55-passenger buses in Santa Barbara have a rating of 6.0 mpg.  Using the previous figures of two passengers in a car and twenty-five in a bus, we get 92 mpg/passenger for a Prius (worse if we use some other vehicles) and 150mpg/passenger for a bus.  If the bus had forty passengers, we would get 240mpg/passenger.

In areas where traffic comes to a standstill and buses drive on the shoulder, the buses would definitely be doing better on emissions.

Every time I drive to the Cities, I marvel at all the land gobbled up by that huge interchange of 35E and 694.  How much tax revenue is lost for that land?  I took an easier sample.  Using Hennepin County’s Property Interactive Map, I selected a few residences on Second Avenue South that were south of Lake Street.  Houses on Second Avenue there overlook I-35W Gulch.  The real estate taxes there are about $2,500 per year.  There are about 31 blocks from Lake St. to the city limit at 62nd Street.  I-35W is one block wide.  The city, county, and school district taxes lost for that section of freeway are over $1.8 million.  For this little article, I am not going to make the effort to calculate the taxes lost for all the freeways that scar the Twin Cities.

Sadly, the freeway is probably used more by people that don’t even live in Hennepin County, but counties to the south.

It wasn’t “government that took our buses away”, but land speculators and corporations.  In the Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries, railroads and land speculators encouraged people to move to the suburbs to get away from “those people” in the city.  Then the car manufacturers lobbied for more roads for their vehicles.  Roads were a subsidy for cars, but to pay for the roads, governments couldn’t afford street cars and buses.

Ironically, now many affluent are moving back to the cities and pushing “those people” out.  First it was land speculators attracting people out from the cities, and now it is building speculators attracting people back to the cities.  Pst, hey buddy, I have this nice New York City condo for you, only $25 million.

Who needs comics? We live them!

Yesterday my wife came back from Japan via Minneapolis.  She was to call me on her cell phone when she was in line to board the flight to Duluth.

That was the first of many delays.  The plane had not arrived yet.  It needed to be de-iced at its previous landing, but the de-icing equipment was broken.  This wasn't so bad, I don't think it left Minneapolis more than 45 minutes late.

When she called, I started off on several errands before I met her, figuring I could do quite a bit in an hour.

The first was to dump food scraps for compost at a neighborhood restaurant.  I did that then went in to pick up the latest Reader Weekly.  It wasn't in yet.  I came back to the car and it wouldn't start.  Oh, no!  I left the lights on?

What do I do?  Walk the block back home and get the other car?  Or do I just bring the battery charger?  I opted for the latter.  Then I couldn't get the lid off the charging contact.  Even with the pen knife I had recently bought to replace the one I lost.  I kept trying and eventually got the lid off.  I hooked up the cables and nothing.  I put the ground at a different place, and vroom!

OK, I can go now.  But as I shut the hood, I forgot to take out the prop.  For the second time this year I bent it!  So, there's five more minutes to straighten that out so I can close the hood properly.

Next stop is to mail a bill and a Netflix DVD.  That went OK though the mailbox access was not the best.  And I managed not to get my door banged by other traffic.

Now it is too late to do my next errand.  So, it's straight to the airport.

As I'm on the way to the airport, my cell phone rings.  The best I can do is peek at the caller and see that it is my wife calling.  She has landed.

OK, so I go directly to Arrivals and call her to say that I am out front.  No answer!  I try again and again assuming she either went to the rest room or has it buried in her purse.  After six or seven tries, I loop around to the "cell phone lot".  I try two or three times more.  #%&!  I drive to the pay lot and trudge across the cold, windy, snow-packed lot to the terminal.

What do I do first?  Yell and scream at her for not answering the phone?  Give her a big hug because I'm so glad that she has come back safely.  Of course, the latter.  Then I "yell and scream" and she admits she had turned her cell phone off!

She is ready to trudge across the lot with her big suitcase, our granddaughter, and our granddaughter's little suitcase.  I say no, I'll drive up to the Arrivals and meet you there.

So, I trudge back across the cold, windy, snow-packed lot to our car.  I have $2 out because that is the cost for the first hour.  I present the ticket and $2 to the attendant.  He presses a few buttons, says it's free, and gives me my $2 back.  Second best thing of the day after my wife coming back.

The rest of the day was "normal".  She had enough energy to visit the store I had planned to visit first, to go to two other stores, and to go out to eat at the restaurant that I had stopped at first.

Then she crashed!  Then woke up and couldn't sleep.  Then she crashed and slept to ten this morning.

Maybe in a few days, we'll be back on our normal cycles.

Oh, my wife also suggested that maybe I forgot to press the brake as I started the car with keyless entry.  Did I?  Didn't I?  I vaguely remember both!

I'm glad they don't build them like they used to

People often complain about the quality of cars, even before Toyota's fiasco. However, few stop to think how much more reliable and long-lasting cars are. One of the many features that is more reliable is the speedometer. We have had several cars in the last two decades that have had much more accurate speedometers than previous cars.

In the late 70s when the 55mph limit was opposed, many people gamed the system because a few court cases ruled that a driver could not be ticketed for going less than 10mph over the limit. I regularly drove my Fiat 124 Sport Coupe between southeastern Pennsylania and New York City at 70mph. Oops! That's 15mph over the limit. Not really, my actual speed was 63mph. I went right by at least one patrol car parked under a bridge while my CB crackled with a warning that there was a smokey under that bridge. It was also fun to watch those who had previously passed me slow down to less than I had been going.

When we bought our first Ford Escort I couldn't understand why so many people were passing me when I was going 55mph. I took a few measurements and discovered that I was actually going 47mph!! The dealer wouldn't do anything about it, making some noise about tire wear, blah, blah. Tire wear on a new car?? Once I began driving a true 55mph, I passed a lot of Escorts driving much slower than I was. I guess the Escorts were wearing their tires out within a few miles of the dealers.

The 1997 Ford F-150 I bought later had a much more accurate speedometer. I think it was correct within one mph at highway speeds. It did fairly well at lower speeds; I went past many a radar sign registering 30mph just like my speedometer.

Our 2002 Prius is just about as accurate.

On a recent trip we timed our Chevy Trailblazer at 70mph on a six-mile stretch of I-35W. If our speed was exactly 70mph we would have covered the six miles in 308.57 seconds. We covered the distance in 308.9 seconds, and so our speed was 69.926mph.

Of course, our measurements weren't that close because of reaction time, plus it is difficult to set cruise control right on the line on the speedometer. I think I had it slightly under, but I couldn't be positive without reading glasses.

Even that is damn good. If one were to allow a one percent error, the range of time would be slightly outside 306 to 312 seconds. That is a whole lot better than the 17 percent error of the Ford Escort or the 10 percent error of the Fiat 124.