http://www.mbta.com/profile/budget/budget.cfm , for example. Half a billion dollars?!?! What are they spending it on?!
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- Methinks this is headed for GD, but one possibility right off: they don’t run it profitably, because they don’t have to. It is not required, either explicitly by law or implicitly like in a private business. It’s government money they’re wasting --not their own, and their own individual pay is basically a set percentage of the total wasted so they have no incentive to reduce the total. In fact, quite the opposite.
~ With public programs, there is often a perverse incentive to expand the program at any cost in order to justify continuing it regardless of how much it currently costs, how little it is accomplishing, or if there is a less expensive way of obtaining the same results. - MC
- Methinks this is headed for GD, but one possibility right off: they don’t run it profitably, because they don’t have to. It is not required, either explicitly by law or implicitly like in a private business. It’s government money they’re wasting --not their own, and their own individual pay is basically a set percentage of the total wasted so they have no incentive to reduce the total. In fact, quite the opposite.
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Just want to point out that road systems are so expensive to run and for that matter bus systems. It’s just you don’t see road maintance fees in your bus fair because the bus company doesn’t pay them (ok a small amount but really they don’t). It seems like the rail system gets hammered hard because they have to pay for the train and track while the bus systems gets to run on ‘free’ roads that tax payers pay for.
No cite for this, I’m afraid, but I read once that the only subway system in the world that made a running profit was in Hong Kong. This was before reunification with China, so it was a very unusual case for geographic reasons as well as commercial ones.
My WAG as to why subway systems are expensive to run is that part of the cost is paying off the interest and capital involved in building the thing in the first place.
Public transportation often gets criticised for being expensive, but there are so many hidden costs and payoffs in all forms of transport in a city that the true picture is hard to isolate. I was at college in Sheffield, England, where the bus fares were once ridiculously cheap (~3¢ for a two mile ride). Under political pressure the subsidy that allowed this was removed, but over the next few years a lot of businesses in the city centre collapsed becase people preferred to drive to an out of town mall instead. Maybe they should’ve paid the tax, kept the cheap buses, and kept their customers?
Doesn’t seem that expensive to me. As a Boston native, I can tell you that like New York, you can get anywhere you want to go at virutually anytime for a reasonable in reasonable safety – what do you think is a reasonable price?
Subways and public transportation in general are a public service, like a police department, fire department, etc. They are not intended to make a profit. They exist because most of the public thinks they are worth having. All have user fees to partially offset costs.
Costs include capital costs, interest, maintenance, salaries, etc.
I dunno, half a billion dollars seems really friggin’ expensive to me. I suppose I can see the logic behind everton’s WAG.
muttrox, Cambridge myself, so I know how great the T is, I just wonder why they have such a hard time making it on 100+ million dollars a year.
I realize my previous post was a bit incoherent.
erislover, what am I asking is what criteria are you using to judge how expensive it is. Are you comparing it to street/rail/air budgets? Are you comparing it to mass transport systems in other major cities? Or are you taking the half-billion number in a vacuum of context.
I don’t know the answer myself, how the T ranks. But since I moved from Boston to Atlanta, whose mass transport costs twice as much and doesn’t ever seem to go anywhere you ever want to be, I really miss the T.
How much do you think it should cost?
The costs can be found in two major expense categories:
Right of way and signalling: urban rail transit systems (and all railroads in the US) build and maintain their own infrastructure. In urban areas, this right of way must be built for high traffic densities and a significant fraction is in tunnel or on elevated structures, which are high-cost items.
Power system: The capital costs of electrifying a rail route are much higher than routes where the equipment has its own power supply (i.e. diesel). OTOH, diesel is impractical for a subway system. Long-term, on heavily-traveled routs electrically-powered equipment is much more efficient, requires less maintenance, and has a longer usable lifespan than diesel-hauled equipment, despite the higher initial cost.
According to this link, Boston has one of the lower-cost transit systems in the country, at about 42 cents per passenger mile.
That link is for all public transport, not subways specifically, so extrapolating comparisons of subway costs for various cities is impossible.
Uh, yeah, but the budget link in the OP is for the 'T’s overall spending, including heavy rail, light rail and bus, so I’m not sure what the problem is. The transit authorities of most cities operate in several modes.
I was simply trying to show that the cost per passenger mile for Boston’s system is not out of line with the costs in other cities.
$500,000,000 divided by 2,991,905,000* = $0.167 per passenger. That’s not bad for a transit agency.
What’s the transit fair in the MBTA’s service area?
- Figure arrived at by multiplying the daily ridership of 819,700 on the MBTA’s web site by 365 days in a year.
From what I recall , the subsidy per passenger (not per passenger mile) works out cheaper for the subway than for bus or commuter rail. I think it was about a dollar per passenger. The Commuter Rail (justified using the MBTA’s per passenger mile figures showing it to be the cheapest) had a per passenger subsidy of over two dollars.
By my calculations, if you assume that 250,000 people will use the Central Artery per day once built (that’s what it expected to be able to handle comfortably) every day and you figure thirty years to pay off the construction costs, that works out to a subsidy of over $5 per vehicle. And that’s assuming no operating costs, and paying it off without any interest.
I haven’t been able to find the exact numbers for the subway, but I’m guessing that it’s in the vicinity of 200 million people per year (the MBTA serves 103 million per year by bus, and it seems reasonable that the subway serves twice that). I guess that the public considers moving that amount of people into and out of the city without cars to be something worth paying for.
Tokyo has private subways, and I don’t imagine they would be in business for 100 or so years if they were loss making.
Part of it is population density. Hong Kong has one of the highest population densities in the world, their subway system isn’t all that long, so you have a very efficiently used system. That is, a lot of riders over what didn’t cost that much to build because of short distances.
I’m sure you’re correct about Hong Kong, China Guy (it’s what I meant by “geographical reasons” in my earlier post).
In any case, however much a subway costs to run it’s essential to pay as much as is necessary to maintain it properly. The London Tube is my local subway, and it has run into problems recently which seem to be due to chronic under-funding. It has other problems too – being unusually large for instance (I believe its underground sections are the longest in the world), being very old in parts (the first line opened in 1868), and needing unusually deep tunnels for geological reasons – but always remember that a stitch in time saves nine.
Without wanting to recommend the command economy model to an American audience, I also believe the Moscow subway had a good reputation under the USSR. The stations were very clean (as well as very beautiful), the system was totally safe and the whole thing reputedly ran like a clock. Not any more.