Re: Lost your home? Car? Everything? Thank a bicyclist and the California road diet.

Am 20.01.2025 um 12:57 schrieb Catrike Ryder:

On Mon, 20 Jan 2025 11:56:01 +0100, Rolf Mantel
<news@hartig-mantel.de> wrote:
 

Am 18.01.2025 um 10:19 schrieb Catrike Ryder:

On Fri, 17 Jan 2025 21:27:16 -0500, Frank Krygowski
<frkrygow@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>

On 1/17/2025 5:44 PM, AMuzi wrote:

On 1/17/2025 4:13 PM, Frank Krygowski wrote:

On 1/17/2025 2:17 PM, AMuzi wrote:

>
This line?
>
https://sfstandard.com/2024/08/02/bart-silicon-valley- extension-
funding/
>
Seems to be 'in progress' as of last summer.
>
For the whole system, fares cover a whopping 22% of operating
expenses (that's negative ROI on capital), more than most passenger
rail systems.

>
Hmm. I wonder what percentage of, say, I-880 or I-680 operating
expenses are paid for by fares. Anybody got a figure?
>

>
Impossible to know.  Too convoluted, just like most government
accounting (which practices would land me in prison post haste).
>
Regarding tolls, I remember when Illinois paid off its original
Interstate bonds, at which point the toll booths were supposed to go
away. Never happened because it's a slush fund for politicians and the
civil service.

>
Same thing happened with the Ohio Turnpike just a few years ago. People
blamed the Republican-controlled legislature.
>

>
But if you meant the road tax, that's different everywhere you go and
depending on where you are 2% to 20% of road tax doesn't go to roads:
>
https://reason.org/policy-brief/how-much-gas-tax-money-states-divert-
away-from-roads/
>
And, in the other view, road taxes don't cover road maintenance expense,
as far as we know:
>
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/gasoline-taxes-and-user-fees-
pay-only-half-state-local-road-spending/
>
So every argument can be both right and wrong, depending.
>
Short answer: it's a mess and a muddle. Which suits the insider
beneficiaries just fine.

>
My overall point is, we've obviously decided to subsidize road
transportation. It's not immediately obvious why we should not subsidize
rail transportation. Asking fares to cover all expenses skips over that
point.

>
We do subsidize passenger rail, and it seems pretty obvious that
people in the USA have not choosen to use long distance passenger rail
even when it is subsidized. There does seem to be interest in
intercity rail for trips that take less than half a day, but two or
three days vs 4 or 5 hours on plane for a lessor charge is easy to
choose even if the train ride has more legroom.

>
Sure. Given that air traffic exists and tickets are "affordable", 4
hours of journey time are the maximum where rail traffic is capable of
gaining a significant market share of journeys between "cities with an
airport"; 3 hours of journey time between 2 city centers pretty much
kills the airline market (except feeder services) between those cities:
>
The high-speed rail line Berlin - Nuremberg - Munich completely killed
the air market Nuremberg - Berlin and halved the airline market Munich -
Berlin when it opened in 2017.
>
Germany is just about small enough to have reached 4 hours journey time
between most major cities (except Hamburg - Munich and Ruhr - Munich) by
investing in 180 mph lines.

 I never thought of it that way, but yes, four hours is about how long
I'd care to be locked up. I have taken air flights for longer, but
only because auto travel wasn't an option.
 So lets see, 180MPH for four hours will get me about 720 miles if it
was a direct route. That wouldn't get my wife and me to any of our out
of state relatives. I suspect that there'd be stops along the way that
would make it take longer, too.

Correct. Hamburg - Munich is 500 miles and not technically but financially out of reach of those magic 4 hours (currently it's 5:30 with two major investments planned to bring it to 4:30 by 2070).
In Germany (like the east-coast corridor), we aim for one major stop per hour to serve intermediate locations - which is why speeds above 160 mph are rarely value-for-money; in France (larger and less dense) they go 3 or 4 hours non-stop at 200 mph to compete point-to-point with the plane.