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

Am 20.01.2025 um 18:55 schrieb cyclintom:

On Mon Jan 20 11:56:01 2025 Rolf Mantel  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.

 San Francisco or Oakland to LA is only an hour on commercial
aircraft. The same to Las Vegas and only a half hour more to Arizona
and only a half hour more than that to Denver. Trains simply do not
work with the distances between major cities in the US. Too bad, I
do like railroads.

On the contrary, exactly those are the distances that work on high-speed trains.  "One hour on commercial aricraft" means a total travelling time of approx. three hours "city-center to city-center"; a "2:40 non-stop travel time" by train as planned on completion of phase 1 would kill the air market completely.
Obviously, only building the central-valley section will not be able to compete on its own.