I have no airtravel experience, but I would assume that it falls in the first category.
Or free and world-leading
It is free and awesome where I live, I am sorry for you :(
There are a few places in the world where it is cheap and good, just not a lot of them.
Counterpoint: London.
It’s easy to complain, with it being £2.80/$3.70 for a single zone peak single, the frequent strikes, the noise, etc. but the trains are at worst every 5 minutes or so, they have the most frequent rail service in the world (Victoria Line), they’re constantly making improvements (Elizabeth Line, Battersea extension), it has fairly good coverage (when including national rail for south London), overnight service, and the busses are absolutely amazing.
Is it on par with Seoul & Singapore? No. But it’s certainly significantly better than most cities worldwide.
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The Shinkansen network in Japan was infamously extremely expensive and during its construction, many Japanese hated it and doubted it would ever amount to much. Today, it is held up as the best public transit system ever created.
Here in Seattle, the Link Light Rail system is also extremely expensive, though this is due to many factors, notably the fact that between the time the project got started and initially set its funding goals, the Covid pandemic happened and massive inflation, both in currency and in raw materials. However, the lines that are finished are extremely nice. The Link system is shaping up to be some of the best in the entire US, and the biggest and most important section hasn’t even opened yet: the world’s first rail line to travel across a floating bridge. Once the bridge section is complete, it will connect the two separate systems on the west and east sides of Lake Washington into one system and allow fast, efficient transit from the east side into downtown Seattle.
Anyway, my point is that just because a system is expensive, doesn’t mean it’s bad. I think you’re just furthering car-centric propaganda and reinforcing the belief that public transit is expensive and therefore bad
My part of the UK falls squarely within the first category. But we’re working on nationalising it, so it might improve… by the time I retire /s
Being good and being cheap are both indications that public transit is being properly funded. When funding is short, they have to raise fares and cut services.
Hi NYers. Since this is one of Zohran’s priorities, gentle reminder that there’s 2 more days of early voting. Sun is out right now and polling center lines are at their shortest. https://vote.nyc/
Yep, what plenty of people don’t understand, or don’t want to understand is that a good public transport system is seldom directly profitable.
Instead, the profits comes from taxes, public transport enable more people to work in a far greater area, meaning that you get more money through income tax, people earning money also get to spend it, generating more money from sales tax, and so on.
This is also why privately funded public transport systems are less common than state/city funded systems.
What most people intuitively understand, though, is that public roads are expensive, not profitable and still a worthwhile investment.
It’s kinda baffling that the same isn’t intuitively understandable to everyone when it comes to public transport.
Yeah—ideally, fares only need to cover the marginal/fluctuating costs, not the fixed cost of the whole system.
For private transportation, fares need to pay for both, and generate a profit on top of that.
That’s because it’s infrastructure. It’s very expensive, and needs to be publicly funded to be good - otherwise you have a death spiral of raising prices, neglecting maintenance, and losing passengers because it’s expensive and terrible
You can easily make it all back from taxes though… Good public transportation means anyone in a city can work, shop, or patronize anywhere, it makes the economy go brr
The best public transit systems can even make back their money just from low fairs alone due to shear ridership
The best ones don’t bother, because collecting fares is expensive and slows everything down
You can have self funded infrastructure, it can work, but it just seems like a bad solution. It’s a weakness. All it takes is one leader throwing a wrench in the process, and the whole thing unbalances and you get a death spiral
But if it’s free? Even if maintenance is neglected for a time, there’s no feedback loop
Air travel can be cheap and terrible.
It can also be good and expensive, but that expensive is really damn expensive in that case.
I’d take a good train ride any day over it though
I’d rather spend three days on a train than three hours in a plane.
Except when the train is operated by Deutsche Bahn. Then you wish you were walking from Düsseldorf to Munich.
Depends on the categroy of public transit. Public transit as in subway in cities yes. But public transit as in long distance can be good and very expensive. For example the TGV in France is pretty good. But it still costs a shit ton to use
I’d argue Switzerland is an example of good but expensive.
In Northern Ireland it’s okay. Occasional delays but they manage to compensate the timetables for this
Good transit is always expensive. Where the money comes from can be hidden from the end users, but it is always expensive. If you only look at the fares it might seem that good transit is cheap, but that is just because the costs have been moved elsewhere - a political question that has nothing to do with transit.
Good transit means you can get a lot of places (there are a lot of routes, with good transfers), and you don’t have to wait (meaning there are a lot of vehicles). That costs a lot of money no matter where you are.
However if you look at it a differently - your alternatives are either worse or more expensive.
Your share of the cheapest car (meaning 10 years old and you do all the maintenance yourself) is still going to be more that a great transit network. Most people live in a “family” situation so you could save money if you went down to one car/truck for those random things transit cannot do and use transit for everything, but this is only possible if you have great transit such that for more people this is a reasonable option.
A bike (ebike) is cheaper, but you can get much less distance in a reasonable amount of time. (or at least should be able to - many bad transit systems are slower than a bike!).
Walking is very cheap, but you cannot get very far in a reasonable amount of time and so it is limiting.
Good transit is always expensive. Where the money comes from can be hidden from the end users, but it is always expensive. If you only look at the fares it might seem that good transit is cheap, but that is just because the costs have been moved elsewhere - a political question that has nothing to do with transit.
At surface value, this seems true. Until you look at the city with the best train system on earth, Tokyo. There, the trains are cheap. The trains are fast, clean, on time. And all of it is without any external funding
Trains are still expensive - they just have enough users that the amnortized cost is cheap.
The initial investment can be very expensive, yes, but a good underground system or largely off-road overground system in a city can be profitable from reasonable fares because of the sheer quantity of passengers it can move per hour.
Once you get to the frequency where you don’t look up the timetable before you set off because there’ll be one along shortly and you get to the speed where you beat the traffic, you start winning passengers from cars and them everyone has a better commute.
But if there’s only a few per hour and they have to mix in with the traffic, public transport is worse than going by car, so people don’t use it en masse, so fares are high and it’s not great.
Isn’t that how public shared companies supposed to work? /s
