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Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

reuters.com

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Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#151

Post by tzs »

qcnguy wrote: post #109
sofixa wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, that's not how Switzerland operates, because it's a very direct democracy where the status quo and the will of the majority takes priority over common sense and long term thinking. Full franchise (women being allowed to vote) didn't happen in all cantons until the 1990s (after it being made possible in the 1970s), because the existing voters (men) just voted against it.

That's because women themselves voted against it. Which is actually the history of the female franchise everywhere. The suffragettes were reduced to bombing campaigns because fellow women did not agree that women should be allowed to vote. In the UK it was only WW1 that changed things. Maybe in the UK female franchise would also have been much delayed if not for the huge social upheavals caused by the world wars.

> That's because women themselves voted against it

That's rather confusing. If women didn't have the right to vote, how would they be able to vote on the question of whether or not to grant women the right to vote?

Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#152

Post by qcnguy »

birn559 wrote: post #149
qcnguy wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roads are much cheaper and more useful. They can be used for moving freight whereas good public transport keeps freight off the lines to avoid timetabling problems caused by blockage.

Rails can and are used to transport freight. Trucks contribute a lot to bad traffic and therefore the same kind of blockage you mentioned.

Rail freight is dying everywhere outside the USA, where passenger rail died instead. Mixing the two on the same lines is very difficult and causes tremendous problems, you can't even do it once passenger rail speeds get high enough. Rail freight has been uncompetitive with trucking for a long time as a result even though rail has huge subsidies and road traffic is a revenue generator for governments.

Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#153

Post by qcnguy »

birn559 wrote: post #148
qcnguy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh no, that is an actual failure mode. Germany is experiencing it right now. What it means is everyone ends up being forced to use horribly broken public transport and it screws up everyone's business and personal lives. It is possible for public transport to be too popular. It looks like overloaded, crowded and constantly broken lines that can't get better because they're starved of funding.

Budget for German train system has been cut and was too low for two decades. It was well known that would result in what we have today. You have to invest in infrastructure to keep it at a high quality level. It's crowded because it has been lacking proper funding for years. It's a result of politics, nothing stops public transport from being popular and providing reasonable high quality service.

Inability to competently manage finances within the framework of populist democratic politics is one of the top reasons governments suck at running things and "public *" often ends in failure.

Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#154

Post by qcnguy »

jewayne wrote: post #113
qcnguy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh no, that is an actual failure mode. Germany is experiencing it right now. What it means is everyone ends up being forced to use horribly broken public transport and it screws up everyone's business and personal lives. It is possible for public transport to be too popular. It looks like overloaded, crowded and constantly broken lines that can't get better because they're starved of funding.

I don't know much about what Germany is experiencing, but even Germany's neighbors in the Netherlands and France seem to be having a renaissance predicated upon getting people out of their personal automobiles. Perhaps the problem is actually the outsized influence of the auto industry in Germany?

No, auto industry is dying in Germany and was more powerful in the past. German railway collapse is a recent phenomenon. It's the inverse: the Green push to make everyone use public transport is collapsing both the auto industry and public transit there.

Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#155

Post by qcnguy »

k_g_b_ wrote: post #133
qcnguy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh no, that is an actual failure mode. Germany is experiencing it right now. What it means is everyone ends up being forced to use horribly broken public transport and it screws up everyone's business and personal lives. It is possible for public transport to be too popular. It looks like overloaded, crowded and constantly broken lines that can't get better because they're starved of funding.

Public transport being massively/too popular is the only way for it to get anywhere near the level of funding it needs. That's not really a failure mode, just a symptom of the real failure. It was extremely easy for governments to ignore it and leave it to rot for decades because it had next to no lobby compared to cars. The 9€ and Deutschlandticket reinvigorated that lobby - although that's being snuffed out again.

This is backwards. The public transit lobby is the Green/climate lobby which is absolutely massive and incredibly influential because it peddles to politicians a unifying moral story about the end of the world that justifies unlimited exercise of political power.

What does the auto industry have in response? Jobs? The left don't care about jobs to begin with, they view anything linked to capitalism or employers to be inherently suspicious.

To see this is true, just look at which group is a net tax payer vs net tax recipient. Car drivers subsidize public transport everywhere I know of (unless you get into stupid arguments that assume world peace exists solely for the purpose of oil transport).

Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#156

Post by aqme28 »

kccqzy wrote: post #45
aqme28 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to comment on if it should be free or not, but public transit and micromobility should always be cheaper than owning+driving a car. Even with NYC's controversial new congestion pricing, it's still cheaper to drive your family to the city than to take them via train.

No it's absolutely not cheaper to drive your family into the city. You said owning+driving a car; did you really take into account ownership costs (maintenance, insurance etc) and driving costs (tolls, parking)? Just the cost of parking alone dwarfs the cost of the train.

A family of 4 is charged $2.90x2 in subway fares, which is more than the $15 congestion price for a car.

Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#157

Post by tzs »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #136
ferguess_k wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are still depending on the roads for trucks that transport merchandises around and emergency vehicles and a lot of other stuffs. We are also paying for your public transit, thank you, because at least in my city it never breaks even, so everyone including us gets taxed -- but I have no issue with that -- I mostly take public transit anyway.

Sure, roads are multi-purpose. But if the roads were only used for public transport, transport of goods, and emergency vehicles, that would reduce wear and tear significantly and many might not even be needed. How much do you think road maintenance costs would drop by? Significantly. So that very large amount is being subsidized by taxes so people can drive private cars instead of taking public transport. Yes, we as…

Careful with road wear and tear. Stress on the road goes as the 4th power of axle weight.

My car, a 2025 Hyundai Kona Electric SEL, weighs 3 800 pounds. Call it 4 000 when carrying one typical person. It has two axles so the axle weight is 2 000 pounds.

Let's call the amount of stress this puts on the road when driving from point A to point B 1 car's worth of stress.

Suppose we need to get 60 people from point A to point B. If we put them in 60 Konas that would result in 60 car's worth of stress.

A bit of Googling suggests that a typical 40-foot transit bus with 60 passengers would weigh around 36 000 pounds and has two axles which gives an axel weight of 18 000 pounds, which is 9 times that of the Kona.

The bus taking 60 people from A to B then will result in 9^4 car's worth of stress, which is a little over 6 500 car's worth of stress. That's a little over 100 times the stress from sending those people in 60 Konas.

There might be some differences due to other factors like tire types and speed, but the weight difference would be the dominant factor.

There are some good arguments for buses, but saving on road maintenance might not be one of them.

BTW, this outsized stress from heavy vehicles is also relevant to the ICE vs electric debate, since EVs usually weigh more than similar sized ICE cars.

For example the ICE version of the Kona is about 500 pounds lighter. The EV version should cause about 70% more stress on the road.

But wait! The ICE version needs gas, and gas is usually delivered to gas stations via tanker trucks. When the stress from that delivery of gas was taken into account it turned out that replacing ICE Konas with EV Konas would be a net reduction in road stress if the tanker truck that brought the gas had to drive more than just a few miles from wherever it gets filled up to the gas station.

Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#158

Post by bluGill »

belorn wrote: post #140
k_g_b_ wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public transport being massively/too popular is the only way for it to get anywhere near the level of funding it needs. That's not really a failure mode, just a symptom of the real failure. It was extremely easy for governments to ignore it and leave it to rot for decades because it had next to no lobby compared to cars. The 9€ and Deutschlandticket reinvigorated that lobby - although that's being snuffed out again.

Looking at the Swedish railway, the issue is related to budget but the problem is not that simple. The main issue is that the railway system lacks redundancy in track capacity, meaning that any failure require short term fixes in order to reduce short term losses. Those short term fixes eventually leads to overall higher downtime and higher failure rates, which only lead to a even more focus on quick fixes and shoddy…

One differente with nuclear power is that today we have a better option - renewables - and so nuclear doesn't make sense at all any price. By contrast we don't have anything completely better than mass transit for some cases and to it makes sense to build it and make it cheaper.

Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#159

Post by 1718627440 »

MangoToupe wrote: post #139
bluGill wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I said transit I mean mass transit. Most people do not refer to roads as transit even though they are part of your transportation network.

Sure, and I'm just saying there's the rational impulse to tax cars to death and then enjoy the fruits of a mass transit network. The way we have things set up now doesn't make any sense to begin with—almost like we're taxing our economic centers for existing.

> we're taxing our economic centers for existing.

Yes. Economic centers need transport. Transport costs money to operate, so it is an external cost for an economic center. Taxes are a ways to price in external costs.

Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#160

Post by bluGill »

qcnguy wrote: post #155
k_g_b_ wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public transport being massively/too popular is the only way for it to get anywhere near the level of funding it needs. That's not really a failure mode, just a symptom of the real failure. It was extremely easy for governments to ignore it and leave it to rot for decades because it had next to no lobby compared to cars. The 9€ and Deutschlandticket reinvigorated that lobby - although that's being snuffed out again.

This is backwards. The public transit lobby is the Green/climate lobby which is absolutely massive and incredibly influential because it peddles to politicians a unifying moral story about the end of the world that justifies unlimited exercise of political power. What does the auto industry have in response? Jobs? The left don't care about jobs to begin with, they view anything linked to capitalism or employers to be…

Much of the green mokement is a hypocrite that wants to appear green- but don't take their cars or gas away. And so polititians exploit that to build minimal transit - enough to look like they did something but not enough to take away cars.
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