
Metrorail vs. Uber: Travel Time and Cost - wallflower
https://districtmeasured.com/2017/10/11/metrorail-vs-uber-travel-time-and-cost/
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muglug
Where cost = financial cost to the end user, not the cost to society when
private corporations suck revenue out of public transportation systems for
short-term market gain.

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dogruck
I agree with your first statement, but not the followip.

Public transportation systems are woefully inefficient. If we made them
operate more like private corporations, I would agree more.

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mozumder
Nothing inherently more efficient about private companies over public ones.
Private companies have all sorts of inefficiencies that public organizations
don't have, like profit and other requirements.

You can send mail across the country via USPS for $.50. Or, you could pay $8
to send it privately via UPS or FedEx.

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icelancer
>>Nothing inherently more efficient about private companies over public ones.

>>You can send mail across the country via USPS

USPS has to service everywhere. This is usually the case with all publicly
funded "companies." This is inherently inefficient. It _is_ more fair, but
that's not the argument. Private companies are absolutely inherently more
efficient.

~~~
dragonwriter
Private companies are absolutely more efficient if you discount externalities.

Of course, externalities are the entire rationale for having public services.

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tabeth
This is not a fair comparison:

1.) The real cost for an Uber ride is opaque, at best.

2.) Unlike Uber, public transportation becomes exponentially better with
infrastructure upgrades. These upgrades would cease (in both mind and in
implementation) to exist with the proliferation of Uber and other "car
sharing" rides.

3.) Road travel is more subsidized than rail, anecdotally. I hate to say I
don't have hard data for this, but I'm pretty sure it's right (sure, there's a
gas tax, however cars are subsidized both implicitly, with parking lots and
real estate, and explicitly, with wars and other foreign policy to manipulate
the price of gas).

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JumpCrisscross
> _Road travel is more subsidized than rail, anecdotally_

New York spends between $1.11 and $7.34 subsidizing each ride on our Subway or
LIRR, respectively, [1]. Assuming 2 trips a day on each of a year's 260
workdays, that comes to $577 to $3,810 of subsidies per commuter per year. The
article is from 2012, so we'll use BLS data [2] to adjust those figures to
September 2017 dollars: $618 and $4,080, respectively.

"The statewide average of highway spending per capita in 2009 was $233," [3]
or $266 in September 2017 dollars. That said, this isn't a fair comparison
since we aren't adjusting for usage. On the other hand, most of roads' wear
and tear comes from trucks [3]. And New York taxes the hell out of trucks [4].

TL; DR Trains work, but in the United States we tend to treat them as jobs
programs first and public infrastructure second.

[1] [http://www.wnyc.org/story/283927-mta-suburban-passengers-
get...](http://www.wnyc.org/story/283927-mta-suburban-passengers-get-7-per-
ride-subway-riders-a-buck/)

[2]
[https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm](https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm)

[3] [http://facweb.knowlton.ohio-
state.edu/pviton/courses2/crp776...](http://facweb.knowlton.ohio-
state.edu/pviton/courses2/crp776/776-roads-handout.pdf)

[4]
[https://www.tax.ny.gov/bus/hut/huidx.htm](https://www.tax.ny.gov/bus/hut/huidx.htm)

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kalleboo
You're comparing different values here - subsidies per commuter vs subsidies
per capita. To be fair you should recalculate the road spending to be paid
only by those who use it for commuting. Not to mention that number only
includes highway spending and not regular roads.

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bkohlmann
Very useful. My experience, however, is that unless you live or are going to
an event/work at a metro station, the "last mile" benefit of ride sharing tips
the scales towards road travel in most instances.

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rayiner
Modeling metro delay as 0 minutes is completely unrealistic. For example, the
scheduled trip time from New Carrollton to Foggy Bottom (all on the Orange
Line) is 36 minutes. In reality, it often runs well over 50 minutes.

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kapauldo
This is great. I wish there was consensus that data was the basis for
opinions.

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dwills1
Just like with Internet service, the real cost (time) is in the last mile, as
bkohlmann refers to. Uber picks you up at your door. Did the study figure the
average walking time to a Metro station into their statistics for random
addresses? I doubt it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statist...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics)

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icebraining
If you look closely, you'll see they did:

"A trip from Metro Center to Bethesda, for instance, takes 33 minutes, and
that includes time to wait for the train _and walk to and from the station._ "

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yardie
Just to note. In DC the train system is called the metro. Metrorail is the
name for the miami transit train system. The author uses metro, metro train,
and metrorail interchangeably. Left me slightly confused as if they were
comparing DC to Miami.

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cmsmith
In DC, the mass transit agency is usually referred to as Metro, and offers two
main services - Metrorail and Metrobus.

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yardie
I’ve only referred to the train as the metro and the buses as the bus. I’ve
only seen in one city the locals refer to the train as the metrorail. And that
was Miami.

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TheCoelacanth
In colloquial use, you are right, but in written media I see references to DC
Metrorail all the time.

