[sustran] Re: Economic value of urban transport system

[Mark Diesendorf]

Re comments by Eric Britton and Eric Bruun:

Eric Britton's model does not distinguish between the costs to 
society of different transportation modes and the costs paid by 
users. This distinction is important, because ISF's study of 
passenger transportation in Sydney finds that users of cars, buses 
and trains each pay only half of the operating costs of their 
respective modes. These user charges are roughly equal to each other 
when expressed in cents per passenger per km travelled. (Pace, Eric 
Bruun, I agree that using these units biases the results towards 
cars.) Then we have to add in the capital/asset costs, part of  which 
is paid privately and part publicly. In particular, we find that the 
land costs of cars are substantial and are mostly not paid for  by 
motorists.
Mark Diesendorf

>Dear Colleagues,
>
>I have received a number of interesting and helpful messages on this topic
>over the last days, and they, plus a little head scratching here, have led
>me to begin to think about something long the lines of a back of the
>envelope model/construct that would be 100% (or close to it) unscientific
>and still maybe of some use.  Why am I driven to such ends? Well, cause I
>really think that it could be useful to have a better feel for the
>importance of the sector in ballpark economic terms, so that we can then
>begin to show the value of alternative ways of rejiggering any given city
>transport systems.
>
>Let me start the drill here and then go into hiding as the barbs fly:
>
>Goal: Come up with some ballpark figures for the economic value if the urban
>transportation system for some mythic but hopefully recognizable city.
>
>1. Let's assume a city of one million people, all of whom enter and use the
>local transport system each day, incur direct and impose indirect costs, and
>who for the sake of argument are divided into two separate but equal
>classes.
>2. Half of these people are car owner/drivers, the other half travel by the
>city's public transit system (this being one of those nice modern American
>cities with no sidewalks or provision for cyclist of pedestrians). The
>system does not permit cross-dressing (i.e., if you have a car you go by car
>and that's it, and v.v.)
>3. Cars owners - all 500k of them - have total daily average costs of
>$20/each (i.e., about &7k/year per vehicle?). This means that their total
>direct out of pocket is on the order of $10 million/day.
>4. The 500 public transit uses incur on the order of $5/day of costs, for a
>total of $2.5 million there.
>5. Meaning that the out of pocket cost to the individual citizens for our
>fictive city's (SimCity?) movement system is on the order of $12 million a
>day, 4/5ths of which paid by the auto folks (hmmm.)
>6. Now let's take a stab at the indirect costs, starting with an easy one
>(easy because all it takes is one whooping assumption), namely the cost of
>their time in transit. Following the old and pretty dodgy practices of the
>profession, we can for the moment value the time of the transit uses at
>something on the order of the minimum wage (call it $6/hour), with the value
>of the car people at twice that.  This gives us a total travel time bill on
>the order of another $10 million.
>7. (Does this seem as if we are in any sort of ballpark at all on this one?)
>8. Now externalities, and here I am gong to ask for a bit of help from the
>group. In this first stab, I am going to assume that the external costs of
>the driver group (and here by the way and in time I want to include their
>not so efficient use of valuable urban real estate) is 5x that of the public
>transit users - but for today and lacking better, I am going to set the
>first-cut bill at exactly the same as their out of pocket in each case.
>
>Where has this got us with our first awful cut?
>
>* Direct out of pocket daily cost to city's million citizens - ca. $12
>million
>* Value of their time in transit - ca. $10 million
>* External costs - ca. $12 million
>
>For a total on order of $35 million dollars each day for the city and its
>citizens... which if we push out for an annual figure has us on the order of
>$10 billion dollars a year.  That for a single medium sized city.
>
>Three questions for those of you who have worked your way through this mess:
>
>1. Is the basic question with which we started a valid and eventually useful
>one?
>2. Can the above be patched up to have some usefulness?
>3. Do you have any ideas as to what we might do next if we had some
>reasonable estimates along these lines?
>
>Have a nice day.
>
>eric britton

>Also, it is important to distinguish between public and private
>expenditures. In the US, the focus is almost always on how much
>transit is costing instead of how much autos are costing. Puget
>Sound Regional Council (website I believe is www.psrc.org) did
>a computation of total expenditures for both freight and
>passenger transportation in the greater Seattle region, including
>some "externalities" like pollution costs. It might be worth
>looking at. It found that about 90 percent of all passenger
>transportation costs are private. (Transit service is being
>slashed in this region by 40 percent due to an antitax initiative that
>cuts excise taxes off car users. Supposedly, this is because they were
>being unfairly taxed in order to waste too much money on transit. There
>was no mention how small a portion of the total cost of car ownership
>this tax really was and that many households actually save money by not
>having to own as many cars. That is why the public/private distinction is
important.)  Eric Bruun

Mark Diesendorf, PhD
Professor of Environmental Science
and Director, Institute for Sustainable Futures
University of Technology, Sydney
PO Box 123, Broadway NSW 2007, Australia

email: Mark.Diesendorf at uts.edu.au
Web: http://www.isf.uts.edu.au

phone: +61 2 9209 4350
fax:   +61 2 9209 4351

ISF's address via UTS internal mail is Institute for Sustainable Futures,
Australian Technology Park.