[sustran] Re: WB urban transport draft strategy ex.summ.1

Alan Howes alanhowes at usaksa.com
Fri Nov 10 00:03:13 JST 2000


Oh whizzo! A debate!

<climbs on soapbox>

Broadly I agree with what the WB are saying - and I am neither conservative
nor an economist. Of course there is scope for some cross-subsidy within
transit networks - but you have to be clear where and why. Who is
subsidising whom in Toronto and Montreal? (And do any routes actually make a
_profit_ that's available for cross-subsidy?) If it's low-income users on
high-volume lines subsidising high-income users on low-volume lines, then I
would venture to suggest that something is wrong - and this is what I read
the WB as saying. If anyone should bear the cross-subsidy, it should be the
car users in the high-income areas - especially commuters. But cross-subsidy
is a very blunt instrument compared with a proper road user charging system
that, as nearly as possible, reflects the true infrastructure, operational
and social costs of transport use.

It might come strangely from one who works for a transport firm, but IMO one
of our main problems is that [mechanised] transport is just too cheap, in
just about every country of the world - and this is even more true in
less-developed countries than in developed ones. (In this context, North
America is less-developed!) It is certainly the case
here in Saudi. If car travel is too cheap, it may be tempting to reduce
transit costs to match - but all that does is to encourage travel-dependency
at the expense of more rational land-use / transport patterns. (To the
extent that here, for instance, there isn't even a decent postal system -
people drive to pay their bills, drive to deliver messages, drive, drive,
drive ...)

When I worked in Glasgow in the early 80s, the residents of the highly
deprived area of Easterhouse, who used buses in the absence of anything
else, cross-subsidised the rail service to Milngavie and Bearsden, one of
the most prosperous areas of the city! (Guess where the elected
representatives lived!)

And here at SAPTCO in Saudi, we make profits on the (pretty good) intercity
bus
network which subsidise the (lousy) urban bus services. But why should the
intercity users subsidise the urban users? And it makes us less
competitive - and while we in theory have a modal monopoly on intercity, (a)
the theory doesn't hold good, and (b) what about the other modes?

I am quite happy to accept the need for cross-subsidy across time zones
within a corridor. Also, I would accept cross-subsidy between routes serving
the same residential neighbourhood - e.g. a route to downtown supporting a
route to a hospital. But beyond that, I need a lot of convincing.

And in fact, the ridership losses in the UK were mainly a continuation of a
previous trend. It's not really true that there was a dismantling of route
networks - what there was was a substantial increase in fares in real terms,
and a dismantling of network ticketing. Both undesirable - but not
necessarily a result of reduced cross-subsidy. (In Metropolitan areas
outside London, over the period 1985 to 1998, fares went up by 60% in real
terms, while patronage declined by 40%. in the UK as a whole, in the period
from 1950 to1985 (pre-deregulation), patronage went down by about 67%.) I
have a .ppt presentation with an overview of UK experience if anyone wants
it.

<climbs down from soapbox>

--
Alan & Jacqui Howes, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
(also Perthshire, Scotland)           [MSOE]
alanhowes at usaksa.com      work: howesap at saptco.com.sa

----- Original Message -----
From: Eric Bruun <ebruun at rci.rutgers.edu>
To: <sustran-discuss at jca.ax.apc.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 09, 2000 12:50 AM
Subject: [sustran] Re: WB urban transport draft strategy ex.summ.1


>
>
> RE.  Paragraph xiv. I don't agree with this concern over
> "cross-subsidization".  This comes from conservative economists
> who don't understand transit networks. Look what happened in the
> UK when they dismantled networks --- large ridership losses.
>
> The two most heavily used systems in North America, Toronto and Montreal,
> are "cross-subsidized".





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