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| Re: part 2: PHOTOS: Pennsauken Transit Center (1253744) | |||
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Re: part 2: PHOTOS: Pennsauken Transit Center |
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Posted by WillD on Wed Oct 16 20:57:54 2013, in response to Re: part 2: PHOTOS: Pennsauken Transit Center, posted by Bill West on Wed Oct 16 01:15:30 2013. Yes transport politicos have separated capital from O&M but they are only deceiving themselves.They're using the same accounting used for all other modes. If you want to start including capital expenditures in the "operating" costs of highways, airports, and other modes then mass transit, even more marginal lines like the Riverline, will start looking downright economical. Transit just doesn't get unfettered access to the general taxpayer fund when their own dedicated streams start drying up as highway and air transport networks do. I'm not going to judge whether it's right or wrong, but that's the way they've chosen to do their accounting. Incidentally, even if we take your full cost accounting model then you must include the fact that the line will not be reconstructed every ten years. They may go for another $40 million/yr operating contract, but the investment in the fixed infrastructure (the capital cost) will not be expended. Thus you need to amortize the capital cost separately over the 30-40 year lifetime of the line before analyzing the O&M costs. Our local politicos can't tell the public their $3 bus ride costs $8 but they readily sneak the other $5 out of everybody's back pocket. Do you think the false costs help our economic decision making? They tell us the highways are "free" while "sneaking" money from every pocket they can find, so how about we address that problem orders of magnitude larger than anything being discussed here before dealing the comparatively tiny problem of transit? 2. Yes the line runs 7 days but the weekend trips are just bonus service received by the weekday users, for which the fares probably don't even cover the extra O&M. The work week load sets the total system cost and is better at revealing the number of distinct citizens served on a recurring basis. That's an abjectly ignorant statement. First of all, you don't get to pick and choose which statistics you want to use arbitrarily. Secondly, other than the ACL's nearly 1:1 ratio (for fairly obvious reasons) the Riverline has one of the largest fractions of weekday to weekend ridership in the NJT system. What you say may be true of the RVL or PVL, with Saturday and Sunday carrying 10-25% of the line's weekday ridership, but the Riverline carries 60% of its weekday ridership on Saturdays and tops 50% on Sundays. Users of the Riverline clearly do not fit into the mold of 9-5 weekday commuters. Incidentally they run around 70% the service they provide on a weekday during the Saturday schedule, so their Saturday service certainly loses little in terms of marginal costs per passenger to weekday service. |
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