TrainBlog by Marcel Marchon

Late last night, I got a phone call from a reporter for the Santa Barbara Newsroom (that site in itself has an interesting story) - she said she was writing a story about Santa Barbara’s plans for commuter rail and Union Pacific and wanted to use one of my pictures on their site. I said, sure, go ahead, and this is the result.

However, the real story is what she says in her article (Commuter Rail to Santa Barbara Faces “Huge Obstacles”): Santa Barbara would like to set up a commuter rail service to Ventura County (Oxnard), but Union Pacific does not want to allow this without double-tracking the line. In fact, they said “Commuter trains on the single-track section between the San Fernando Valley and San Jose might degrade the freight service that Union Pacific is committed to.” Did you notice that? Not “between the San Fernando Valley and Santa Barbara“, no, they said “between the San Fernando Valley and San Jose“. So not only do they not want any new passenger rail service to Santa Barbara, they do not want any new service on the whole Coast Line!

While doing some totally unrelated to rail, I ran across this site “The True Cost of Smoking” - quite interesting, but since I don’t smoke, not that relevant. But then I thought, obviously there are similar calculations out there for “The True Cost of Driving” - well sure, here you go.

Let’s give it a try - suppose my job was in downtown San Francisco. That wouldn’t be too unusual. To drive from Mountain View to San Francisco is roughly 38 miles (according to Google Maps), i.e. 76 miles round trip. Suppose I work 5 days a week and use my car for commuting exclusively. In that case, my annual cost of driving (or more precisely, the annual cost of my driving) according to that site would be ~$23,500, i.e. roughly $90 per day!

Well, that sounds like a lot. And I’d like to be able to say that using public transportation would be “cheaper”. Sure, I can tell you that a Caltrain ticket would cost me $6.33 per day (based on a monthly pass cost of $139.25 and an average of 22 days of usage every month). But that is clearly not the “full cost” - there are other costs to be factored in, i.e. contributions to Caltrain’s budget from tax monies, cost of pollution, etc.. Is there a site that shows “The True Cost of Public Transportation”? Adron, that sounds like something you might be interested in? I’m pretty sure that public transportation would still be cheaper than driving overall. Such a calculation would probably also show that there are economies of scale associated with public transportation, i.e. if ridership goes up and trains are fuller, farebox recovery will be better and less taxpayer money will be needed. In other words, the (absolute, not just relative) share of total costs covered by fare purchases will go up. Sure, as more and more people use the train, there will need to be some investments, i.e. add more cars to trains, acquire more rolling stock, even run more trains, but even there, the economies of scale should still prevail.

PS. The more comparable number to that Caltrain ticket cost would be the “Total Direct Drivers Expense per mile”, which in my example above was $0.86 - times 76 miles that results in a total per day of $65.35. Still a lot more expensive than using Caltrain.

PPS. Caltrain also has a calculator.