TrainBlog by Marcel Marchon

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.

The Lott-Lautenberg Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act, formerly known as Senate Bill #1516, has been reintroduced as the Lautenberg-Lott Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act under Senate Bill #294 in the new Congress.

Washington, D.C.—Senators Frank R. Lautenberg (D-NJ) and Trent Lott (R-MS), appearing at a joint news conference this noon at Washington Union Station, announced that they were introducing today their Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act. The new bill, S. 294, is similar to S. 1516 in the last Congress, except for changes in the dates and technical amendments.

[via NARP Press Release]

This proposed legislation would, among other things:

• Reauthorize and provide funding for Amtrak for 5 years
• Establishes an 80% federal match funding mechanism for capital projects.
• Requires the development of a long-range Federal rail policy

Adron has a post on his blog where he attempts to calculate how high the gas taxes would have to be to actually cover all costs associated with road construction and maintenance. His conclusion:

In no scenario does the gas tax cover roadway maintenance except in certain circumstances. Even on the vast majority of the interstates gas taxes don’t cover the costs. If they where to cover the costs the taxes would have to increase from 10-35 cents per gallon to about 60-80 cents per gallon minimum. In addition to that if new construction and maintenance where factored in for ongoing expansion of roadways that would have to increase somewhere to the tune of $1.20-2.00 per gallon.

[Quoted from Transit Sleuth : Gas Taxes for Roads?]

The main take from this should be the following: a lot of people in politics and elsewhere complain about the fact that public transportation (especially Amtrak) is not “self-sufficient” - this calculation hear clearly shows that road-based transportation is also not “self-sufficient” and I believe a similar calculation applied to air traffic would show the same. What follows is that no means of transportation is currently “self-sufficient” (i.e. pays its own costs), but rather relies on certain subsidies to be paid out of general tax monies.