The incentives still favor driving, even at $4/gallon. (kind of a personal rant)

[randomness]

I drive a lot. Most of it is highway driving from Massachusetts to Connecticut. It's about 300 miles, round-trip. In my old Corolla, that's about 10 gallons, or at today's Massachusetts prices, around $36. (It's a couple of bucks more at Connecticut prices, which is an incentive to buy fuel in Massachusetts.)

My car is nearly 20 years old, with 300,000+ miles on it. Thus, minimal depreciation. The largest remaining expense is oil and oil changes, and the occasional repair. My insurance is also minimal. Moreover, there's no marginal cost to it; I'm paying my insurance regardless of whether the car sits or I drive it constantly.

Let's say that all adds up to another $4 on each trip, on average.

If I'm cheap, I drive down I-95 through Providence, and avoid all the Pike tolls.

So it costs me about $40 to do the round-trip by car. And it's usually under 3 hours.

Amtrak, Boston to New Haven, is $43, purchased in advance, on one of the non-Acela services. Add another $1.70 for the T and another $2.50 for Shore Line East. So that's nearly $50, each way, or $100 round-trip.

Greyhound to New Haven is $31 with a seven-day advance purchase. So that makes the bus alternative around $35 each way, or $70 round-trip.

I could, were I insane, take the Chinatown bus to Manhattan, then take Metro-North back from Manhattan to New Haven, then Shore Line East to my parents. That's probably the cheapest possible way. Occasionally, between Bolt and the Chinatown buses, you can get to NYC for a buck. But Metro-North is still $14, even off-peak, and there's still the $2.50 for Shore Line East, and $2 on the subway to get from Chinatown to Grand Central, and the $1.70 to take the T. Add it all up and it's more expensive than my drive and takes more than twice as long, because I'm travelling about double the distance, with multiple changes and 75 miles of backtracking. Sorry, that's nuts. My time is worth something, after all.

(I'll add here that Shore Line East leaves me a couple of miles walk from my parents', and the sidewalks end about a half mile before their place. I've walked it. The car dodging is merely annoying, not suicidal.)

In order for me to break even on the trip, taking Greyhound to New Haven, my fuel costs would have to rise to around $60. That's around $6/gallon in my car. And for my taking Amtrak to make economic sense, it would need to go to above $9/gallon. I mean, it might happen, but it hasn't yet.

The point is that it costs me money to take public transit on the long-distance trip I do most often. I want to do it. I'm a transit buff, so I even have non-economic incentives to take transit. But given the price difference, of course I'm going to save the money and drive; on average I do this trip weekly. And I need a car once I get to my parents'. It's suburban Connecticut, after all.

This is all quite broken if we want to encourage people to get out of their cars.

Is this an exceptional case? Sure. I'm going from an urban area to a suburban one, but I'm doing it in the Northeast Corridor. That's a part of the U. S. that actually has some usable public transportation. In a lot of the rest of the country, the comparison's even worse. (San Fernando Valley to Las Vegas springs to mind, from recent experience.)

But it's the case that makes the most difference to me.

Comments

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Hm, it might be interesting to re-run the numbers taking into account what percentage of your state and federal taxes go into maintaining the interstate system. Even moreso if you take the fact that it's all deficit spending into account.

Of course this more underscores your point than invalidates it: the taxes are a sunk cost no matter what, and we don't "feel" them in the same way that we feel forking over $100 for an Acela ticket.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the problem really is the degree to which our taxes and subsidies are distorting the decisions people make. Thanks for making that clearer.

[meepodeekin.livejournal.com]

That's long distance. Until people like hubby and I, who are also transit buffs, can feasibly get out of our cars for our daily commute, the gas price is irrelevant. The best option for me is bike. But at 4 miles with no bike paths, that is not a daily option. And hubby's commute is 30 miles of interstate that, when we last checked, a public transit bus ran, via a 30 mile detour, a couple of times a day. I'd absolutely love to get out of my car. I hate my car.

The good news is that the gas prices might eventually create political pressure to improve public transit. The bad news is that, at the individual level, being able to keep your job is going to remain pretty important for the foreseeable future. :)

[meepodeekin.livejournal.com]

PS Don't even talk to me about the drive to DC, which we make regularly. Flying is close in cost for one person, but ridiculous for 2. And the train literally comes through once a day at 3 am.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

The good news is that the gas prices might eventually create political pressure to improve public transit.

It's a slow process. I mean, it took decades to get us to the car-centered existence we now have, so I can't be surprised at how long it will probably take to adapt away from it.

Oh, and my actual commute is dandy. Ten minutes walk to the T, two stops in, and then five minutes walk. On a nice day I can just walk.

It's getting to my parents' which is annoying.

[meepodeekin.livejournal.com]

I miss having that commute. I used to have it. :(

[mycroft.livejournal.com]

When the weather's nice, I actually just walk to work and back about half the time. 5 miles each way.

[rfrancis]

Yeah, that's a lot different than wondering how to fix a 2.5 mile each way commute, which is what I'm doing. Current idea: electric-assist bicycling.

[donnad.livejournal.com]

When I was commuting from Watertown to UMass Boston, I could take the bus to the train to the shuttle to the school. One way it would take about 75 to 90 minutes depending on traffic. It meant buying a Combo t-pass or paying each day.

Or I could drive, 2 miles to the pike, pay $1. toll. onto the expressway and about 2 miles later to school. I would pay less for a semester parking pass than I would for 5 monthly t-passes. It took my 20 minutes.

Since I am a person who cannot read in a moving vehicle, I lost a couple hours a day taking public transportation that I could spend studying, and it cost me more than driving and having to park. I decided I would rather have those 2+ hours than to be ecologically responsible.

[http://users.livejournal.com/cgull_/]

I think you're underestimating the car costs, as most people do. Things you've left out:

* Tires (maybe $3)
* Expendable parts (alternator, water pump, etc) (maybe another $3)
* Increased injury risk (?)
* Food you get on the road, if it's more than you'd spend doing transit (?)

When you buy a ticket, you're paying for everything up front. Cars have lots of predictable and less-predictable expenses.

[koshmom.livejournal.com]

But then you forgot the local costs for transportation, and the inconvenience of not having a car at your destination. If you have to rent a car, even a zip car, prices then rocket again for your "don't use your own car" scenario.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Actually, I've included the expendable parts in general repairs.

And food is cheaper on the road than it is on transit.

[totient]

Why take Amtrak to New Haven and backtrack instead of transferring at Old Saybrook?

Tranferring at Old Saybrook, it's $34 on Amtrak and $3.40 on the Shore Line (you do this more than frequently enough that the ten-trip tickets won't time out). This is 10 or 15 minutes faster than changing at New Haven, and it saves you $7.70 each way.

On the way home, if you're willing to constrain your schedule, you can even transfer at New London, making it $30 on Amtrak and $5.30 on the Shore Line, so you save a further $2.10. It takes 20 minutes longer this way than changing at Old Saybrook, and it only works eastbound, but it's still nearly as quick as going in to New Haven.

Optimizing a little more, you could take the MBTA to and from Providence. $7.75 for the T (oddly, the multi tickets don't save you any money here), $22 for Amtrak, and $3.40 for the Shore Line is $33.15 each way -- cheaper than Greyhound to New Haven, and no buses. On the way back the schedule even works with transferring at New London, and the fare structure makes that trip only $30.05. A car that needed $1000 of work every 15,000 miles -- not implausible after 300,000 miles -- would add $20 to your roundtrip and make this a wash. And it's a whole lot better than going in to New York City.

[totient]

Oh oops, I'm not including the T on this end, but the savings figures are all correct anyway, and it does not take much of a gas price increase before there's a train option that's as good as I suspect your actual driving cost is.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Have you looked at the timetables on that?

Shoreline East runs Mondays to Fridays, and it only goes inbound between 5:27AM and 9:14AM. (There are some deadhead return runs between 2PM and 8:15PM, but they don't stop anywhere near the station I need, so there's plenty of backtracking involved. I can get off at New Haven and then have to buy another ticket back, so that's another $2.50.)

So, let's look at which Amtrak services meet the Shoreline East trains at Old Saybrook.

The 9:45PM departure the day before arrives in Old Saybrook at 11:46PM. The following Amtrak service is at 6:05AM, arriving at 8:11AM. Those are the only two services which connect.

Taking the first train means I sit on the platform at Old Saybrook for nearly five hours in the middle of the night. The second is much more reasonable, as there's a connection in just over an hour.

Still, my time is worth more than that, leaving aside the point that I can only leave weekdays at 6:05AM. First Red Line T out of Alewife is at 5:16AM, and it's probably a good idea for me to be on it if I want to catch that train.

Note that using that connection I cannot take the MBTA to Providence: Amtrak leaves Providence for Old Saybrook at 6:55AM; the first MBTA service on the Providence/Stoughton line leaves South Station at 6:25 and doesn't get in until 7:25.

The return trip problems are left as an exercise. :) (But note that there are even fewer Shoreline East trains which go all the way to New London.)

I'd love to be able to take commuter rail part way, but the schedules seem deliberately set to discourage my using it as part of a long-distance trip. Easier to take Bolt bus to Manhattan and backtrack. No exaggeration.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Sorry, did I say fewer Shore Line East trains to New London? There's one. :)

[totient]

Yes, but that one meets an Amtrak train in New London 45 minutes later, and that Amtrak train meets an MBTA train with only 20 minutes in Providence.

I was so busy checking that the eastbound connections work (improbably, but they do, and they give you a lot of flexibility) that I missed that the westbound MBTA-Amtrak-Shore Line connections don't work, and that even skipping MBTA on the way down you have to get up at the crack of dawn. That's a shame.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I've been checking and rechecking the connections for almost as long as SLE has existed. It's a great thing that there's finally rail service to the town where I grew up, it's just wildly irritating that it runs strictly as a commuter service.

*sigh*

[koshmom.livejournal.com]

When visiting my folks, I bring my dog along. I have no option (other than boarding the dog) than to take my own car, because no matter who I beg or what I'm willing to do, I cannot take my dog with me on a bus or a train. Of course, I can fly, but my folks in NJ live so far from an airport, AND you have to pay $50 each way for the dog's transportation, it's just not worth it to fly from boston to NJ.

[colinmac.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I could talk nonstop for hours about this: Sprawl, transit, lifestyle, mobility, sufficiency. And probably will next weekend...

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

We have, even. :)

I've been quoting your comment--about random interactions while taking transit having the possibility of being good ones, while all random interactions while driving are bad--for years now, most recently a couple of days ago while at the dentist. Still true.

[peacefulmayhem.livejournal.com]

Oh, I feel your pain!

I commute about 52 miles each day into Boston (Allston). I took the train for a few months - I *really* wanted to make it work, but it just doesn't. Given the train schedule, I would have a 5:45am - 6:40pm day, with the same time in the office that I now have being gone from 6:30 am to 5:15 pm.

I carpooled very successfully for a few years, but then my carpool mate left his job and couldn't share the ride anymore.

I am ogling the good MPG cars out there (we have a Subaru Outback and a Minivan, both not so good mileage). but I have several spreadsheets that show it does *not* make sense to trade in a paid-off car for a hybrid commuter car at this point.

So now, I am searching for a carpool mate. I can not *believe* how hard it is! That is a system that could scale with very little startup cost and yet, I'm having trouble. I look at everyone else on the road with me - all of us alone in our cars and that is *crazy*.

-Jess

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

I'm totally with you on the trade-in problem. I think a hybrid or a diesel would be great, but I can't make the numbers work there, either.

It really does seem odd that it's so hard to find someone to carpool with nowadays.

[evilmagnus]

We live too far from our jobs.

My grandfather's commute was 200 yards - from the stone cottage to the mill. :) My dad had, for part of his life, what was considered a 'long' commute - a 15 mile bus ride (40 minutes) to the nearest city. I believe it was a bit shorter before the Beecham reforms closed the branch railway.

I've been extremely lucky (or just obstinate in my choice of living arrangements) to have been able to walk to work or take public transit (in less than 45 mins) for every job I've ever had, except for one six month period where I had a 65 mile commute, each way. 3.5hrs of my day in a car; something I hope to never do again.

I blame The American Dream. When everyone aspires to a nice house in the suburbs, then everyone has to commute to get to where the jobs are. And you just can't - can not - have working public transportation from 'the suburbs' without massive investment. Even the more urbanized European countries have trouble with that. Hub and spoke will only get you so far.

My parents are delighted they qualify for bus passes now. They told me how they made a (free!) trip to the city the other week, took them 40 minutes, dropped them off right downtown and they didn't have to pay for parking. It was faster and cheaper than driving. That's what public transportation should be like... but that's not going to happen over here anytime soon.

[peacefulmayhem.livejournal.com]

True - we live too far from our jobs. (though when we bought the house I worked elsewhere). But I think I live in the wrong region where to buy a house close to work we'd have to live in a home smaller than the apartment we rented before buying. Yup, all about trade-offs, but here in New England, they are significant. Wah wah.

[totient]

Or put another way, we work too far from our homes. I personally find moving house much more stressful than changing jobs, and I don't think I'm alone in doing the latter more frequently than the former. And I've found that the jobs that have seemed prestigious during the jobhunt have often been the sucky ones, and the ones that seemed kind of random have been the best. So now I give location a lot more weight. Not everyone has a choice when they jobhunt, but the worst thing that happens if you take the closer job is you decide a couple of months later that it was a mistake and move on.

[pmat.livejournal.com]

When we bought our house, my husband and I were starting jobs in the same place, and we chose the house by drawing concentric 1-mile circles around that place and looking first within one mile, then two miles. We never got to three miles; our house is about 1.5 miles from that first office.

Then the company closed that office. Then I got a different job, and then he did. So now we work in locations 25 miles apart, and the closer is 10 miles from our house. The best we could do is to each be 12.5 miles from work, and trying to keep minimizing distance as things changed would have meant moving three times. Since we have kids, who would have had to change schools, and about 10,000 books, that's not trivial.

Our actual current solution is that I drive a Prius 10 miles one way and work at home one or two days a week, and my husband takes the train to center city every day.

There are a couple of encouraging notes in here: his employer subsidizes a monthly train pass, and the local transit system has enough parking and (barely) enough trains. And my employer has made it easier to work at home. And my Prius gets 40 to 45 mpg.

And a couple of discouraging ones. The local transit system has cut back substantially on train schedules in the last year, to one an hour during off-peak times, on one of its busiest lines, because it just doesn't have enough money. And I could also take the train, because my employer sends a shuttle to meet it during commute hours. But instead of a 25 minute commute which costs me maybe $1.50, it would cost me $5 and take over an hour.

Like r_ness, I'm something of a transit buff, and I have been known to take Amtrak instead of flying for trips as far from the east coast as Denver. But as long as we subsidize highways heavily and try to make transit pay for itself, the incentives are going to go right on favoring driving for all but the lucky few.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Yeah, time is worth something, which is why a solution that costs almost the same but takes twice as long really isn't a solution at all.

[bluenoteboogy.livejournal.com]

On the LA to Vegas insanity... They are continually talking (though I think there may actually be some movement) on a high-speed rail from Anaheim to Vegas. Everyone agrees that this would be a very valuable corridor (though a direct link from Sin City to Disneyland amuses me immensely.)

Also, I'm pretty sure that there is going to be a bond measure on the ballot in November for a high-speed rail connecting, San Francisco, LA and San Diego.

Here's hoping that California will eventually get itself back to an effective mass transit system.

It was great to have you in for the visit last week. After finally managing to move to be closer to my office, I'm definitely in support of finding ways to avoid this whole mess in the first place.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

http://gas2.org/2008/05/13/california-building-220-mph-high-speed-train-from-san-francisco-to-la/ says you're right about the bond measure.

It was great seeing you! Thanks for having me over and thanks for dealing with that dumb poster tube. :)

You are one lucky commuter. I imagine the percentage of Southern Californians who live close enough to walk to work must be minimal.

[choirsoftheeye.livejournal.com]

Yup. Which illustrates pretty directly why the short term environmental benefits from hiked gas prices will be the purchase of more fuel-efficient cars - and perhaps increased intra-city public transportation. Long range US public transportation is crippled, and will be for years to come, even if a real attempt to change it is made.

[dirque.livejournal.com]

No doubt America's reluctance to subsidize mass transit is very real and very sad. The real problem with your commute is that there isn't enough sprawl. :) That commuterrail deadzone between New Haven and Providence has always been a real annoyance.

Obviously, the solution is to have the local municipalities build 'free' bus depots with free long term parking and watch the Chinatown bus companies flood in and somehow make money. ;)

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

I love the idea but I'm not sure it'll work. It's significant, I think, that the Chinatown buses only serve particular major destinations, like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and DC. Oh, and the casinos. Not to forget the casinos.

It seems to me that they're after the low-hanging fruit. I'm not sure that outside of vacation times that New Haven would support cheap bus service. It'd be interesting to find out.

Moreover, the Chinatown buses didn't actually need depots to start their services, so I'm not sure that building the depots for them would be a great incentive to them. Some (most?) of them still just pick up on street corners. I think Boston had to force them to use the South Station terminal, but they still deliver to Chinatown in Manhattan.

[muffyjo]

I would offer that bus fares are changing...see this $1 fare (yes, you need to book ahead and yes, it goes up from there. It's built on the Virgin Airlines system of booking in advance and all that.

To get the $1 fares, you need to reserve your tickets online, two weeks in advance, from their prospective websites, but Megabus.com wants to make an even more enticing offer, if you make reservations to travel between May 30 and June 5, they’re offering free tickets!

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Indeed, I mentioned that. :)

Occasionally, between Bolt and the Chinatown buses, you can get to NYC for a buck.

The Megabus deal of a free ticket is actually 50 cents, because you have to pay them a non-refundable booking fee. It may be per ticket and it may be per order; I haven't ordered tickets from them yet because service doesn't start until, as you said, May 30.

[eclectician.livejournal.com]

I find it interesting that people frame this as a transport issue vs. an urban planning/architecture/lifestyle issue - I feel like that's the root cause of the transport issues, after all.

At a guess, the amount of fuel spent moving goods to major metropolitan areas should be a tiny percentage of the fuel spent moving people from urbs to suburbs over any given time period.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

I definitely think you're right about that. Over decades the land use decisions in America brought us to the situation today, and--I think this is what I was thinking when I replied to meepodeekin above--it's hard to imagine that they can be changed much more quickly.

At a guess, the amount of fuel spent moving goods to major metropolitan areas should be a tiny percentage of the fuel spent moving people from urbs to suburbs over any given time period.

I have read arguments that the big box/individual auto/suburb model is more energy efficient than the small local retailer/delivery truck/urban model. I don't buy it, but I haven't seen the numbers, so I can't say definitively either way.

[emilymorgan.livejournal.com]

So true! Princeton to New Haven is all on commuter rail, and the price of driving it with one person in the car is just starting to approach the price of the train... but as long as you time it right, going by car takes half the time. Half! And you can sing really loudly to your stereo, and leave whenever you want, you generally have some control over the major delays, and you have a car on the other end, and you don't need to deal with getting from the train station to where you're going.

The other long-distance trip I do on any sort of regular basis is Princeton to DC, and the options are 1) Dinky to Princeton Junction, NJT Junction to Trenton, Amtrak ($$$$) to DC, metro to wherever you're going, 2) Dinky to PJ, NJT PJ to New York or Philadelphia, Chinatown bus, metro, 3) Drive. Yeah, I'm going to be driving that, thanks!

Even getting to Philadelphia from Princeton, the trains take three times as long as driving. It's just not worth it to me.

[xse99.livejournal.com]

Does Greyhound have e-saver fares Boston-New Haven? I find I save ridiculous amounts of money booking those on the website. Of course, the bus station in Bmore is so far from my parents' house, if I had to take a cab it would cost more than the bus ride.

[maggiebex.livejournal.com]

Another problem with mass transit is egregious unreliability with the schedules. I can read easily on a train, and I like to sleep after a rough week, so I took a $35 Greyhound down to NYC this weekend, and a $115 Amtrak back. While in NY, I did not need my car.

The train back up last night got in *two hours and 45 minutes* late. A train that was supposed to arrive at 11:15 got in at 2 am, long after the subway stopped running. And Amtrak had not arranged any compensation travel for all of us who were stranded in South Station in the middle of the night. Some people slept in the station until the subway started running; the rest of us took expensive cabs.

All of this would have been avoided if I'd driven my very fuel-efficient Civic down myself, and used my EZPass for discounted tolls. But I wanted to nap.

As for daily commuting -- I'm buying a Vespa. It will also be perfect for all those interstitial travels around Camberville, where the train doesn't go but it's a waste to drag out the car.