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[GlyphGryph]

Again, the real question isnt whether robo taxis will harm subways, its whether they will harm bus systems.

Can bus systems survive the spread of affordable point to point transportation? Honestly, I doubt it.

[LordBucket]

tldr: Passenger rail is stupidly expensive. It's only "cheaper to run" if you completely ignore the billions of dollars a year that it costs.

subways are cheaper to run.

No, they're not. Again...I would think that common sense would show this. When you build a road, what exactly is needed to keep it operating? Sure it might be nice to have streetlights. But those are optional. Rail requires fuel or electricity to run. It requires staff to keep it running. It requires engineers and safety inspections. A road, if it starts to go bad, it gets bumpy. A railway, if it goes bad...people die. BART, which covers 104 miles of track, employs over 3300 people. That's 33 full time employees for every mile of track. How many full time employees do you think are needed to maintain a mile of road? Roads are obviously cheaper to maintain.

So...are you assuming that passenger fares pay for the difference? Nope. Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan are the only countries in the world that run profitable passenger rail systems. Everywhere else, they operate at a substantial loss paid through taxpayer subsidies.

How much is that loss? What portion of operating costs do passenger fares actually pay for?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio

In the US, fare recovery ratio is a good as 71%, down to as low as 9%. The US is generally towards the least efficient end of things, but plenty of other countries have numbers within that range. A few examples:

 * In Austin Texas, the fare recovery ratio is 9%. For every dollar fare paid by a passenger, the government pays roughly ten dollars to Capital Metro to keep the system running
 * In Los Angeles, the ratio is 30.6%. For every dollar paid by the passenger, the city pays $2.26
 * In Amsterdam, the ratio is 41%. For every dollar of fare paid by the passenger, the government pays $1.43
 * In Brussels, it's 35.2%. For every dollar paid by the passenger, the government pays $1.84
 * In Munich, it's 42%. Good for Germany. For every dollar paid by the passenger, their government pays only $1.38 to keep their system running.

Great Britain, with a staggeringly excellent fare recovery ratio of 91%, for every dollar their passengers pay, the government pays only   nine cents. They're doing extremely well.

But...what does "exxtremely well" actually cost them? What kind of net numbers are we talking about? Let's look at the link for Great Britain  I gave in my previous post:

http://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/displayreport/html/html/bfee944f-5d61-42ee-a4ad-df41d02ef567

"Government subsidy towards the railway industry in 2012-13 was £5,060 million (£5.1 billion), this is £524 million greater than the previous year."

Since 2010, Great Britain has been spending between 4 and 6 BILLION dollars per year subsidizing its 10,000 miles of rail. California has 15,000 miles of state highways and pays only 2.4 billion to maintain them.

That works out to be, Great Britain...one of the best countries in the world in terms of rail cost efficiency...is subsidizing payments of $500,000 per mile of rail. California is paying $160,000 per mile of highway. It costs Britain three times as much per mile to maintain its rail system as California pays for its highways.

Yes, there are a very few individual cities where rail can cost less to maintain than roads. Tokyo Metro even runs a net profit. In the vast majority of cases, this is not the case.

If you're going to compare subway vs. robotaxi, you need to take into account running cost and the buying of all those taxis.

Only if the government will be subsidizing them. If google invests the required hundreds of millions of dollars to build a robot taxi fleet, then recovers those costs through operation at no cost to taxpayers or the government, it's not reasonable to include that investment when doing cost analysis comparison vs a subway that takes billions of dollars of tax money to build so that it can then charge people per trip while simultaneously continuing to collect tax-funded subsidies to continue running.

Taxi services are generally not subsidized like rail is. In fact, in some places taxi fares are taxed to pay for rail subsidies:

http://taxicabtimes.com/ny-taxis-still-taxed-to-subsidize-mta-p1964-99.htm

"One of the controversial taxes for the taxi industry in New York is the 50 cent surcharge that is used to subsidize the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The tax began in 2009 after it was included in the $2.3 billion bailout package for the MTA that passed in May of that year by the New York State Legislature. Although the bailout prevented service cuts and a large fare increase for public transportation riders, the tax raised the base charge of a cab ride from $2.50 to $3."

So there you have it. In New York, if you pay to ride the subway, the government is paying the subway on top of your fare, because the subway operates at a loss. And if you pay to ride a taxi...you pay for somebody else to ride the subway because the subway operates at a loss.

[Sheb]

Well, you're ignoring the costs of buying all these cars and all that fuel. Of course road is going to look cheaper if you don't count the rolling stock. 

[LordBucket]

Well, you're ignoring the costs of buying all these cars and all that fuel. Of course road is
going to look cheaper if you don't count the rolling stock. 

Clearly I need to make my posts shorter, because you're not reading them. Taxis are not subsidized except in cases for people over 65 or with disabilities.  Neither is taxi fuel subsidized. A taxi company buys its cars and its fuel and recovers that money by receiving fares from passengers. Subways are built with taxpayer money, and after being built are still paid for by taxpayer money in addition to fares.

You only think rail is cheaper because the payments are hidden in your tax bill.

[Sheb]

I read them. You're ignoring all the money spent by individuals on car and fuel. Roads are cheap. Cars are not.

[Putnam]

Clearly you didn't, because LB was talking specifically about running costs for the subway and how expensive those are.

[LordBucket]

You're ignoring all the money spent by individuals on car and fuel. Roads are cheap. Cars are not.

Because individuals don't buy taxis. Have you ever bought a taxi? No, you pay for the fare. Why are you insisting on including the cost of somebody else buying a vehicle?

The cost to a consumer riding a taxi is...the taxi fare. DONE. It's up to the taxi company to pay for their fuel and vehicles and recover those costs through fares, and what's left over is profit for them. It doesn't make sense to add consumer costs to company expenses and pretend that those are the cost to the consumer.

What you're trying to do is like saying that you paid $5 for a happy meal, and McDonald's paid $2 for the ingredients they used to make the hamburger and a dollar in wages to make it, then concluding that you therefore actually paid $8 for the happy meal. No, you paid $5. McDonalds' expenses and profit ratio are irrelevant to your cost.

[Sergarr]

Shouldn't the time wasted on the travel be included into the cost? Because subways are way faster than taxis.

[Sheb]

Except if you're comparing subway to taxis, you have to compare all the costs, not only the part of it that is government subsidy.

Anyway, I typed the following convinced you were wrong and I'd prove it to you. Turn out I was wrong, and cars are cheaper than subways. Thanks for making me check my assumptions. 

Since you brought up Brussels in your example, let me expand on it. The local transportation authority, the STIB had operating cost of 520 millions euros, and transported 350 millions travellers for an average distance of 4.6 km, or 1,6 billions traveler-km. Assuming an average filling ratio of 1.4 person per car, that would be 1.14 billions car-km.

Assuming a typical small car like a Renault Clio, you're looking at 5l of gas/100 km, so 57 millions liter of gas. If a car run for 150000km before needing to be changed, you're going to get through 7600 cars. At 1.2 euros/l for gas and 12000 euros/car, you're still looking at something way cheaper than mass transit. Crap, look like I'm wrong here.

[Sergarr]

How can a public transportation system be more costly (per person) than an individual one???

[sneakey pete]

The figures make it seem like subways are more expensive.
And they are maybe.

But as LB said in his post on the last page, they're only put in in inner cities where there are space constraints.
You couldn't have a city of a few million people all commuting to work in robot taxis, normal taxis or their own cars, as there physically isn't enough space for enough roads.

[Frumple]

You're ignoring all the money spent by individuals on car and fuel. Roads are cheap. Cars are not.

Because individuals don't buy taxis. Have you ever bought a taxi? No, you pay for the fare. Why are you insisting on including the cost of somebody else buying a vehicle?

To... help you understand, sheb is bringing up the cost of somebody else buying a vehicle because you're using road costs -- of which only a tiny fraction is taxi-related -- vs. rail costs as a point of comparison. The road costs in question largely don't include things like individual vehicle maintenance (including replacement) or gas costs, which is where sheb's problem is coming from. With those included, it would be a higher number. How much higher, I couldn't say, especially considering vehicle purchase and maintenance patterns are very... suboptimal.

It's all kind of "back of napkin" calculations, though... the actual question you'd be looking for in terms of cost/benefit analysis would be dollar generated for the overall economic system per dollar spent, I think, which is a considerably more complicated question. In the case of the subsidies, ferex, if the tax money being spent in rail is overall generating more than is being sunk (by enabling people to get to work, or move product, or consume goods), then it's not really a loss even if the immediate transportation service is.

'Course, that said, given that vehicles largely aren't subsidized, the fact that people have and use them kinda' imply they're managing an economic benefit somewhere in there, so unless the indirect effect of subways are rather impressive they're still going to be losing out pretty heavily in terms of cost efficiency.

Shouldn't the time wasted on the travel be included into the cost? Because subways are way faster than taxis.

They're only faster between very specific points, though, and time wasted on travel for rail involves transit time both to the subway, to the destination, and back again.

Assuming a typical small car like a Renault Clio, you're looking at 5l of gas/100 km, so 57 millions liter of gas. If a car run for 150000km before needing to be changed, you're going to get through 7600 cars. At 1.2 euros/l for gas and 12000 euros/car, you're still looking at something way cheaper than mass transit. Crap, look like I'm wrong here.

Do note that there's still maintenance costs involved to get those vehicles to run 150k-km. Probably still wrong with that included, but maybe not as wrong

How can a public transportation system be more costly (per person) than an individual one???

Well, for one they tend to be underground. It's really bloody expensive to build underground. Also have a higher standard of maintenance they have to keep to to keep people from going splat. And then there's other stuff. Not exactly an expert on the economics of public transport, ha.

[Sheb]

Yeah, of course, and then you have externalities (air pollution from cars, poor people who can't afford a car facing increased isolation) and benefits from getting rid of cars on the surfaces (walk-only areas are nice and good for commerce).

Another nice thing is that this technology could dramatically lower the cost of some forms of public transport too. Goodbye bus driver!

[GlyphGryph]

Subways are, like, super-expensive, even per person. After the next price hike this year, my local, state-subsidized subway system is going to officially become more expensive than it was for me to own and maintain a car back when I had one. And that car let me carry around groups of people and supplies pretty regularly and easily.

Subways are super expensive.

They are also often the only real option for dealing with the amount of people that want to get into and out of certain places. In dense areas where building underground is required roads are ALSO really frickin' expensive. Look at Boston's Big Dig project to see how much of a cluster that stuff can turn into.

Being expensive doesn't mean it doesn't have a purpose, though, it just means it's really important to keep in mind that subways, and even rail in general, is often not the best answer.

[Sergarr]

...maybe we should just stop cramping millions of people into spaces too small for them? We already have all the technology required for long-distance communication.