From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!ihnp4!ihnss!warren
Newsgroups: net.auto,net.politics
Title: cars versus mass transit
Article-I.D.: ihnss.889
Posted: Thu Dec  2 16:16:19 1982
Received: Fri Dec  3 09:15:20 1982

I have seen endless emotional debates on the merits of mass transit
versus cars and highways.  My state (Illinois) fights this one
perpetually since it has 1 big city with mass transit and lots of
miles of deteriorating roads in the rest of the state.  I seem to
recall someone at one point doing an economic analysis of what is
truely the most economical form of transportation.  I think that
fuel economy was a minor to irrelevant factor.  The ingrediants of
the analysis included:

	Cost of vehicles
	Cost of fuel
	Cost of facilities (roads, rails, stations, etc.)
	maintenance for vehicles and facilities.
	cost of labor
	Cost of time of person being transported.

Has anybody else seen something like this?  As I recall, it was very
hard for mass transit to win because of the extra high-cost labor
needed to operate the system and the relatively high cost of mass
transit technology (due to much lower production volumes). If the
cost of the comuters time was included, that dominated everything
else.