‘general agreement’ on typical elasticities: I’d be interested to know any overview references for this.

‘large fare rises are rare’: note for researchers: Sydney train fares were increased by about 50% in, from memory, about 1975, in what was presumably a kneejerk reaction to declining cost-recovery. A less certain memory is that an early act of the Wran Government elected 1976 was to undo part of that increase.

To add to that, The Independent Inquiry into a long-term public transport plan for Sydney assumed a 6% fall in patronage in response to a 38% real increase in fares (raising farebox recovery for rail and bus to circa 70%). That fall though would be more than offset by the increase in patronage from investing the additional revenue (circa $2 billion p.a. by 2040) in system improvements. PT’s share of all travel is estimated to increase to 25% as a result of the suite improvements (higher real fares is only one source of the additional funding required).

Well that’s a perennial problem for writers – how much supporting detail and evidence can you include and still keep a reader engaged? I find around 800- 1,000 words is about as much as you can get away with, but if someone has a deep-seated or ideological disagreement then no amount of words will ever be enough.

Apologies to any other commentators that have mentioned any of these points.

Firstly and most obviously public transport doesn’t exist in isolation. It must compete with other modes, most predominately the car. Farebox rises that drive people away from public transport don’t make any sense if externalities are considered.

Secondly, there is are two sides to getting better cost recovery. Incoming revenue, and outgoing expenditure. I know its been argued on this blog that most low-hanging fruit has been picked in terms of public transport improvements, but frankly that is rubbish. There are plenty of improvements that will improve services and reduce costs. These are win-win improvements that must be pursued. In Melbourne I would argue the most important improvement is fixing the tangled, slow, meandering, duplicated bus network. In Sydney it would be introducing a cheap and effective multimodal ticketing system.

Thirdly, an unbalanced loading will always make a transport system cost dramatically more, as peaks will cost a lot to be able to provide for, whilst huge amounts of the system are left barely used outside of the peak. Is it really the best use of funds to spend tens of billions on a new rail tunnel to add extra peak capacity (which is only necessary during peak times) when a fraction of that expenditure will produce a much bigger mode shift outside of peak hours?

Following improvements that are either “low hanging fruit” or “off-peak” improvements (obviously there will be a lot of crossover here) can of course increase farebox recovery ratios. This then makes big-ticket items, built for peak hours be easier to afford and easier to justify? These arguments also make a lot of sense for differentiating peak, counter-peak and off-peak fares.

Fourthly, if you are going to compare farebox recovery from different systems around the world; it is equally fair to compare service quality, and the actual fares being paid. Are Australian’s getting good value? I doubt it. Is that because our fares are expensive? Only partially, it’s because our fares are pretty expensive compared to the service quality.

http://www.ptua.org.au/myths/growth.shtml

Farebox is an arbitrary and artificial function with no real linkage to transport costs, IMO the way it should be. Just look across the way to Auckland and you will see how ‘hypothecation’ has strangled public transport to death over decades (at least now they’re actually doing something about it and getting into the eletric train age, 80 years later than Wellington btw!).

There is some smokes and mirrors in solely comparing Comet/Nova figures globally, especially comparing costs from Asian transport systems. Typically Asian systems are a lot newer with the asset base not as life expired as Australia where assets are hitting +100 years old! (cue loads of bridges). Hence the Capital/O&M workload is miles more compared to typical Asian systems. I am unsure exactly what normalising the Comet/Nova figures include but I would think they wouldn’t normalise for asset age and ‘capital’ works Australia would treat as regular O&M and Asia would never do as they haven’t hit serious capital works as yet. It is also this reason why cost recovery ratios don’t seem to make sense in the one country where factors such as pricing power parity, labour costs, systems and farebox are not wildly different.

Of course you could always google up a few statistics and have a look but I’ll give you a tip. Expect countries such as Greece and Spain to have the lowest cycling rates and so on without any great anomolies…oh except for Ireland from memory. Ireland provided tax breaks for cyclists after the financial meltdown so watch that one.

There is a glaring logical fallacy here. Linking bike riding and public transport use to economic success is pretty far-fetched.

Look at Europe since 2008. The countries that suffered the most economically and the rates of cycling and public transport usage make arresting comparisons.