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The two routes I use the most, Capital Corridor and San Joaquin I think are now profitable, or very very close and have seen expansion in both passengers and frequency. Capital Corridor runs 15 trains/Amtrak-buses a day now.
By the way, you can get to Yosemite Valley via San Joaquin + Amtrak bus. If you're just sticking around the valley, you don't really need a car.
A lot of western residential subdivisions are very distant from commercial areas, which are located in "power centers" that can be quite geographically distant. Especially in the case of gated HOA subdivisions, there simply aren't any commercial uses within easy walking distance.
As I mentioned before, many eastern residential neighborhoods are more spread out than typical western ones. You can find plenty with no commercial areas in walking distance. However, those areas usually won't have bus service, and if it does rather infrequent. Of course I can find exceptions:
has bus service every 20 minutes for most of a weekday. Huge contrast there between rich, white low density Garden City and much poorer, minority, rather dense Hempstead to the south. Hempstead can support more bus service, though.
As I mentioned before, many eastern residential neighborhoods are more spread out than typical western ones. You can find plenty with no commercial areas in walking distance. However, those areas usually won't have bus service, and if it does rather infrequent. Of course I can find exceptions:
has bus service every 20 minutes for most of a weekday. Huge contrast there between rich, white low density Garden City and much poorer, minority, rather dense Hempstead to the south. Hempstead can support more bus service, though.
Okay--in Sacramento proper there are some bus routes that run through remote suburban neighborhoods that are nowhere near commercial streets, to provide some tenuous modicum of bus service, but mostly run on commercial streets. Those tend to be the "loss leader" routes that lose money but are operated because if they did not exist there would be no transit service for those in the area who need it. That's a major reason why transit doesn't make a profit--they can't foist off the cost of their externalities like unprofitable routes, but because they are considered a public good, they have to provide the service even if it isn't profitable, until the service becomes untenable due to stretched budgets. If a grocery store had to sell its food below cost to people just because they were hungry, they'd have trouble staying profitable too. Instead, only those with money get food, but those without food get food stamps that allow them to purchase the same goods. The externality (the cost of food) has been transferred from the private sector to the public sector. And, of course, some people just starve.
It's not really about the fact that they might use petroleum. It's about how much they use per rider mile. A standard diesel bus (which gets around 10 MPG) carrying 50 passengers 10 miles uses approximately 0.02 gallons of fuel per rider mile. A single occupancy vehicle (car) getting 50 MPG would use 0.2 gallons per rider mile.
Nearly empty buses are a lot more common than full ones, at least in the cities I've lived in.
By the way, you can get to Yosemite Valley via San Joaquin + Amtrak bus. If you're just sticking around the valley, you don't really need a car.
If you go walking you will be shoe-dependent.
If you want to scale cliff faces, you will be rope and piton dependent
Due to elevation, those who are air-dependent may experience difficulties breathing while hiking around.
You won't eliminate food, water, housing, or money dependency while there.
Don't forget minibus and minibus schedule dependency - 'cause you have to get from the train station to the lodge and back.
Or you can go by car, drive around, check out the sites (and sights) you want to when you want to, and leave at your own leisure as opposed to being concerned about the Amtrak & minibus schedule, departure point limitations, cattle tour limitation, and cost.
The free-market does not apply to railways. The economic growth they create is siphoned off via a giant sluice called the land market. Capture that economic growth plugging a hole in the cycle and feed the economic growth back into the mechanism that created it in the first place - the railways - and we will have first class rail all through.
Railways are "economically viable" as they create economic growth in the community along the tracks and stations. This wealth soaks into land and crystallises as LAND VALUES. Land near a station is worth more than land nowhere near a station. The owner of the land never created this wealth, the railways and community activity did.
Many railways cannot cover their day to day running cost via tickets sales. No underground railway in the world is viable running on ticket sales. All need money out of central taxes. This is the problem as the uninitiated think that as ticket sales is not enough to keep running them, they must not be viable. This is very wrong. Very, very wrong.
There is a massive accounting gap. The wealth the railways create is not being captured to loop back into the railways to keep them running in a modern, clean, efficient manner - and to expand them. The mechanism to reclaim a part of the wealth the railways create to keep them running without dipping into central taxes is, Land Valuation Taxation. This is a levy, rather than a tax, reclaiming the wealth the railways create completing the economic funding cycle.
Currently the wealth railways create is pocketed by private individuals in increased land values - the richest people in the UK are land owners. The example of the London Jubilee line was given where the land values around the line's extension rose by £14 billion, when it cost £3.4 billion of central tax money to build - even people in rural Cornwall and Wales helped pay for that. Land Valuation Tax (LVT) would have reclaimed the value the Jubliee line creates to fund it. In short, it is self funding. Hong Kong's underground was funded out of LVT, not central taxation. Harrisburg in the USA is funding essential infrastructure out of LVT.
We can have top-rate electric rapid-transit rail, and trams, all over the most countries towns and cities as they are self-funding. Towns can then be cleaned up by de-motorising with large, imposing, district ruining, urban roads closed, or roads made narrower with parts of them turned over to tram throughways, and the street pattern put back to an attractive human scale, as they once were before the hearts were ripped out of them for cars.
Nearly empty buses are a lot more common than full ones, at least in the cities I've lived in.
If you got in the bus I take most often at my stop, and stops above mine, you might think it was an unpopular route. (There are approximately 5-6 stops till the end of the route after mine over about 1.25 miles)
But after my stop and after you head down the hill are packed on most runs. So you could be only seeing a low ridership zone. Most buses that go to my neighborhood are full, occasionally standing room late into the even ending (after 10).
I am not a daily rider, so I don't know the patterns. The commute is packed, the buses from 3-5 are packed because the school kids are on the route. But I typically use it midday or early evening.
Agreed jade, and most routes are like that. I get tired of the argument that because a person sees a bus with little to any people on it, that it is not profitable or it shouldn't be on the road. The buses exist as a public service, and that service should be available to if the bus is full or not.
I long for the day that transit is not stigmatized.
Agreed jade, and most routes are like that. I get tired of the argument that because a person sees a bus with little to any people on it, that it is not profitable or it shouldn't be on the road. The buses exist as a public service, and that service should be available to if the bus is full or not.
I long for the day that transit is not stigmatized.
I'm not saying that a low ridership zones should be removed. Just saying that busses are often not full in the USA and so making carbon footprint calculations based on a full bus is disingenuous.
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