Friday Reads – 14 June 2019

On By In Buses, Friday Reads, Maps

• London tops most pricey public transport league table (Forbes)

• Four new London Low Emission Neighbourhoods to be created (AirQualityNews)

• New interactive map provides UK railway station accessibility info (SignDesignSoc)

• The Magic of red painted bus lanes (StreetsBlog)

• Subway station accessibility lawsuit against MTA proceeding (6SqFt)

• Can cities curb parking rage? It’s personal now (CityLab)

• French streets could lose thousands of parking spaces (TheLocal)

• Singapore-Malaysia Metro Line put on hold (NextCity)

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13 comments

  1. The Forbes article. Struggling to understand the methodology here.
    Example one : “The research also found that the UK’s capital has the highest average costs for daily car rental at $172”. Does that mean rate per day??
    I don’t own a car but I rent frequently. I’ve got a car booked next week, picking up at Heathrow – medium size car – I’m paying £125 for the week. That’s about average for the prices I see.
    Example two: the public transport costs. I’m guessing the figures are for a monthly zone 1/2 season in London and equivalent across Mannhattan for New York. But is that representative? – most commuters in both cities live further out from the centre – and so actual costs will be even higher than stated here
    Without understanding the methodology used for this article , I’m struggling to trust the analysis. The link doesn’t seem to provide any link to more detail – or have I missed something?

  2. The Forbes article appears to take no account of inter-availability of tickets, size of network, the public transport modal mix or average income relative to the fares quoted.

    For example, whilst Tokyo has a very strong rail-based public transport system it is made up of a variety of operators, some of whom are in competition with each other, with limited flexibility between operators. What your money buys you is more limited. How can this be compared to, say, London with one ticket covering most modes of transport?

    Distances travelled in the larger cities tend to be greater and so passengers will be paying more. An average rate per km or mile would be more meaningful.

    The cost of public transport will be related to average incomes within a city. Without taking income into account expenditure cannot be meaningfully compared, especially between countries.

    The article appears to be based on some very vague, unsubstantiated statistics. The original data from Deutsche Bank may well be sound, but I suspect that in between there has been some considerable simplification from which uninformed conclusions have been made.

  3. The figures in the Forbes article originate from http://www.expatistan.com. To quote their website –

    ‘Expatistan.com was founded in 2009 by Gerardo Robledillo, a software engineer specializing in web applications. An expat himself, he created Expatistan to solve a problem that every expat faces; How much money will I need in my new city?

    Expatistan runs one of the biggest collaborative cost-of-living databases of prices in the world. This database is constantly updated and improved in a collaborative way by expats all over the world.’

    Which means that as far as transportation costs go the only thing it will tell you is what the users of the website (essentially we-to-do foreign residents in the cities) think they are – which may or may not bear any relation to the costs faced by the normal inhabitants.

  4. Red bus lanes arrived in London in the 1970s and were as successful then as those in New York are now. Indeed, Dave Wetzel, the GLC’s transport supremo in the early 1980s, once quipped that at the 1981 election, his opponents accused him of wanting to paint London’s streets red, and that was exactly what he then went on to do.

    Sadly, this successful scheme became politicised because of the association of red and Labour. Hence, when Boris became Mayor, new bike lanes were blue. It’s all a bit silly because the importance of the colour was just to alert motorists to the fact that that part of the road was, in some way, special.

  5. I’m wondering how London commuting prices could have gone down since 2014, “monthly ticket costing a whopping $179. That’s still cheaper than in 2014 when it cost more than $200.”, unless the typical expat they surveyed used to live in zone 4 and now can afford zone 3?

    Given the glut of ‘luxury’ flats on the market in z1&2, maybe more expats are able to live closer to central London now?

  6. @IslandDweller
    It appears you have missed a couple things. The “average costs for daily car rental at $172”, so it is per day.

    Also note that this $172 is in US dollars, whilst you are paying £125 next week, so roughly equivalent given the exchange rate.

  7. @ Hessie

    There’s lots less dollars to the pound than in 2014 so that explains the difference (1.68 then 1.26 now)

  8. @LBM
    $172 per day is still not equivalent to £125 per week.

    @Herned – using those exchange rates, the sterling equivalents are £119 and £142. The latter is somewhere between the current prices of a Z1/2 and a Z1-3 monthly Travelcard (£134.80 and £158.30)

  9. LBM: Island dweller had not missed the word “daily” as he quoted it. But since,as you say, the figure quoted was roughly equivalent to what Island Dweller is paying per week, he conjectured that the statement might have been badly expressed. More likely, as others have suggested, it is just plain wrong.

  10. IIRC, the modal colour ascribed to Cycles was W&C teal/turquoise. It would have been prudent to keep Barclay Blue away from any permanent infrastructure colour, since sponsors were envisaged to change if needs be. Frustratingly, though…

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