Part of the costs is our low tolerance for detouring car traffic. Recently, LA metro made waves by shaving 7 months off of their purple line extension schedule, since the lightened pandemic traffic allowed them to dig an open cut along wilshire and install decking over the future station. Beverly Hills fought that closure from happening since the build began, but the pandemic forced their hand and removed any ground for their argument to stand on.
We could save so much money if we didn't focus so much effort on minimizing construction impact to existing traffic. We would rather take a longer, slower, more painful bleed of the public purse, than cheaply ripping the bandaid off and dealing with a 15 minute longer commute for a few months.
Well that is just offloading costs onto the public as tax is it not? At a $15/hr min wage, adding 15 minutes to a round trip commute for 20'000 people/day M-F costs after 7 months $10.5 million dollars too.
That's not a good comparison. You can actually spend the money saved by finishing construction faster. Nobody gets a check for all the supposed "saved time" when you do that math. You can't pool that money together and build a nice neighborhood park -- because there is no money.
What happens in real life is that people largely don't just stick to their same behavior and suffer like lemmings. They time shift a little bit. They find a different route. It's not magic, it's just a complex system adapting to a change in conditions.
"Dollar value of time saved" calculations are a common distraction peddled by lazy engineers who can't actually make the numbers for their project make sense and instead need to dupe the public into supporting a project they want to do.
I am not fond of this cost-based argument - you hear this one (longer commute times priced at hourly wage) and similar ones.
But no company pays me for my commute time. If I take an extra hour commute I don't get that 15 bucks. And that commute time does not go onto GDP either. It's hard to argue the economy lost the time I was doing nothing productive.
And if we really want to take it to the extreme, if it costs the country 15 bucks each hour people are not paid to work, but could have been doing something useful, Avengers Endgame must have cost the country more than it made in ticket sales. Thanos' final revenge:-)
> But no company pays me for my commute time. If I take an extra hour commute I don't get that 15 bucks. And that commute time does not go onto GDP either. It's hard to argue the economy lost the time I was doing nothing productive.
I suppose that's true if you believe that things without a price are worth nothing.
Truly, it's a mystery why people spend time with their families and friends instead of working another job. Such a waste of time.
>But no company pays me for my commute time. If I take an extra hour commute I don't get that 15 bucks.
Pretty much anyone paid to show up in a windowless van and do some task is paid (or their boss is paid) by billable hour. Anything that decreased the ratio of billable hours to hours worked is going to mean they need to charge you more. Obviously it might amortize out to only be pennies on the dollar but when you start adding a pennies on the dollar sized inefficiency to the economy of an entire region it's gonna hurt.
Imagine if you made the day 5min shorter for 50% of the population. That's what crappy transportation infrastructure does (be it car, rail or otherwise).
>And if we really want to take it to the extreme, if it costs the country 15 bucks each hour people are not paid to work, but could have been doing something useful, Avengers Endgame must have cost the country more than it made in ticket sales. Thanos' final revenge:-)
Is there a word for when you actually agree with a reductio ad absurdem? Because man, what a waste of time movies like that are.
> If I take an extra hour commute I don't get that 15 bucks. And that commute time does not go onto GDP either. It's hard to argue the economy lost the time I was doing nothing productive.
Presumably on average you work an hour's less overtime/day while the diversion is in place, or maybe you quit your job and take a less productive one that's in decent commuting range, or so on.
> And if we really want to take it to the extreme, if it costs the country 15 bucks each hour people are not paid to work, but could have been doing something useful, Avengers Endgame must have cost the country more than it made in ticket sales. Thanos' final revenge:-)
I mean it's certainly worth thinking about how much time you're putting into things like movies and whether that's worth it to you. If something that takes 1 hour and costs $45 is more fun than something that takes 3 hours and costs $15, you might well be better off doing the former.
It's not just a car detour issue. When a city shuts down a street for months to do construction that is likely to destroy any adjacent restaurants and retail businesses. When customers can't easily drive to business and park nearby then they stop coming. Naturally business owners strongly object to this and advocate for slower, less disruptive construction techniques.
This is a valid complaint, but the problem is that slower and less disruptive techniques are still disruptive and still often kill businesses. In many cases it would be much faster and more cost effective to give transfer payments to the businesses for their expected revenues during the closure and then just have them close temporarily to get the project done a lot easier and faster.
No one going to any store in LA is able to park in front of it. Even if there were a street parking spot at that artery, it will probably be occupied by someone not going to that restaurant or store. Plus the sidewalks don't close when the city does this sort of work, and there are ample parking garages in every neighborhood with a commercial corridor that remain open. I saw a figure that said LA had 3x as many parking spaces as cars.
We could save so much money if we didn't focus so much effort on minimizing construction impact to existing traffic. We would rather take a longer, slower, more painful bleed of the public purse, than cheaply ripping the bandaid off and dealing with a 15 minute longer commute for a few months.