Agreed, Americans do (and always have) love their cars.... but,

Just who is riding all these new commuter and light rail operations that are beginning to bring the shine back to the urban rails?

Rail transit is not likely to more than skim the surface of metropolitan congestion. But that's OK, and worth the investment, and applicable almost anywhere (even Albany, or Nashville)

> It is interesting to see this topic
> resurface. The only real way to forecast
> demand is to go ask -- design and conduct
> scientific surveys, tabulate the results,
> and let the numbers guide your way.

> Things that seem to make intuitive sense to
> rail propoents often are not. Just review
> the Tennessee State Senate Committee's 1988
> preliminary commuter rail feasibility study
> for Nashville. (Newspaper clippings are
> available if anyone is interested. Contact
> me off-post.)

> In spite of what then seemed to be
> slam-dunks turned out to be not of much
> interest to surveyed motorists and other
> commuters. And they are still not.

> Even with the expenditure of some $340
> million on major Mashville area interstate
> highway construction projects and increasing
> congestion, we have to face this fact ---

> Americans love our cars.


jgerlach@trainsofthought.com

> Agreed, Americans do (and always have) love
> their cars.... but,

>One of the more famous marketing professors and theorists, Phillip Kotler of Northwestern University has theorized that every product sold is comprised of four sources of utility (value) to a consumer.

Time (having the product when you want it)

Place (having the product when you want it)

Form (having the product how you want it)

Possession (having ownership or control over the product)

On these four counts, mass transit will always be deficient in three regards (time place and form). You donÂ’t have to own a train to receive its benefits and can buy in effect, a little piece of it when you purchase a ticket, but trains must run on schedules, from a limited number of places and arenÂ’t really customizable to an individual.

In our world, time utility is especially important-which explains why people will plunk down $25,000, two bucks a gallon and hundreds every year for insurance, registration, license, etc.-or extravagant amounts for a plane ticket.

Of course the funny thing about the whole issue is that in the 1950Â’s the government was busy killing passenger trains with publicly subsidized highways and even more heavily subsidized airports.

Now they suddenly find trains useful for a whole host of reasons and they are going to spend millions or billions to herd us back onto trains after destroying them.



superheater62@yahoo.com

> Just who is riding all these new commuter
> and light rail operations that are beginning
> to bring the shine back to the urban rails?

The reasons underlying modal shift decisions by commuters are very complicated matters rooted in economics and psychology (buyer behavior). They vary on a market-by-market basis and are strongly related to urban and suburban development patterns driven by another big set of time and cost (economic) issues. [Ready for a factor analyses discussion? How's your calc skills?]

> Rail transit is not likely to more than skim
> the surface of metropolitan congestion.

While one sentence statements about urban transportation patterns and their underlying reasons are often wrong, this statement is pretty close to correct. But even here there are, as one might expect, exceptions. Sorry.

> But
> that's OK, and worth the investment, and
> applicable almost anywhere (even Albany, or
> Nashville).

How do you define "worth" and determine what is and is not applicable? These are very complex questions that require great study and are not easily described in one sentence. Consider the Nashville research project. We found that a fair number of folks reported they liked the basic idea of commuter rail service. However, when we further described the likely commuter rail travel experience, we found that there were many other factors that would be involved. When confronted with the realities of all that commuter rail service would involve (like connecting bus rides to and from final in-town destinations), most folks decided they would not be so likely to use commuter rail after all.

The Nashville-Davidson County commuter mindset is very unlike that of someone from Putnam, Bergen, Westchester, or Worcester (MA) counties. Similarly, travel decisions and commuter transportation choices made by RyPN participants likely are not the selections of the majority.

amiller@rtms-movietrains.com