Bicycle Austin forum

MichaelBluejay

Webmaster

From: Austin, TX

Registered: 2008-05-26

Posts: 1,494

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Societal costs of driving, bussing, biking, and walking

A site called "The Discourse" has some interesting data on the relative subsidies of various forms of transportation.  For example:

And here's their calculator:  http://discoursemedia.org/urban-develop … lator-data

Darron

Member

Registered: 2014-05-22

Posts: 131

Re: Societal costs of driving, bussing, biking, and walking

Thanks for posting this.  It is surprising they did not include the cost of parking as well:

"Not Included:Costs and benefits that were unavailable for this analysis, but significant enough to warrant future investigation include: specific infrastructure costs for buses (i.e. bus shelters, signs, benches etc.), infrastructure costs for cycling and walking, parking costs, roadway land value costs, transportation diversity costs,land use impacts, water pollution and hydrologic impacts/costs and waste disposal costs and/or life cycle costs."

Parking costs in the US are pretty significant.  Just look at a Google earth to see that for most shopping centers the parking space take more land area than the shops.  The net effect is this reduces the supply of available land and drives up land prices.  We all pay more directly in property taxes and indirectly for good and services as businesses need to cover rent/taxes.  Here was an interesting article on the subject: https://www.fastcompany.com/40441392/se … ing-spaces