this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2025
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Any research on the financial side of a public transport heavy society? (self.fuckcars)
submitted 2 weeks ago by Jeroen to c/fuckcars@lemmy.world
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We all here want more public transport in our societies and see cars as inefficient and expensive. I wonder if anyone knows any research or well thought-out article about how much it would cost to run a society/city to have a lot of public transport, and how much that would save.

If I think about how in a political campaign it could be (financially) convincing. Let's say that taking, say, 1000 USD/EUR/GBP(etc) more in taxes per person per year, would be estimated to save a person 5000 USD/EUR/GBP(etc) per year in their car cost, medical cost, other societal cost like the parking space. I am curious if there is literature or even just blog posts about someone going into detail about this and detailed (and real life preferably) calculate and estimate these statistics.

To reiterate, I am curious about the numbers and economics of this in as real of situations as possible. How many bus routes would need to be added and how much would that genuinely cost at a level where people can stop buying cars.

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[–] brotundspiele@feddit.org 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

I'm not sure if that's what you're looking for, but such studies are standard procedure for major infrastructure projects, at least where I'm from. Here's the 49-page executive summary for a new subway that's currently being built in my home town. It's obviously in German, but I guess the same should exist in English for any subway/tram etc. that has been built in the UK or any other English speaking country.

To give a brief summary of the summary: They've included all kinds of costs like

  • accidents
  • CO₂ emissions
  • travel times

etc. and they come to a net-worth of 1.28 (later this was reduced to 1.23 due to unexpectedly high inflation in construction, but I don't know if they also recalculated the without-case after inflation), meaning every 1€ spent will generate 1.28€ in revenue/savings. Or a net gain of 39 Million Euros per year.

[–] Jeroen 3 points 2 weeks ago

Thanks, something like this is indeed already interesting, especially with the return on investment calculation so I'll check it out. But to be slightly more directed at what I wanted, I meant a paper/article researching how much it would cost and it would save to have 90% of the trips in a society be with public transport. I understand if that is not something a lot of direct high-quality research has gone into.