Quote:
Originally Posted by LMich
You sound absolutely elated, you know, as if you've totally dropped the pretense of being objective, and you're just rolling in completely political, philosophical, and ideological talking points and buzzwords. lol
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Ok, I will be bit less theatric.
Estonia is at an earlier point on the automobile consumption curve than such points are in Western European countries, the US, Australia, Canada, and, Japan. Perhaps this curve might be a flattened S curve, with the X axis measuring time, and, the Y axis car population per capita, where the per capita relates to a range of possible maxima, dependent on mean wealth. Maybe, given a constant mean wealth there are declines in total ownership, related to aging demographics or different political regimes.
Regardless, IMO the net impact of lowering or eliminating the cost of using buses or public transportation has to be partly related to volunteering not to use privately used automobiles. This willingness to "park the car" is related to PERCEIVED value as well as operating cost. In nations
and CITIES within nations that only now are experiencing the ability for large sectors of their consuming population to afford cars, the PERCIEVED value including concepts such as "status" is far higher than in societies in which the masses have driven privately owned automobiles in significant numbers for generations, who have lived with traffic jams, and witnessed the impacts of this traffic upon their cities.
Until the 'newness' wears off, or until the cost of operating and owning an automobile consumes almost all of the discretionary income of the statistical mean, the 'average' auto driver with the ability to afford to drive will be more hesitant to use public transportation, even if ridership is free.*
The willingness to 'park the car at home" is inversely (to some power) proportional to the total number of automobiles divided by the total population.
*This relates, too, to how much the public transport cost before it became free. If for example, a 20 mile trip cost $5.00 on a bus, and, that became free, then the amount of "hesitancy" of an auto owner might drop, more than for a trip of 1 mile costing $1.00. If one were to plot this "hesitancy factor" as another curve for a range of values for a given point on the automobile consumption curve, one would get a function defining distance traveled, cost of travel per unit distance, and, mean income.