This video, from the indispensable Streetfilms and the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, notes that the equivalent of Cincinnati commutes by bus every day into New York City; if all those bus riders chose to drive, traffic levels would be 84% higher.

On a similar note, Felix Salmon, running through Charles Komanoff’s “Balanced Transportation Analyzer,” notes:

After crunching the numbers, he calculates that on a weekday, the average car driven into Manhattan south of 60th Street causes a total of 3.26 hours of delays to everybody else. (At weekends, the equivalent number is just over 2 hours.) No one car is likely to suffer excess delays of more than a few seconds, of course, but if you add up all those seconds for the thousands of affected cars and trucks, it comes to a significant amount of time.

Many of those hours are very valuable things, especially when you consider big trucks, staffed with two or three professionals, just idling in traffic. Komanoff calculates (check out the “Value of Time” tab) that the average vehicle has 1.97 people in it, and that the average value of an hour of saved vehicle time south of 60th Street in Manhattan on a weekday is $48.89. Which means, basically, that driving a car into Manhattan on a weekday causes about $160 of negative externalities to everybody else.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 9:50 am and is filed under Cities, Commuting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.