Kangaroos, cars and the tube that costs more than it earns
The Australians have calculated that traffic delays costs the colonials $30 billion a year. My faithful retainer, Digdog, assures me that this is roughly £15 billion in real money. In Zimbabwean dollars it would not be enough to buy a tin of the amber nectar. Quite how traffic delays can cost them so much is a mystery: are there really traffic jams of jackeroos riding their kangaroos down to the local billabong?
By contrast, TfL (transport for London) estimates that traffic delays in London cost a mere 837 million minutes a year. Perhaps that is because we don't have so many kangaroos jamming up the roads. Although Thames water is doing its best to create as many billabongs as possible in London: potholes are not good enough for Thames water. They dig up entire roads and convert them into little lakes. Their latest ruse is to dig up the main road into London (the Cromwell Road) and reduce it to one lane. Inevitably, no one has actually seen anyone working on the Cromwell Road billabong. That alone must account for 850 million minutes of delay a year.
Digdog is good at numbers. He assures me that this converts into about 14 million hours or about 8,000 working years. Even giving each car commuter a value of £40,000 a year, that still only comes to £320 million a year. Peanuts compared to what the Aussies are able to claim.
The real cost of delays are not above ground: they are below ground on the tube. TfL goes very quiet about this, since they are responsible for the tube. Digging around finds that they admit the average delay, on TfL's own metrics are 6.6 minutes per tube journey. This excludes time spent queuing while the person in front of you attempts to pay with Lithuanian luncheon vouchers. That is just actual travel time. 6.6 minutes delay is nothing. Until you multiply it by the 1 billion passenger journeys on the tube this year. That suddenly becomes 110 million hours of delay a year. That comes to about 60,000 average working years or £2.4 billion of lost productivity a year.
Tube delays cost nearly eight times as much as road delays: they cost more than the entire revenues of the tube network. The tube costs twice as much as it earns. Of course this "cost of" calculation shows why all such "cost of" calculations are pure meadow mayonnaise. An accountant would promptly conclude that we would be better off closing down the tube. And everyone else would rightly conclude that we would be better off closing down accountants.
The real cost of tube delays are not financial. They are the cost of the Count's sanity while waiting for yet another mythical tube train to go in a faintly useful direction.
The only real solution is to dump the tube and hire a kangaroo instead.
By contrast, TfL (transport for London) estimates that traffic delays in London cost a mere 837 million minutes a year. Perhaps that is because we don't have so many kangaroos jamming up the roads. Although Thames water is doing its best to create as many billabongs as possible in London: potholes are not good enough for Thames water. They dig up entire roads and convert them into little lakes. Their latest ruse is to dig up the main road into London (the Cromwell Road) and reduce it to one lane. Inevitably, no one has actually seen anyone working on the Cromwell Road billabong. That alone must account for 850 million minutes of delay a year.
Digdog is good at numbers. He assures me that this converts into about 14 million hours or about 8,000 working years. Even giving each car commuter a value of £40,000 a year, that still only comes to £320 million a year. Peanuts compared to what the Aussies are able to claim.
The real cost of delays are not above ground: they are below ground on the tube. TfL goes very quiet about this, since they are responsible for the tube. Digging around finds that they admit the average delay, on TfL's own metrics are 6.6 minutes per tube journey. This excludes time spent queuing while the person in front of you attempts to pay with Lithuanian luncheon vouchers. That is just actual travel time. 6.6 minutes delay is nothing. Until you multiply it by the 1 billion passenger journeys on the tube this year. That suddenly becomes 110 million hours of delay a year. That comes to about 60,000 average working years or £2.4 billion of lost productivity a year.
Tube delays cost nearly eight times as much as road delays: they cost more than the entire revenues of the tube network. The tube costs twice as much as it earns. Of course this "cost of" calculation shows why all such "cost of" calculations are pure meadow mayonnaise. An accountant would promptly conclude that we would be better off closing down the tube. And everyone else would rightly conclude that we would be better off closing down accountants.
The real cost of tube delays are not financial. They are the cost of the Count's sanity while waiting for yet another mythical tube train to go in a faintly useful direction.
The only real solution is to dump the tube and hire a kangaroo instead.
posted by Count Kostov at
12:33 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home