Over crowding – or to give it its proper economics name – a queue - is a symptom of too much demand meeting too little supply. Solutions, raise supply or reduce demand.
Raising supply might be difficult where the marginal cost of additional supply is greater than the marginal revenue from additional journeys. In railway engineering terms I can see that this might be the case on parts of the UK rail network where significant capital costs (which are hard to divide) are required.
The other solution is to reduce demand. This can be done by providing substitutes or by raising the price. Substitutes suffer the some of the same infrastructure provision issues, depends how you do them. (I’d vote for self-driving buses). Raising the price is easy. Not so good if you are a punter.
Buses I think suffer from this problem less so.
For the price of a dozen buses I could start a Bath to Calne bus service. I don’t need to spent millions upgrading stations or laying track or upgrading signalling.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2012-02-23 03:24 pm (UTC)Raising supply might be difficult where the marginal cost of additional supply is greater than the marginal revenue from additional journeys. In railway engineering terms I can see that this might be the case on parts of the UK rail network where significant capital costs (which are hard to divide) are required.
The other solution is to reduce demand. This can be done by providing substitutes or by raising the price. Substitutes suffer the some of the same infrastructure provision issues, depends how you do them. (I’d vote for self-driving buses). Raising the price is easy. Not so good if you are a punter.
Buses I think suffer from this problem less so.
For the price of a dozen buses I could start a Bath to Calne bus service. I don’t need to spent millions upgrading stations or laying track or upgrading signalling.