Your city bus costs more per mile than a first class overseas flight

[Whyzman]

Very interesting read...

http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2009/03/06/your-city-bus-costs-more-per-mile-than-a-first-class-overseas-fl/

[classicsoftware]

Total and complete bull-****. The real comparison is between how much it costs to drive your car in a city as it does to take the bus. This is a typical straw man argument.....

[Whyzman]

I would agree Classic, that drawing conclusions such as was done in the opening paragraphs is perhaps skewed...

However, the interesting thing to me is the simple out of pocket cost per mile comparisons.

[Budfred]

Unfortunately, none of the comparisons are valid for more than a few minutes a day under very specific circumstances... If I get on a city bus, I can ride the entire route for the fare, get a transfer and ride another route and I believe transfer once more under the same fare... If I call the airline and ask for the fare to fly to somewhere 500 miles away, I may pay $1 a mile or I may pay $5 a mile, it depends on when I call and what seat I want to pay for...

There is no way to compare these forms of transport realistically and that also goes for comparison to driving an individual car... If I jump into a hybrid subcompact and drive around the city all day, it may not cost me more than a few cents -- as long as you don't consider insurance, purchase costs, maintenance and so on... If I jump into a Humvee and drive the same route, it will probably cost me many times what I paid for that trip in the hybrid, even excluding the fact that the hidden costs are several times higher than the hybrid... If I jump onto a bicycle and make the same trip, it will cost me almost nothing except time...

The author is comparing oranges to apples to kumquats to ugli fruit to ?? The argument breaks down very quickly and is basically about being angry that he has to pay more to ride the bus than he wants to... I understand being resentful about higher costs, but unfair comparisons just muddy the situation...