Irish Times - Proposal to bring train journey times between cities below two hours

monument

More on road costs outweighing motor taxes:

Road injury figures 'highly unreliable'

"Using the Hipe data, the authors calculated the average inpatient hospital cost of treating a road traffic injury patient was €6,395. They estimated the total cost to the exchequer of treating road traffic injuries for the five-year period (2005 and 2009) as €4.5 billion."

ei.sdraob

Because cyclists are immune from injuries in their invisible forcefield as they break red lights and weave in and out of traffic :rolleyes:

monument

ei.sdraob wrote: »

Because cyclists are immune from injuries in their invisible forcefield as they break red lights and weave in and out of traffic :rolleyes:

Did you just post on the wrong thread?

L1011

monument wrote: »

Did you just post on the wrong thread?

Quite clearly not.

Motorists are in no way responsible for a decent amount of the injuries caused, namely to dopey pedestrians and sociopathic cyclists who don't understand that the rules of the road apply to them.

Working in Health I'd find their suggestion that 900M a year is spent by the exchequer on treating road traffic accidents highly suspect. If you go through a years medical journals and add up the "cost to the exchequer" of everything priced you're going to find it adds up to more than the health budget by a massive amount. These figures are pulled together by finding something that looks vaguely right and using the *entire* cost for it, e.g. the "cost of smoking" and the "cost of being overweight" will contain the entire actual cost of heart disease...

monument

MYOB wrote: »

Quite clearly not.

Motorists are in no way responsible for a decent amount of the injuries caused, namely to dopey pedestrians and sociopathic cyclists who don't understand that the rules of the road apply to them.

Regardless of blame, it's still a cost of the road network.

MYOB wrote: »

Working in Health I'd find their suggestion that 900M a year is spent by the exchequer on treating road traffic accidents highly suspect. If you go through a years medical journals and add up the "cost to the exchequer" of everything priced you're going to find it adds up to more than the health budget by a massive amount. These figures are pulled together by finding something that looks vaguely right and using the *entire* cost for it, e.g. the "cost of smoking" and the "cost of being overweight" will contain the entire actual cost of heart disease...

You'll have to do a bit better than what amounts to "sure, all research is flawed" to discredit their research.

Also -- we don't know who you are or what your qualifications are, so you "Working in Health" is equally meaningless with the information we have about you.

L1011

monument wrote: »

Regardless of blame, it's still a cost of the road network.

Only when you're desperately scrabbling for figures to try and claw yourself towards not being wrong. If its not a cost of motor vehicles there should be no expectation of motor vehicles paying for it. You're getting desperate now.

monument wrote: »

You'll have to do a bit better than what amounts to "sure, all research is flawed" to discredit their research.

I don't have access to the figures they worked from, all I can say is that when you add together all the notional figures provided you get more than the sum of the parts. Someones inflating figures somewhere.

monument wrote: »

Also -- we don't know who you are or what your qualifications are, so you "Working in Health" is equally meaningless with the information we have about you.

Informatics, enough to know that HIPE's data isn't particularly reliable. "Admitted as an emergency case" most likely means "turned up at A&E and wasn't turned away" meaning that the figure does not have any correlation to what the RSA classes as serious injury.

You can suffer debilitating injuries in a motor accident and never turn up at A&E (GP, specialists, possibly hospital but never A&E and hence not an "emergency" by HIPE) and you can turn up at A&E with a cut to your hand from falling off a moped at low speed. Which one is a serious injury?

Their price averages are going to be taken from data that includes swathes of non motor related injuries also, many of which would be far more costly.

Expect to see a huge amount of thrown together "research" as doctors are now required to have continuing medical competence proof to keep their registration.

Pete_Cavan

monument wrote: »

More on road costs outweighing motor taxes:

Road injury figures 'highly unreliable'

"Using the Hipe data, the authors calculated the average inpatient hospital cost of treating a road traffic injury patient was €6,395. They estimated the total cost to the exchequer of treating road traffic injuries for the five-year period (2005 and 2009) as €4.5 billion."

From the article you linked;
"The researchers found the annual number of hospital patient discharges related to road collisions reduced by almost 8 per cent between 2005 and 2009."

Hardly surprising that this drop coincided with the development of the motorway network. The motorway network have reduced the cost of hospital patient discharges to the exchequer, so far from this being a case of "road costs outweighing motor taxes", this is more a case of road investment reducing costs elsewhere (ie. health care).

Not a whole lot of information unless you have a subscription but heres a bit more on that point.

HivemindXX

MYOB wrote: »

Motorists are in no way responsible for a decent amount of the injuries caused, namely to dopey pedestrians and sociopathic cyclists who don't understand that the rules of the road apply to them.

Please define what you mean by 'decent'. I think the word you were looking for is 'tiny'.

Try to resist your impulse to editorialise as well it creates the impression you don't have actual facts to back you up. Unless of course you think only cyclists and pedestrians are capable of being dopey and/or sociopathic.

Kadongy

I'm interested whether they would need to replace the trains to achieve this.

I worked in a train station years ago and I was told that the trains were capable of travelling much faster than they actually do, only the tracks are not of sufficient quality for this to be safe/feasible. Don't remember whether this was in reference to the DART or the intercity trains or to both.

LXFlyer

No they do not need to replace any of the rolling stock.

L1011

HivemindXX wrote: »

Please define what you mean by 'decent'. I think the word you were looking for is 'tiny'.

Try to resist your impulse to editorialise as well it creates the impression you don't have actual facts to back you up. Unless of course you think only cyclists and pedestrians are capable of being dopey and/or sociopathic.

Far more than tiny. In all my driving around Dublin alone I've seen one cyclist injured in an RTA that wasn't their fault (someone turned left in to them) and somewhere in the region of ten injured when it was - breaking red lights primarily although notable ones include going the wrong way down a road... Ditto pedestrians, generally running across the road in to moving traffic.

monument

MYOB wrote: »

Far more than tiny. In all my driving around Dublin alone I've seen one cyclist injured in an RTA that wasn't their fault (someone turned left in to them) and somewhere in the region of ten injured when it was - breaking red lights primarily although notable ones include going the wrong way down a road... Ditto pedestrians, generally running across the road in to moving traffic.

Oh, I see, you piss on people's research and then you want us to take what you've seen on the street as something with some kind of value. :pac:

L1011

monument wrote: »

Oh, I see, you piss on people's research and then you want us to take what you've seen on the street as something with some kind of value. :pac:

Seeing as my reply was in response to someone acting as if cyclists could never be at fault, there was no research involved on either side.

monument

MYOB wrote: »

Seeing as my reply was in response to someone acting as if cyclists could never be at fault, there was no research involved on either side.

I don't see where they say never. Cyclists account for a small amount of deaths and injures, and it's very unlikely among these few that cyclists account for the blame or full blame in most of these.

Take Dublin City Council report on Cycle Collisions in Dublin City (2002-06) [as attached]. And yes, I make some judgement calls here, but you're welcome to dispute anything I say if you want:



Most deaths and the most seiours injouries were caused by motorists turning left -- often shared blame (as most crashes are to diffrent degrees -- ie shared blame can range from 50/50 to 10/90), cyclists should know better than to go into the inside of left turning vehicles but that's also often where the cycle lane bring them, but you'll also find motorists doing very silly things like not looking, not indicating and things like overtaking cyclists fast and then straight away turning in.

Most minor and the second most serious crashes were caused by cars turning right into cyclists cycing straight on -- this is likely mostly to blame on motorists. If red light breaking cyclists were such a problem you'd expect "crossroads, perpendicular diretcion of travel" to be a large issue, it's not.

Side-swipe, same direction is mostly the fault of the person overtaking and not the person who is being overtaken.

Rear-ends in Irish law is the fault of the driver who rear-ends.

Opening doors is usually the fault of the person who opens the door but you could say (and I do say) cyclists shouldn't really be in the door opening zones but cycle lane bring them there and if they cycle further out in the road they'll annoy motorists to no end.

Hitting a pedestrian is mixed -- they walk out on front of cyclists as much as cyclists hit them at crossings.

Studies elsewhere also show cyclists "rarely to blame":

Risky cycling rarely to blame for bike accidents, study finds

In Toronto found that clumsy or inattentive driving by motorists was the cause of 90 percent of these crashes

Australian helmet cam study says motorists to blame in 88 per cent of accidents with cyclists

dowlingm

Sponge Bob wrote: »

Some posters in this thread resolutely refuse to accept that Express Bus networks, the best example being Galway - Dublin, work very well given passenger volumes and are purely focused on rail which should only be part of the mix.

Let's turn that statement around. In an Express Bus network world, where does rail fit in?

L1011

turning right will include light breaking cyclists when opposing traffic has been given a filter. Seen this happen on the canal, more than once.

monument

MYOB wrote: »

turning right will include light breaking cyclists when opposing traffic has been given a filter. Seen this happen on the canal, more than once.

It will include such, but it will more than often include junctions with no lights -- where motorists somehow don't the cyclists even in the day (likely because they're not looking), or where they think they can make it or vastly underestimate the speed of the cyclist.

Pete_Cavan

monument wrote: »

I don't see where they say never. Cyclists account for a small amount of deaths and injures, and it's very unlikely among these few that cyclists account for the blame or full blame in most of these.

Take Dublin City Council report on Cycle Collisions in Dublin City (2002-06) [as attached]. And yes, I make some judgement calls here, but you're welcome to dispute anything I say if you want:

Interesting research, but totally irrelevant to this thread. The issue at hand, as per the article in the OP, is IRs pleas for €175 million to improve speeds on the rails lines from Dublin to Cork and Galway. Motorways, on which it is illegal for cyclists to travel, already exist between Dublin and these two destinations so your claims about cyclist accidents (or indeed most other accidents) being a cost of roads is immaterial here.

monument

Pete_Cavan wrote: »

Interesting research, but totally irrelevant to this thread. The issue at hand, as per the article in the OP, is IRs pleas for €175 million to improve speeds on the rails lines from Dublin to Cork and Galway. Motorways, on which it is illegal for cyclists to travel, already exist between Dublin and these two destinations so your claims about cyclist accidents (or indeed most other accidents) being a cost of roads is immaterial here.

I would have never brought up the topic of accidents in which there are cyclist on this thread as they account for such a small amount deaths and injuries. Cyclists were first mentioned by another poster to try to divert blame from motorists.

But we are talking about the costs of the road network (not just the motorways) and a major cost of the road network is deaths and injuries. This line of debate came from the presumption of others that roads and all of CIE are more than paid for by road taxes.

It might seem quite off topic from the OP but one or more mods were on here when the debate switched or went down this path and they seemed to have no problem.

DWCommuter

I have a problem. The OT was really very important. Its subsequent side track into road fatalities and cycling is bonkers. I'd personally like it to get back to being about IEs ambitions for increasing rail journey times and all the positive and negative stuff that is directly related to it.

Any chance??

Yahew

DWCommuter wrote: »

I have a problem. The OT was really very important. Its subsequent side track into road fatalities and cycling is bonkers. I'd personally like it to get back to being about IEs ambitions for increasing rail journey times and all the positive and negative stuff that is directly related to it.

Any chance??

This thread spent 4 pages on freight travel which was off topic to the OP - a post about cutting passenger times. That was off topic. This isn't.

Since the OP we have moved onto a general discussion of the costs of rail vs road. The anti-rail posters did that in their first posts by claiming the costs of rail exceeds the benefits and road users were subsidising rail users. The counter arguments depend on the total cost of road vs rail including the externalities. That includes the cost of accidents. In total

Amtmann

monument wrote: »

It might seem quite off topic from the OP but one or more mods were on here when the debate switched or went down this path and they seemed to have no problem.

Believe it or not, I don't spend all of my time (or even all of my free time!) on this website. Neither do my co-moderators I'm sure. Having just read the latest posts on this thread, I'm inclined to think that it's in its final stages, but it's not there yet. The thread has drifted from the OP, but I think it's a natural drift and not wildly off-topic. That said, try to rein it in. Less of the cyclists please.

Sponge Bob

monument wrote: »

and a major cost of the road network is deaths and injuries.

and a major cost from NOT having a road network is .........death and injuries as it happens.

How does food get to the shops, on cycle relay networks is it ??

How do sick people get to hospitals in time, on camel trains perhaps ??

Once you calculate out the excess deaths that do NOT happen as a result of the road network being as it is the NET cost of road injuries and accidents is easily netted out to €0.

If you genuinely think that stroke victims will somehow benefit from cycling to hospital during the golden hour please explain your calculations, ta!

monument

Sponge Bob wrote: »

and a major cost from NOT having a road network is .........death and injuries as it happens.

How does food get to the shops, on cycle relay networks is it ??

How do sick people get to hospitals in time, on camel trains perhaps ??

Once you calculate out the excess deaths that do NOT happen as a result of the road network being as it is the NET cost of road injuries and accidents is easily netted out to €0.

If you genuinely think that stroke victims will somehow benefit from cycling to hospital during the golden hour please explain your calculations, ta!

As I already said: That post would only make sense if somebody was arguing for no roads.

Sponge Bob, I'm still unsure how you don't understand this -- I'm not arguing against the road network I'm am looking at all of its costs.

Even if these costs are covered by the benefits over not have the road network, it still means that motor taxes do not cover the costs of the network. Making it imposable for motor taxes to also be paying for CIE, including Irish Rail (as somebody claimed). So, it's a nonsense argument to say we should close the rail network because it does not pay for it self unlike roads -- because roads do not pay for them self.

Sponge Bob

No, they are paid for by taxes. You should, however, net off life saving benefits versus accident costs. How accessible is the main Cork Hospital SINCE the Jack Lynch tunnel was built for example, or the Beaumont SINCE the M50 was built. ???

I mean nobody who is really sick would be stupid enough to take the train would they??

monument

Sponge Bob wrote: »

I mean nobody who is really sick would be stupid enough to take the train would they??

Yet another straw man argument. Nobody is saying people shouldn't have access to ambulances or that there should be no roads for ambulances to drive on.

Sponge Bob

What is straw about it, seriously sick people go by road not by train, way it is.

thebman

monument wrote: »

Yet another straw man argument. Nobody is saying people shouldn't have access to ambulances or that there should be no roads for ambulances to drive on.

Which roads do you have a problem with then as all roads can be used by ambulances to bring people to hospital at some point or other.

Overall I'd say the deaths on most roads are probably close to canceled out by the number of times ambulances and fire brigades utilising them to get to scenes of accidents but it would be almost impossible to work all that out IMO especially if you try to into account for roadside burnout of vehicles for insurance money which seems to happen on motorways mostly.

L1011

monument wrote: »

it still means that motor taxes do not cover the costs of the network.

You've still not shown this, so you should probably stop stating it as a fact.

You cannot claim any apparent "hidden costs" without taking all the "hidden benefits" as inputs, so you're not going to be able to prove your point with or without them.

monument

MYOB wrote: »

You've still not shown this, so you should probably stop stating it as a fact.

Fair enough, I'll phrase it more carefully until I make an attempt to gather everything together a bit better.

MYOB wrote: »

You cannot claim any apparent "hidden costs" without taking all the "hidden benefits" as inputs, so you're not going to be able to prove your point with or without them.

Yes, yes, I can.

The "hidden benefits" can come regardless of whether motor taxes pay for roads or not. And even if the "hidden benefits" were to end up cancelling the "hidden costs", that does not mean that road taxes covers all the costs the benefits do. Just as the benefits of the whole rail network outweigh the costs. Anyway, if I remember how this started right, I think the challenge was actually to prove that motor taxes do not pay for all of the road costs plus CIE.

And at the point where you are relying on the "hidden benefits" to cover all the cost of the road network, questions have to be asked if different mixes (ie more rail along with road projects) would be better overall and reducing the overall costs of the total transport network.

Sponge Bob wrote: »

What is straw about it, seriously sick people go by road not by train, way it is.

Again: Nobody is saying people shouldn't have access to ambulances or that there should be no roads for ambulances to drive on.

The cost of road maintenance and building, as well as the "hidden costs" would be tiny if they were just used by ambulances, other emergency vehicle, and, say, even local goods vehicles as well.

If ambulances etc only make up a tiny amount of the costs, trying to use ambulances as an excuse for overall road expenditure is nonsensical -- or nicer put a straw man argument.

thebman wrote: »

Which roads do you have a problem with then as all roads can be used by ambulances to bring people to hospital at some point or other.

My main problem with a lot of roads is the pot holes on them or poor designs, but I'm unsure what that to do with this thread...

thebman wrote: »

Overall I'd say the deaths on most roads are probably close to canceled out by the number of times ambulances and fire brigades utilising them to get to scenes of accidents but it would be almost impossible to work all that out IMO especially if you try to into account for roadside burnout of vehicles for insurance money which seems to happen on motorways mostly.

The need for ambulances and fire brigades to attend scenes of road accidents is a cost of the road network.

The general use of ambulances and fire brigades and other emergency vehicles to attend other types of incidents is a side issue given that these vehicles have very little impact on the running and building costs of roads in comparisons to other traffic.