- Joined
- Oct 29, 2016
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- 525
It's the same number of buses per hour. To way oversimpify, if the extra lane allows each bus to do 1-hour round trips, then it'll take 24 buses per day (each with its own driver). If the plan that doesn't include the extra lane ends up meaning 2-hour round trips, then it'll take 48 buses per day (each with its own driver) to provide that same 24-bus-per-hour coverage. And twice the buses & drivers would cost twice as much. Not to mention the extra overtime expenses when the big backups occur.
Interesting but it still doesn't add up. I think you're saying "24 buses per hour" means "24 buses departing Alta per hour" With the dedicated lane of option B, it does make sense that less buses would be needed due to higher bus speeds for B. In fact we can define exactly how many less because they mention round rip travel times of 92 and 74 minutes for options A and B respectively. So we should expect 19.6% less bus O&M bus costs. We don't know what percent of the 9M O&M costs for option A are buses, but even at 100%, that would make option B 1.8M cheaper, not 2.8M as stated. That also assumes that the lane is speedier 100% of the time (<30% in reality) and non-bus costs are likely 50% (parking lots maint, gas, tires, bus stops, etc. With those adjustments, the savings is less than 0.27M.
And the biggest factor excluded, the cost to maintain the new lanes (repaving, extra snow removal, etc.) is at least 1M MORE for option B. (road resurfacing alone is half of that at $.63M per 2-lane flat mile at standard 15 year intervals. Mountain roads are often much more prone to maintenance with snow, melt water damage, freezing, chain damage, avalanche damage, etc.)
So long story short, I'd expect option B to be between 1 and 4 million more per year more expensive than option A.