Editor,
When you were in high school, you probably took either the ACT or SAT. And you got a verbal score and a math score.
It looks to me like Laguna Beach is largely led by people with good verbal scores.
But can anyone do math?
Here’s a small example.
This summer, to great fanfare, the city announced it would try an experiment called Summer Breeze, which was a hastily assembled program to lease a parking lot near the 405 and to have OCTA busses carry people for 16 summer weekend days from those parked cars to downtown Laguna and back 26 times per day.
Cost to the City $85,000.
The goals were to reduce congestion in the downtown and to reduce the number of vehicles entering downtown.
The problem is – it is very expensive for what it accomplishes.
While there were a reported 5,428 bus “boardings”, actual cars parked and kept out of the downtown were about 1045 (total) or 65 per day the program was in effect.
So the effective cost of the program was $81.28 (per day) for every car kept out of the downtown.
But to keep 65 cars off the road, we added 26 bus trips. So we only reduced vehicles in downtown by 39 per day.
On that basis, it cost $134.98 for every net vehicle kept out of downtown.
And the reduction in trips on Laguna Canyon Road was about .02 percent. That’s one out of every 500 cars.
Environmentally, we probably used more fuel for the bus trips than the cars would have used.
Okay, so it was an experiment, and it’s okay to experiment, but gee whiz let’s work on the math.
To make a real difference, how many trips per day would we need to save? What would that cost?
On this basis, keeping 1,000 vehicles out of the downtown, at a cost of $134.98 for every net vehicle kept out of downtown would cost $134,980 per day.
And that would reduce vehicles in downtown by 5% on those days.
Seems pretty expensive.
If the city sent me a check for $134.98 to stay out of downtown, I’d do it.
It’s election time. Maybe we need fewer verbal skills and more math skills running the city. Vote for Verna. Verna can do math.
John Thomas, Laguna Beach
Mr Thomas,
It seems there is a trend in promoting city council candidates by speculations in public transportation operations.
I believe the cost you are evaluating is off set by federal funding, and part of that funding is though fuel subsidies .
The numbers you are bantering are daily averages, those number can be misleading in there appearance.
For example weekend or holiday traffic is proportionally greater than week day or non holiday traffic. Where as the human components and other public services the city provides are also scheduled accordingly.
Any help in reduction of traffic during these “tides” of influx is assistance to these other services. It’s simple math.
Damn, Hector Suerte burned you pretty badly Mr. Thomas