Bruno Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology, PDF - Dss-edit.com

"Aramis has a lot of advantages because of the forks. Waiting time for apassenger goes from three minutes, with a trolley, to forty seconds."The problem is that everybody's seated. With Aramis you can't soy, 'We'lliust cram folks in. So as soon as there's even iust one more passenger, youneed another car."It isn't really an economic calculation we're making, because it's a networkstudy. What counts is the average travel time per passenger."In Paris, with the orange card, users pay a standard rote, in any case, sothe return on a new investment can't be calculated directly. On the other hand,we know from experience that as soon as people are offered a new systemof public transportation, they give up private cars."So our profits come from new passengers; those are the only ones we canhonestly count . ."Then there are three parts: one, the investments, the civil engineeringthat'swhat costs the most; two, the system, mobile and fixed; next, the trafficthatis, the new passengers and the new offer of comfort; and finally theoperation-that is, drivers and maintenance."What can be said, taking into account the narrowmindedness of theBudget Office [Finance Ministry], is that all the economic studies showed thatAramis was actually pretty well situated. It was completely conceivable, evenif the Budget Office was somewhat critical of the way th ings were calculated."But it was obvious that the operational costs of the rolling stock were awfullyheavy. Three billion francs in investments sounded reasonable enough, but thehitch was the operating costs."Still, in the end, since the service was new, it was conceivable that thequality would have attracted new people."M. Brehier:"We started with a socioeconomic balance sheet by valorizing the passenger,and then we looked to see whether it was tolerable from the standpointof the financial balance sheet."In any case, the Budget Office finds everything intolerable; as they see it,no investment for a specific site is ever profitable. It's only if there's a politicalwill behind a proiect that they decide it's tolerable. Whereas we were pushingfor the new service, the time gains, the increased comfor!" [no. 30J__ THE 1984 DeCISION