As it turns out it doesn’t actually cost that much on regular transit, there’s an AIRPORT SURCHARGE because it’s an “airport train”.
No wonder Americans don’t use public transit, even when the system exists it’s ridiculously difficult and expensive to use.
If it was free, we probably wouldn’t have it because the system would have broken down with no money to fix it.
Just like the roads!
When people say “free” with regards to a public service, they usually take it as understood that maintenance costs should be collectively shared via something like taxes. Better understood as “free at point of usage”.
Yeah, roads are insanely expensive, we’d live in a very different world if they weren’t free to use for everyone in most countries and all the money that wouldn’t have ended up in road maintenance (because usage costs of heavy trucks wouldn’t make them cost effective) went to rail and shipping. And let’s not even count the insane networks of high speed roads that most rich countries built after 1945 that cost trillions of dollars globally.
the big thing is that most roads are paved and regularly maintained these days, medieval britain for example had an absurd density of roads (higher than today) but most of them were just shitty tracks for carts to rumble along. Like back then an actually paved road was kind of on the same level as railways are now, a massive investment that makes things so much better
Some parts of the US have toll roads for most of the major highways
Exactly what I was thinking of when I made that comment. Highway maintenance is paid for, at least in part, through tolls.
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Road maintenance is funded by the people that use them, in the form of tolls, registrations, and gas taxes. Public transport is mostly taxpayers that don’t use it, subsidized by riders. That’s a massive difference.
That’s certainly the theory, but in practice most states don’t actually cover the full cost of roads with use fees and need to get taxpayers to fund most of it.
Public transportation often does better in this regard when you actually look at funding by source.
Additionally the people who have the highest usage, freight shipping, invariably have disproportionate influence on lawmakers and can argue that the fees they see should be proportionally lower than others.
Because gas taxes are paid at the pump, we can’t actually adjust them to exclude low income persons either, making them a regressive tax.
Public transportation is able to charge a few dollars per rider per trip. Given the density they can move, they can generate unexpected revenue per trip at lower costs, again due to density. A subway car is more expensive than a car, but also sees higher utilization and holds about 100 times more people on average.
Neither is generally able to afford to be built using only use fees.
In the end, even though I don’t think we should be reliant on cars, the part I’m least upset about is taxpayers funding a public good. Transportation benefits everyone, even if they don’t directly use it. It’s big, it’s expensive, and doing it right has different incentives from making money.
I’d be very curious to see where you pulled those numbers.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-road-taxes-funding/
As for the mass transit data, I just googled the budgets for different major mass transit providers, specifically Chicago, New York, and BART, then looked at the pre-covid funding sources from their public financials.
Assuming those are the numbers you meant. Curious why you found it so implausible that tax money went to road maintenance.
Those numbers absolutely don’t back your point. Most of those states provide greater than 50% of the revenue for their roads from local sources, whereas public transport is less than 50% in most cases. None of them get close to funding themselves.
Where’s your source for none of them getting close? If you’re going to be the “sources” person, you should probably cite yours proactively.
I’d say only three states actually paying for their roads without taxpayer funds is most states not getting by with just usage fees.
Also, what exactly do you think my point is?
I don’t think getting taxpayer dollars is a bad thing for a public good. I actually think it would be better if the majority of funding came from the general taxpayer because most usage fees are regressive when it comes to essentials like transportation.
This is from Wikipedia, but the only other instances I could find were clearly biased sources, like the Cato.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio
There’s actually a few that do break almost even, I didn’t think any did.
As to what your point is, I have no idea, and don’t care. My initial comment pointed out that conflating public transport with the tax sources for roads isn’t the ven close. I was correct, as pointed to your sources, and now my own.
They didn’t say ‘‘not funded by any means’’ they said ‘‘free’’ meaning ‘‘free to ride’’ the upside of free to ride is that it’s accessible to everyone all the time. The funding for public services can come from a lot of different revenue, for instance ad space on the transit, concessions, taxes on luxury items, even state lottery systems.