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Comment by rchowe | Hacker News Reader

Public transit is a very visible part of government for people who live in cities that have it, and it's controversial because it's partially financed with taxpayer money whether you use it or not.

I feel like especially in southern California, there are a lot of people in the suburbs who don't use public transit and who feel like the money spent on transit ("moving poor people around") should go to road projects instead which benefit them.

I was recently in Miami, and my friend who lives there said to use Lyft instead of taking the bus or the metro, because "it's only used by poor people". I compare this to Boston, where people complain about MBTA crowds and management, but in general if you're near a subway stop you'll take the subway over Uber of Lyft (when it's running).

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> it's controversial because it's partially financed with taxpayer money whether you use it or not.

This is true of every form of transportation. It's just that motorists are frequently unaware of how their preferred mode is subsidized by the government.

I would argue that when people read articles critical of transit, they aren't necessarily thinking of the environmental benefits or the fact that the transportation they use gets a subsidy. And newspaper articles on transit don't put it into context by saying "the interstate next to the railroad costs about as much". Controversial subjects get eyeballs, and that's what the papers want.

Actual cash subsidies for roads are minimal relative to the economic benefit.

This is another way to say that you could eliminate all subsidies on road construction/maintenance, make everyone pay a sufficient per-mile tax, and the system would continue successfully more-or-less as it exists today

The same is not true of most public transit systems.

Now you can start arguing about implicit and explicit subsidies for suburbanization over the decades, but in the here-and-now, public transit is directly subsidized in a way that roads are not.

How can you seriously claim that roads are not subsidized? With the exception of a few toll roads, there is no fee to use them. Gas taxes are the only tax that can be connected to road use and those only cover about half of the cost of road construction and maintenance. In addition to the subsidy of half of the cost of the roads themselves, there is no tax to cover the cost of the environmental damage that cars cause. Added together, that is an enormous subsidy for car travel.

The important distinction is that gas taxes could pay for the whole thing: Federal, state, local...

3T miles driven a year, $90B in annual public spending. It works out to about a $0.60/gallon cost. Even adding in a surtax for CO2 and other emissions, it wouldn't represent a premium over gas prices of a few years ago that certainly didn't destroy the system.

It's just easier to pay for local roads with local property taxes. Everyone uses them even if they don't have cars.

But most public transit systems could never imagine charging full fare to their riders. They'd go into a death spiral. AFAIK, most can't even cover their maintenance costs, let alone capital expenditures.

If you really wanted to quantify the impact in a completely market-oriented way, you'd have factor in not just the road construction and maintenance and environmental impact, but also the negative value of the road noise, high danger to others (much higher per mile traveled per person than other modes), worsening of each other mode (car-dominant street design makes other modes slower and less safe), and value of the land (car infrastructure takes up far more space per traveler than other modes).

By the time you're done factoring those in, driving would be expensive indeed, probably similar to the gas prices in Europe.

> Actual cash subsidies for roads are minimal relative to the economic benefit.

Sure, but that's true of every mode of transportation, that's why we use taxes to also build sidewalks, light rail, bike lanes, etc. On an absolute level, subsidies for roads are still very large. And while some level of available roads is obviously necessary, we really overbuild to support our sprawly development style.

> This is another way to say that you could eliminate all subsidies on road construction/maintenance, make everyone pay a sufficient per-mile tax, and the system would continue successfully more-or-less as it exists today

Well, except that poor and working class people would probably not be able to use it much anymore. Paying for infrastructure via most taxes is inherently redestributive (exception for gas tax, obviously).

I'm actually generally for some more market-oriented policies around cars though. Congestion charges and parking fees are a great idea.

> The same is not true of most public transit systems.

I mean, the poor make up a larger % of transit riders, particularly in the US, so looking at it that way yes the impact would be larger.

> Now you can start arguing about implicit and explicit subsidies for suburbanization over the decades, but in the here-and-now, public transit is directly subsidized in a way that roads are not.

No, you're simply wrong. Road construction and maintenance is heavily subsidized by taxes other than the gas tax (which of course works more like a user fee).

No, you're simply wrong. Road construction and maintenance is heavily subsidized by taxes other than the gas tax (which of course works more like a user fee).

You're missing the distinction I'm drawing: If all funding for all transportation schemes was entirely user-derived, roads would survive (as you admit in your other comment they do in Europe at much higher rates). Very few public transportation systems would.

If your definition for "subsidized" is "receives some amount of funding from general revenue, or forbearance for hard-to-capture externality", then just about every commercial aspect of our lives is "subsidized" in one way or another and the term fails to have much meaning.

> You're missing the distinction I'm drawing: If all funding for all transportation schemes was entirely user-derived, roads would survive

That's very intellectually disingenuous. Whether one form of transport could survive sans subsidy is orthogonal to whether they're receiving large public subsidies right now. You said

> public transit is directly subsidized in a way that roads are not.

which is flat out wrong. Yes, roads probably do not have to be subsidized, and they'd still be around at least for freight transport and the affluent, but right now, they are still heavily subsidized.

Remember that every bus full of 'poor people' is 10 or 12 cards not on the road. It already benefits everybody. As public transportation increases, so do road conditions for all. This is an example of a win-win situation.

Only 12? Maybe at off-peak hours. In my city at peak hours, an articulated bus can have as many as ~70 people in it. At an average private vehicle occupancy of 1.67 [2] that's over 40 cars less on the road.

People also need to realize that before bitching about cyclists. Would you really rather have one more car contributing to the traffic jam you're stuck in?

[1] https://www.ttc.ca/About_the_TTC/Projects/New_Vehicles/Artic... [2]http://nhts.ornl.gov/2009/pub/stt.pdf

Likewise, bike users are tired of paying for either 12 feet lanes, the war that petrol-dependent citizen make in Irak, or their contribution to global warming.

You may be paying for it even if not using it, but you have to account for the environmental savings. But people care less about stuff that's harder to measure.

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