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