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Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

That's the joke to me, people complain about how we are subsidizing buses and train service- "The buses STILL don't make a profit!"- but when have roads for cars ever turned a profit?

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Which is why we should look at more private funding, and a free market competition. Levy a pollution tax and a congestion tax, increasing both to keep traffic flowing smoothly 24x7. This will naturally incent use of higher-capacity vehicles like buses or 18-person vans in peak hours. I don't believe a centrally-planned bureaucracy can decide which capacity vehicle should run in which route at what times and on what days at what frequency, certainly not in India where the bureaucracy is incompetent.

In the UK Road Tax Fuel duty and VED exceed that spent on roads by 20+ Billion Pounds 15/16 FY

I guess I don't usually consider taxes to be profits, considering buses etc that do not generate enough in fares are also paid for with taxes.

we where talking about roads and most of the road traffic is cars, vans and lorries

ok, non EU, non UK countries.

For many years fuel duty was set at a high level to discourage car use. Since then it has become a large amount of money that the government doesn't want to lose. But it is a bit ironic how it is treated as a source of revenue for road building in the public consciousness. It just doesn't seem to work very well at discouraging driving. People include fuel tax in a basket of other costs and factors they have to contend with.

Have you considered the productivity that the roads have added?

I would look at integrated economic growth as opposed to the productivity. There are a lot of things that are ultimately cost centers, but promote economic growth. When a high economic growth is integrated over let's say 100 years you get a superpower.

I'd suggest the two are currently intertwined.

When talking about cost recovery of transportation systems, we absolutely should talk about the positive and negative externalities of those systems.

Transit systems and roads for private vehicles provide massive benefits to society in terms of mobility. Transit systems have different (i.e. better) scaling characteristics when very many people require mobility. Also, the shared marginal cost characteristics make it a better fit for offering lifeline service to the poor.

In terms of negative externalities, society’s private vehicle fleet is a major source of polution, often the major source of polution proximate to where humans live. And then there’s the > 10x 9/11s worth of traffic fatalities that we in the United States endure each year.

So yes, we absolutely should consider the mobility benefits of roads and transit systems in context of cost recovery. As someone with a background in transportation planning, I’m inclined to think that the United States is a little too obsessed with cost recovery for transit systems, and is pretty blind to cost recovery for the public infrastructure that serves our private vehicle fleet.

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