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Comment by Transfinity | Hacker News Reader

The Rainier Valley where this service is being tested is a long north-south residential corridor, bordered by Lake Washington on the east and a steep ridge on the west. It's a few miles wide, just wide enough that it's not reasonable to expect people to walk from the edge to the center to catch the train. Because it's relatively sparsely populated and most trips would be short last mile trips, there's no way running full bus lines would be cost effective.

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What I don’t get is why routes need to make money. This is a public service, sure it’s a good thing to have it pay for itself but the focus shouldn’t be on that.

"Cost effective" does not mean "profitable." This is a straw man that transit advocates like to throw up. No transit system in the entire U.S. is held to the standard of "mak[ing] money." All transit in the U.S. loses money on an operating basis, even excluding capital costs: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/06/how-much-mone.... (Contrast many other countries, where transit often at least breaks even on operating costs, if not capital costs.) The issue is the magnitude of the public subsidy on a per-trip or per-mile basis.

Right now in D.C., transit advocates are fighting battles for service that costs $20-30+ per trip (late night Metro service and the streetcar). That's just a waste of taxpayer money when subsidizing Uber/Lyft could allow those same trips to happen for lower cost. Even more generally, rail service is subsidized, on a per-passanger-mile basis, about an order of magnitude more than automobiles. (While roads receive several much more funding than transit, they comprise about 50x more passenger miles of travel.) https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=15144

> Even more generally, rail service is subsidized, on a per-passanger-mile basis, about an order of magnitude more than automobiles.

Only if you completely ignore carbon emissions and other externalities.

No. Congestion, pollution, accident, and climate change externalities add up to about $0.10 per passenger mile: https://media.rff.org/archive/files/sharepoint/WorkImages/Do... (p. 14). That's vastly more than the $0.01-0.02 direct subsidy for cars from road construction/maintenance, but much lower than the $0.87-0.90 per mile subsidy for transit: https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=15144; https://www.newgeography.com/content/005596-reason-1-end-tra....

And of course--those pollution externalities can be greatly reduced by switching to electric cars.

EDIT: I don't really understand the downvotes. Nobody seriously disputes that, on a per-passenger mile basis, transit is more heavily subsidized than driving.

The $0.10-0.20 per mile calculation of externalities from driving is well supported. For example, the Freakonomics authors calculate $0.10 per mile for externalities: https://www.treehugger.com/cars/pay-as-you-drive-payd-insura...

> With roughly three trillion miles driven each year producing more than $300 billion in externality costs, drivers should probably be taxed at least an extra 10 cents per mile if we want them to pay the full societal cost of their driving.

Meanwhile, the subsidies of public transit systems are easy to calculate from public sources: https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/docs/300...

In 2014 the D.C. Metro spent about $1.35 billion on rail and collected about $600 million, leaving a net subsidy of $750 million. WMATA customers travelled 1.5 billion passenger miles on rail, resulting in a net subsidy of $0.50 per passenger mile. Even without accounting for the pollution externalities of Metro (which are significant, most electricity on the east coast still comes from coal and natural gas), that's a much higher subsidy than for cars.

Do these calculations also include things like mandatory parking minimums, parking lots, etc? IMO the big problem with cars is how they ruin city layout and are generally poor for land use

You can include lots of things but then you’re getting into pretty subjective territory. There are advantages to nice walkable streets, for sure. But there are also advantages to being able to pull right up to your destination and park, instead of schlepping half a mile from a subway to hour final destination in heat, humidity, rain, etc. The study I cited above puts parking costs at 3-10 cents per vehicle mile, which still doesn’t being the driving subsidy near the transit subsidy.

Sure, but saying "it's not cost effective" isn't the same as saying "it's not profitable".

If a low-use bus route ends up costing the city $25 per ride that's not cost effective to the point that a different transit option would be a better use of resources and still meet the communities needs.

If you want anything to last and not become subject to the whims of the next idiot in charge then its in your best interest to make it break even or make profit. Then no one would oppose it.

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