If you mean paying for themselves with fares, then no, as most public transportation does not cover the costs with just fares [0]. For example, I'm in Seattle currently and the fares only cover 20-40% of costs [1]. Not that I am complaining as I take the bus to work everyday, but it's not a slam dunk case of invest more because it has a positive return on investment.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio
[1]: https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/fare-revenu...
What a lot of those same people don't understand, is that taxes pay for the road systems.
The people that understand public transit realize that it's hard to recover the costs without assistance (taxes).
The measure was approved.
And yes, I am aware that King net exports money to the east. I'm not sure how impactful that argument is for a minimum wage worker living far away from Seattle paying $500 a year on car tabs, for a car that they have no alternative but owning in order to get to their job.
https://www.dol.wa.gov/vehicleregistration/docs/VehicleFees....
> If you live in the Sound Transit RTA district of King, Pierce, or Snohomish counties, you may be required to pay an RTA tax that helps pay for local mass-transit projects.
Municipalitis tacks on an additional fee, Seattle's is 80, Spokane's is 20. The only way for someone to be paying $500 in Wenatchee is if they owned 4+ cars.
[1] http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_...
I don't think those people are failing to understand anything. They're just people who use the road systems and don't use public transit.
There are other trains for that, and they are hugely important to the US infrastructure. We would not be the country we are today without rail.
For example, public transit takes people off the road and keeps commutes for other people reasonable (or at least makes them less bad). Which is why it makes sense for public transit to be subsidized by people working in a region even if they aren’t necessarily using it.
If public transit is good enough, it can even make it so people don’t need to purchase their own cars+gas+insurance, which is a huge cost savings. You can argue that this would be more fairly priced with fares than taxes, but again, cars off the road (less parking infra, less air pollution, etc). Only capturing this value via fares turns this from a global optimization problem for a region into a local optimization problem for each agent
Also some public transit does pretty well with fares anyway. Caltrain covers about 75% of its operating budget with fares (and parking and some other minor income sources).
I'm not sure what percentage of routes are like this, but I assume it's non-trivial because predicting demand is a tough problem.
Low-demand, niche routes are necessary for a public transit system to work for its users. Sure, 80% of my trips might be on 2 or 3 routes. But without access to the handful of routes I ride the other 20% of the time, the system wouldn’t work for me, and I’d need a car to get around.
For example: when I take the bus later than ~9pm, I’m often one of just a few people riding it. But knowing I have the option to take the bus late at night is critical to the system feeling reliable. This allows me to live without a car.
Hopefully, this effect reduces congestion in my city, as more people are enabled to live low-car or car-free.
Demand predictions are pretty robust these days. Civil engineering is an entire science.
On balance, it's likely more efficient to pay for public transit via approaches like taxes on businesses served by that transit (who will get increased business).
At this point, I don't think fares serve much of a revenue function; they serve as a filtering function, excluding people who can't afford them, and as a PR function, making transit get more votes.
Also, I have a lot of sympathy for "should we subsidize this or not" arguments, but any such argument also needs to take into account how much we subsidize roads. Gas taxes and registration fees don't fully cover the costs of roads, any more than transit fares fully cover the costs of transit.
Transit investment has a LOT of catching up to do to even get close to the types of subsidizing and handouts we give drivers in every corner of this country.
With such a strong urban-rural political divide these days, and suburban views of transit ranging from apathetic to hostile, federal support for transit operations is unlikely. Personally, I would be a fan of devolving transport funding entirely to solve this issue.
But arguing that states and cities have fewer resources is ridiculous. Cities have more resources than anybody -- they're where the highest income people live.
It's the rural areas that have no money, but mass transit is useless there anyway, because it's too spread out and there is no need for it there because those areas have no traffic congestion.
The cities are where mass transit works as the cities are where the money is. It's only a matter of popular will.
If transportation taxes were devolved to the states or the localities then there would be a lot more public transportation funding.
If you want more local money in the cities then there's a lot more to be had by e.g. raising the retirement age than by eliminating federal highway funding, which we still kind of need unless you want to stop maintaining the interstate highways.
Or if you really want to restore state fiscal control, transfer social security and medicare entirely to the states, and make the National Guard constitute more of the military.
It seems to me that public transit probably follows the law of demand fairly strongly, and reducing the price will almost certainly make it more attractive to riders. Of course this won't fix all problems with public transit, and I don't think that's the goal. It sounds like the goal is to increase ridership (and specifically to increase access to people who cannot easily afford the fares).
> Better to keep charging the fare and use the revenue to improve service
Or...use tax revenue to improve the service. That's the point, and is exactly what happens with most public roads.
A free bus that runs every hour is still going to screw you over if you mistime your walk to the bus stop and it leaves without you. The bus not being available at noon is not made better because it is free, because there's still no bus to take.
Making a service that isn't usable most of the day free still makes it unusable for most of the day.
But then there is a reason for that -- spending has diminishing returns. If you have some money and you could use it to serve an area with 1500 riders then that may be worth it, but once you've served it, the next best unserved area which costs just as much to serve would only have 750 riders, which may not be worth it. The point where you stop is where the value of the service no longer exceeds the cost.
And the value of eliminating fares has a major comparative advantage because it allows you to eliminate the cost of collecting fares, which is typically a huge fraction of the money collected in fares. Especially when the fares are already subsidized (which they are most everywhere), because then you still have the pay the full cost of the collection infrastructure but generate much less revenue. In some places the cost of collection can exceed the total revenue from the fares. And even if you beat break-even, the little amount left over is hardly worth losing the benefits of having fewer cars on the road.
https://www.apta.com/wp-content/uploads/Resources/resources/...
Off peak travel is generally also much less expensive, since you already have the buses and drivers doing peak-only shifts generally spend the middle of the day just sitting around. KC could run a lot more all-day service and garner a lot more ridership.
The status quo doesn't really have anything to do with it though. If it's optimal for them to spend $X on transit while also eliminating fares, then that's what's optimal whether they're currently spending $X or $0.2X.
> Off peak travel is generally also much less expensive, since you already have the buses and drivers doing peak-only shifts generally spend the middle of the day just sitting around. KC could run a lot more all-day service and garner a lot more ridership.
Which would tend to make it so that you would build more transit before you hit the point of diminishing returns, but that doesn't mean the point of diminishing returns doesn't exist, or that we shouldn't also eliminate fares. They're just two independent questions.
It's like asking whether we should increase the size of the child tax credit or subsidize solar panels. Maybe we should do both. Maybe we should do neither. But the answer to each question has more to do with whether its benefits exceed its costs than how you answer the other question.
Tfl could hike the fare wuite a bit and after the riots have died down people will use it the same.
And you could make Emirates Air Line free and I doubt it will bump ridership substantially.
(And yes, obviously continue to use tax revenue as well, just like we charge tolls for some roads but that doesn't pay for all their upkeep.)
Suppose you have an existing A line with 1500 riders and you're considering building a B line, but you need 1000 riders to justify it and you predict there will only be 900, so you don't build it. However, if you eliminated fares then you might expect 1100 riders for the B line. Then the lack of fares also gives you another 300 riders for the A line, and the existence of the B line gives you another 600 riders for the A line since then people can then go from A to B. So eliminating fares allows you to build the B line and add 2000 riders across the two lines, even though only 500 of them were directly from the elimination of fares.
And you get a much better incentive for ridership when you go from something like $1 to zero than you would from, say, $2 to $1, because it increases convenience. You don't have to worry about tickets or exact change or anything, you just go through the door and you're on your way.
I only made the trip by bus two days, when the city was literally out of gas in 2003. The city could have paid me to take the bus and I still would have driven. I have to think the same would be true for pretty much everyone there who wasn't already stuck taking the bus.
That’s completely untrue. Yes we spend more on vehicles than transit. But way more people drive than use transit. There is not even a comparison.
In 2016 federal and state spending on road, transit, and water infrastructure was $416 billion: https://www.bidnet.com/resources/business-insights/us-govern.... Water is about 1/3 of that, leaving $276 billion for transportation. Spending on transit was $65 billion, or 1/4 the transportation spend.
Transit, however, accounts for just 5% of commutes: https://www.bts.gov/content/commute-mode-share-2015. 85% is driving alone or in a car pool. So we spend 3x as much on road infrastructure, but 17x as many people drive to work as take transit.
If you run the numbers on a cents of subsidy per passenger mile basis, busses and subway trains come out to $0.50+ per passenger mile. Roads are just $0.02 per passenger mile. Even adding in CO2 footprint and pollution (assuming that cars are all ICE) puts you at about $0.25.
Transit is incredibly expensive.
No idea how that impacts the actual dollar numbers but it’s worth noting.
I don’t expect it brings them to parity but I expect it’s non-trivial.
Unintentional injury is the leading cause of death for young people. Of which, motor vehicle accident is the leading cause. It takes second place after age 25 due to overdoses. Young people have the most life left to live.
https://www.cdc.gov/injury/images/lc-charts/leading_causes_o...
Cars are massively subsidized.
riders should pay too, not just because we should bear our portion of the direct benefit (we should), but also because it gives us a sense of ownership for the system. those fare revenues give transit agencies funds to improve service, and riders legitimacy in demanding better service. public transit needs to get better in every dimension: frequency, timeliness, coverage, capacity, cleanliness, etc.
Building roads should move from government to fully private entities for the same reason. California has built roads from nowhere to nowhere for no reason other than local assemblyman was focused on getting them done. On other hand critical roads that would have helped commute distance, improved public transporation systems are in a bad state.
Because of the large amount of roadway in America, the number of parties you can call to get more road built is pretty big (as Thiel says, competition is the enemy of profit). And the primary place you put more road is out where there's nothing. Because of the existence of a large network of roads, you could build roads where there is nothing and it's easy to get to where there's something.
Personally far prefer public transit so I'm pretty interested in ideas that change the structure of the interactions to pursue efficient construction.
If you want to help the poor afford public transit, lower their taxes. Maybe not taking a substantial their working capital and giving it back to them when their old isn't such a bright idea either.
... and that's ignoring that shocks like the mortgage crisis can happen, which indicates that home ownership isn't as stable a store of value as, say, the US dollar.
So you don't start getting it back when you're old. It can serve you much earlier.
I think the rate of home ownership there is over 90%.
j/k Seriously though, this year is the first I've ever made over median income and I'm happy to pay taxes if they can actually improve QOL rather than be used to subsidize and oil company or two
Because alcohol and tobacco have "negative externalities" to society. These would be mainly health related but I guess the discussion on this post is also around behavioural issues.
By adding a tax to a product, you can make the consumers and manufacturers together share the burden of paying off the externality, (e.g. care for lung cancer patients) and/or the tax will often discourage consumption in the first place. (The second being more applicable in the US where there is limited/no universal healthcare)
The reason you probably wouldn't tax kale, is because it's good for you, and if anything; you could say it has a "positive externality" in that consuming it makes you healthier, and thus benefits society. So it might make sense to actual SUBSIDISE kale production... although this may have very different effects from taxing unhealthy food.
As an example, Scotland has introduced a tax on alcohol called "minimum unit pricing" and there's a study here: https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/7/5/e013497
The UK as a whole also has a "sugar tax" https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/research/research-action/features/uk...
Wouldn't it be better to tax everybody the same and then help the poor by giving them money directly via a UBI, or direct programs like free mass transit? It would also make taxes a whole lot simpler (you buy a thing, you pay a flat percentage in VAT; no individual tax returns whatsoever) and thereby eliminate a lot of these shell games corporations and billionaires use to avoid paying their share.