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Comment by mrep | Hacker News Reader

> Everyone kicks and screams about transit systems "paying for themselves"

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...

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I think what the original commenter meant was that people get upset because they don't want to subsidize transit systems, and would rather have them break even or turn a profit.

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).

I think exactly that happened in the last Washington state election. The state legislator put on the ballot a measure that would limit the amount the state could tax each car owner. Proponents would claim that the tax was going towards public transit infrastructure (like Sound Transit 3) and that it was unfair to tax car owners for that.

The measure was approved.

The measure was sold largely as a general flipping of the bird towards King and neighboring counties by the rest of the state. Generally there is opposition from eastern Washington for car tabs going to fund Sound Transit's investments on the western corridor, which doesn't really do anything to benefit those that don't live in the western corridor.

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.

I thought the SoundTransit car tabs were only paid inside the SoundTransit area? Are Eastern Washington voters really paying $500 car tabs to build light rail hundreds of miles away? That would be shocking to me if true.

You are correct, the RTA tax is assessed at the time of (car tab) renewal using the vehicle's address of record. It only covers Snohomish County, Seattle area, South King County, East King County and Pierce County.

No, they aren't, but they are convinced that they are.

You might want to reference [1], as you are flagrantly incorrect.

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_...

It wasn’t the state legislators who put that on the ballot, but anti-tax activist Tim Eyman. We’ve been down this route before with property taxes and even car tabs. Note that a previous county-wide initiative approved the car tabs in the first place (in those counties only), they were then repealed by this state-wide one. Amazing how the vote can swing when sampling grows beyond King and parts of Snohomish and pierce county.

> What a lot of those same people don't understand, is that taxes pay for the road systems.

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.

And those same people fail to realize the fact that they are moving at all in their car in traffic is thanks to those 50 people crammed in the bus in the next lane. Could you imagine if the million people who take LA metro daily suddenly switched to cars? The city would functionally break.

Yes, for some reason, no one ever thinks of the opportunity costs here. This is why all public transit should be free and all street parking should be paid. If I need to pay 6 bucks to go into town and back on the train, but I can pay a couple bucks in gasoline cost and have free parking, why would I choose the train? The city can change this so easily and maybe even in a way that they lose no money.

I have a really hard time believing public transit could reasonably compete with the highway system with respect to return on investment. Consider how much food and consumer goods would cost without highway infrastructure never mind the secondary effects. Consider also that you would be making road travel prohibitively expensive for the lower classes.

Public transit isn't meant for private (commercial) distribution of goods.

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.

Interestingly, in some cases the amount of subsidy required may go down by eliminating fares and the associated collection and ticketing infrastructure. (That doesn't account for changes in ridership level. On the other hand, it also doesn't account for speeding up pickup times by not worrying about fare collection.)

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.

Not all of the ROI can be captured with fares.

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).

A large portion of routes are low demand and have few passengers. Does an empty bus reduce congestion?

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.

By this logic: A large portion of roads are low-demand and have few drivers. Why do my taxes subsidize the upkeep of those roads, and not just the major highways?

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.

Feeder lines are important. If they didn't have low demand lines to far flung areas, those people who take advantage of these lines would have to use cars and contribute to traffic by the time they get to the city core with everyone else.

Demand predictions are pretty robust these days. Civil engineering is an entire science.

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