The question then becomes how much if at all do want to subsidize transportation.
If railways are expected to break even, then I expect the same from public funding in roads and airports.
Using the same metrics.
Whereas rail is unbelievably expensive. The MTA budget for the NYC metro area is $18.6 billion. Compare that to the $11.8 billion budget for the entire New York State Department of Transportation.
…and that’s for an existing rail system.
Highway maintenance is anything but cheap, unless you only do the barest minimum as has been done in the US for decades.
According to [0] no state derives more than 71% of its "State & Local Road Spending" from gas taxes. Unclear to me what proportion of the spending is maintenance though.
The best number I could find for maintenance cost was [1], which says in 2015, the average per-mile maintenance cause of US roads is $28,020.
Can anyone help find a comparable figure for rail maintenance?
[0] https://taxfoundation.org/states-road-funding-2019/ [1] https://azmag.gov/Portals/0/Documents-Ext/FLCP/Roadway-Maint...
Including maintenance, externalities and construction.
(though while I would apply the same standards - I would not expect such infrastructure to directly pay for itself. But expecting it only from rail while not expecting it from roads is extremely weird.)
Not to mention, the 2nd ave line seemed like a big waste.
200+ Billion each year & 5th largest category of state and local public spending behind education, general welfare, and healthcare
> It’s paid for with gasoline taxes.
Generated 52 billion so ~25%
The implication in this is that railroads don't already exist, which is simply false. In fact, nearly every town in the Midwest established before 1950 were built on a railroad line. A few notable examples are Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Birmingham, Chicago, St. Louis, and Portland Oregon. Moreover, many suburbs were formed around a streetcar line, which were later torn up to let cars drive there instead.
> maintenance is extremely cheap. It’s paid for with gasoline taxes
That is demonstrably false. Gas taxes as of 2011 do not cover road maintenance (at most it's RI with almost 80% and median of about 45% [1]). Furthermore, the federal gas tax (which is supposed to pay for the interstate system) hasn't been increased since 1993, and isn't indexed to inflation. The United States Highway Trust Fund has been relying on non-fuel tax revenue since 2008, and that doesn't look to be changing any time soon [2]. Of course, regardless of the actual costs of effective maintenance, you can make any public works project much cheaper by simply not maintaining it. If maintenance was actually "extremely cheap," then it stands to reason that the US would be getting more than a 'D' on roads [3]. Even after all of that, it still doesn't factor in the legal requirements for private expenditure on roads, such as minimum parking requirements and extensive R1 zoning. It also doesn't factor in the vast negative externalities of cars (yes, even electric cars).
> Whereas rail is unbelievably expensive
I'm going to ignore that you chose the MTA, a famously corrupt organization that is responsible for tunneling under the densest metro area in the country, as a baseline for the cost of rail. Instead I'm going to point out that car roads have nearly every bureaucratic advantage in the US, for a multitude of reasons. There is a lot of nuance to this, but for anything short of HSR, the expense in railroads is not engineering. If you're interested in a jumping off point for learning more here, check out [4].
[1]: https://taxfoundation.org/gasoline-taxes-and-user-fees-pay-o...
[2]: https://www.enotrans.org/article/ten-years-of-highway-trust-...
[3]: https://infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/roads-infrastr... (The Infrastructure Report Card is published by the ASCE, which does have an incentive to create more work for civil engineers, so it's worth taking it with a grain of salt)
[4]: https://palladiummag.com/2022/06/09/why-america-cant-build/
Sidenote, that's called apophasis - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophasis
Note that rail is uniquely more expensive in USA than elsewhere for various reasons.
also, economists are capable of estimating the ratio of private good to public good for a transit system, and we can simply apportion the funding of the network accordingly. if 40% of the value of transit accrues to the public, then pay that part out of taxes and set fares so that they pay for the other 60%. i'd rather have a system that responds in some proportion to market signals than one that is entirely immune to them.
in LA, they're trying to make transit free, and while i'd benefit from this, i oppose the initiative on these grounds.
Also, the MTA is private (mostly) and the subway costs a fare, yet there's homeless folks everywhere on the trains. Implementing a fare !== homeless people not setting up shop in subway cars or on the platforms.
* the homeless and housing situation is a deeper issue with many variables. Just pointing at the claim that was made
My point was private companies/fares won't prevent homeless people from staying off the subways or other unexpected results that are assumed to come with "free". MTA is a perfect example of that.
i'd personally like to see metro raise base fares, and provide larger discounts to lower income riders via their LIFE program to offset that potentially regressive burden. in the best of times (before covid) fares only covered about 20-30% of operating costs, i believe.
use that money to implement better service (more and more punctual trains), more social/community officers to help the homeless, peace officers on the trains themselves (currently they mostly just walk around stations every once in a while), and more rigorous cleaning and general maintenance.
this all needs to be coordinated with getting housing and services to homeless folks, removing roadblocks to density along transit corridors, and emphasizing multi-mobility (like converting street parking to bus & bike lanes).
Every train and tram is on schedule. In what way is it a "real headache"?
In fact, JR these days makes money by buying up real estate, building a station, and seeing land value skyrocket.
in capital intensive infrastructure businesses like rail travel and telecom, it actually makes sense for the government to provide the high upfront capital to build the common infrastructure and lease it to the competitors (but not sell or give it away) to create viable markets like this.
Leasing infrastructure sounds alright tho
I do think it's worth putting _a_ price on it, since that money can go directly into funding more lines and the like. And hey, popular lines could totally be made profitable. But "it needs to be profitable/break-even" is what leads to public transportation removing unprofitable lines.
And then after you do that a lot, turns out you have terrible coverage and your whole system becomes way less useful!
Maybe I'll pay some visit to a city nearby, but I have to be quick since everything which is not HSR has a target in the back for the public operator.
also, like highways it's probably on some level subject to induced demand
Noone is going to ride two disconnected bus services that run four times a day and require walking 30 minutes in between.
Add a connection and make them all run every 30 minutes and suddenly it's viable.
Add a metro with right of way that runs every 5 minutes and has 5 minute walk or 2 minute walk + bus coverage to the entire city and why would you spend money on a car?
So you can leave the city. Even people I know who live in cities with decent transit systems that they use mostly still own cars to get away on weekends, do larger shopping trips, etc.
Yeah it's annoying, but it's private transportation! A massive luxury if you think about it long enough. And it means that most houses don't need parking lots.
And make living in cities sufficiently unpleasant or incinvenientand people who can will just leave as they did in the 70s and 80s.
But only the latter group is having that choice made for them and then having their tax money spent on infrastructure designed to burden them with car ownership.