SFMTA's fare box recovery ratio is 17%. Were for driving it's 50% but the sums are vastly higher. While back read a fair argument that when you consider the alternative is a person driving the the proper fare price for mass transit is negative.

In a small European capital city it cost 250 Million Euros some years ago to install electronic gates at the metro stations.

Here's an example from pre-covid in Brussels, BE.

https://2019.stib-activityreports.brussels/en/a-high-perform...

The STIB is the Brussels metro & bus company.

As you can see, subsidies represent 54 percent of the STIB's revenue: Subsidies of almost 400M EUR. The figure you want is "traffic revenue": 225M EUR.

So now, the calculation is: Is ticketing and enforcement worth 225M EUR / year in Brussels? The answer on paper is yes, because we're not taking into account the costs I outlined above. Breaking them down by line item is impossible because the figures are not public, but going by related figures, it's not looking good for proponents of ticketing.

Let's just go with sibling comment's ticket gate price: 250MM EUR. They are replaced every 8 years roughly. So, 31MM / year. Now down to under half of the subsidies.

Direct costs: Ticket enforcement staff + equipment, gate maintenance, automated sales booths + maintenance + software, in-person sales booths + maintenance, payment processing fees, contract costs

Externalities: Ticket littering + cleanup costs, inefficient purchases by customers (bought the wrong tickets/too many)

Time costs: Validation time, gate bottlenecking (especially at peak time), reduced opportunities for those who can't afford tickets...

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Okay, so let's say you do all those calculations, and you end up finding out they're all zero (they won't be, but w/e), and actually you're still making decent tax revenue from public transit (0.2bn eur). What is the lesson here?

The lesson, is that all these are insignificant compared to the investment that same city wants to make into public transport: 5.2 bn EUR. (ref. https://www.stib-mivb.be/article.html?l=en&_guid=0035aa30-f3...). Or compared to the costs of road maintenance (50-100bn EUR / year in BE). Or, or ...

Make no mistake, removing costs would increase ridership which would increase costs. But it would also increase national productivity output which increases tax revenue. This is not a simple calculation to run, and my girlfriend is using my parallel universe simulator right now so I can't check. Public transit should be free (AS IN PAID BY TAXES), because it's the right thing to do, when the roads are financed the same way.