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Comment by ccppurcell | Hacker News Reader

I find the word subsidy to be a possible weasel word here. I don't know all the details but a railway system has certain costs (fuel, personnel, water, upkeep, the trains themselves and so on) and takes in a certain amount of revenue (fares and subsidies, also food etc). It might be true that the government increased the subsidy in order to support the cheaper tickets. But that's not the same as "requires". Perhaps I'm splitting hairs but there's a strong danger of comparing apples and oranges if these things aren't spelled out imo.

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Don’t forget too that the cost of proving roads is also ‘subsidised’ in most countries, but we’re tend to be a bit blind to that.

(This is not an argument against rail - I just find that subsidies are often mentioned with respect to rail but not with roads).

Calculating the subsidy associated with state maintenance of roads for private vehicles is difficult.

Some basic level of signage and hazard prevention (potholes, ice etc) is necessary for emergency vehicles and other government operations.

Thereafter, although there is some maintenance cost associated with the road wear from private vehicles and the additional infrastructure required for higher traffic volumes, we don’t have an easy way to calculate the cost.

Wouldn't the very patterns of development be different (and more amenable to rail) if the state didn't spend oodles of money building nice roads to make sprawl livable?

Sprawl happens when there is available undeveloped land. Roads are just a symptom.

People build outwards first and then upwards.

There is plenty of undeveloped land that people don't move to because there are no roads to get to.

We have more than a century of data showing that roads are subject to induced demand. If you build more roads, people move and sprawl (and take more trips in general) until traffic is once again unbearably bad.

If you build more lanes, more people move further out. Roads create sprawl.

And active urban planning avoids sprawl.

At a high level, urbanisation rates increased through the road building binge of the 20th century.

Perhaps those new migrants to cities would’ve chosen to stay in the countryside without roads? Worsening the economics of rail.

Or maybe they’d use their collective voting power to get more rail friendly new towns built?

I don’t think the answer is obvious.

Before the road building binge there was the rail building binge, though limited to the largest cities.

As an example, see the history of the Metropolitan Line in London.

Also bridges and tunnels, which seem to be very expensive to maintain.

I disagree that it's difficult: excepting toll roads and "unassumed" roads‡, the subsidy is 100% (and most toll roads are likely subsidized at a substantial fraction of their cost, since the tolls are rarely high enough to be self-sufficient).

It doesn't matter whether the money used to pay for road maintenance comes from property taxes (like in Toronto), income taxes (Ontario areas not maintained by cities / regions / counties), or gas taxes (much of the U.S.?). If you're not paying per use of the road, there is a 100% subsidy on the maintenance of the road.

There are definite costs to not maintaining those roads (people won't move where there aren't roads; unmaintained roads will result in more costs to the people using those roads as their vehicles are damaged more frequently—which may result in costs to the municipality for not properly maintaining those roads), but we should not pretend roads are self-sustaining or aren't entirely subsidized.

‡ Unassumed roads are those built privately by the landowners in common and are not maintained by the local government. When used for private dwellings, these roads usually fall under the sway of the local government after a period of time, even if they were built initially by a subdivision subcontractor.

People don't think of it as a subsidy because they are not charged per use a la toll road.

People also pay fuel tax, registration tax, and other taxes that fund the roads

I think the point is that if they had to do those things every time they used a road it would be more obvious (like buying a train ticket).

They do have to do it every time, through the fuel tax. Driving costs fuel. I guess people just don't think of it though.

it's not a subsidy if it's a user-pays system.

A subsidy is only a subsidy if users don't necessarily pay the full cost, and the rest is borne by some other group of people who _don't_ use the service.

One issue is that people often benefit from infrastructure without explicitly using it.

Example, road network isn't paid by car owners. But non-drivers clearly benefit from the road network, is the road network subsidized?

Other example, people who rarely take the train still benefit from rail infrastructure (freight, reduced congestion etc). Is the rail network subsidized?

Oh to clarify on that point, the majority of roadwork is paid for by property taxes in I believe everywhere in the USA. Certainly in Texas.

In the United States, often a large amount of road funding comes from property tax, so it has nothing to do with operating a car.

At least in the US, those taxes are nowhere near enough to pay for maintenance, let alone new construction. The rest is a straight subsidy from the general fund, typically paid for by passing the debt to our children.

Do you think that covers the cost of building and maintaining the road network infrastructure?

Do you think that it covers the cost of excess death caused by particle emissions and road fatalities?

We don't have the option to completely replace car infrastructure, but we shouldn't act like it isn't heavily subsidized.

That said, the positive externalities are also significant, but so are the positive externalities from rail traffic.

Everyone has access to a road. Not everyone has access to rail. No business can run without access to road, most businesses can run without access to rail.

There is basically no way to compare rail vs roads and making some arguments based on that.

Everyone who don't own a car have significantly less access to roads than someone who do.

Of course it's possible to compare the advantages and drawbacks of different modes of transport. No society can function without roads, but it's still a question of priorities.

> Everyone who don't own a car have significantly less access to roads than someone who do.

Most weeks I spend more hours cycling on these roads than driving.

Imagine how much less maintenance cost your biking causes than driving a car.

A lot less! So we (society) should be promoting cycling as much as feasible. Also bike parking, which is often forgotten. My town is very bike friendly in nearly every way, except there's no secure bike parking which limits which stores I can bike to.

> Everyone has access to a road. Not everyone has access to rail.

Similar argument can be made about highways to which not everybody has (direct) access, they are not a matter of life and death for most businesses and are heavily subsidized.

You don’t generally see figures from any jurisdiction (and I’ve seen numbers for a lot of countries and states) where those charges and taxes make much more than 50% or so of the actual costs of building and maintaining road networks, and that’s just the actual spend before even trying to quantify all the social and environmental costs!

I don't really follow that, a toll is a way for it not to be (or to be less) subsidised?

I remember Brad deLong did back of the napkin analysis to determine how much a bart fare should be including the cost of freeways. It was minus $2.00 or something.

I’m not sure if it’s the case here with Germany, but typically we refer to transit spending like this as “subsidies” but for some reason we forget that building and maintaining roads and highways and such are subsidies too.

In the case of the US and probably everywhere else, the highway subsidies are a little insidious too because not only do you pay a boatload of money for highway expansion you have to then go and buy an expensive car and fuel too.

>not only do you pay a boatload of money for highway expansion you have to then go and buy an expensive car and fuel too.

the federal excise tax on fuel pays for (at least in part) the "boatload of money for highway expansion "

Not much. A lot more comes from state funding, which can be anything from property tax to sales tax to additional fuel taxes. Because you pay about the same fuel tax per mile on a 60 mph road as a 25 mph road (but the 60mph road costs 100x as much), you also find driving on slow roads becomes a subsidy to building fast roads.

No it doesn't.

Fuel tax income is ~100 Billion

Road expenditures are ~200 Billion

(Combined state and federal)

Here’s another way to think about it: Germany invested N billion into shifting behavior to rail.

How many billions in subsidies has OpenAI gotten to build us a chatbot?

You mean another example of apples and oranges?

Is software and transportation really a good example?

I'm not aware of any subsidies openAi has received. Did I miss something or is this one of the situations we're we are making up new definitions for words?

> I'm not aware of any subsidies openAi has received.

It is rumored that the military (and perhaps three-letter agencies) has/have special contracts with OpenAI. This can definitely be called a subsidy.

A contract isn't a subsidy... A subsidy would be giving them dollars without any particular strings attached except perhaps to use those funds to develop the product. If the contract is to provide money in exchange for services, that's called a transaction.

I see it differently: for example the fact that the US government spends a lot of money on military can in my opinion clearly be called a subsidy for the military-industrial complex.

So then if the government buys pens and reams of paper, then it's the government subsidizing office supply stores? But it's not a subsidy if a corporation spends money on the same supplies?

My employer does business with the DoD and with private corporate entities. Both the government and the private sector spend the same money and receive the same products and services. I appreciate that you have a different perspective, but I have a hard time considering my employer "subsidized by the US government" just because the government purchases our product.

> So then if the government buys pens and reams of paper, then it's the government subsidizing office supply stores?

If the government is a particularly important customer: yes.

Do you have a different term you use for when the government is not simply a customer, buying what they need, but intentionally funding a company in excess of the goods and services it receives? This would be more in line with the traditional definition.

I think a company can make 100% of its revenue from the government, but that doesn't mean it is subsidized. The critical criteria is if the government is directing funds for reasons other than pure procurement, such as buying votes, stimulating jobs, ect.

It’s important to distinguish between an operational cost and capital investment here.

If rail usage continues once the spending stops then it’s an investment. Otherwise is an operating subsidy.

paying for part of the ticket is not an investment, as there's no residual value from this payment. An investment must have some sort of residual value, which over time, is recouped and perhaps even makes a return (hopefully).

> paying for part of the ticket is not an investment, as there's no residual value from this payment

Disagree. There is a lot of residual value in reducing congestion and road usage. Roads need fewer repairs, CO2 impacts the atmosphere less, cities move more efficiently, etc.

There’s residual value also in people spending more time on tax-paying activities and running the economy instead of being stuck alone in their cars. Etc.

If you pay $50 more in taxes because you got a $40 train ticket subsidy that’s a huge win. I don’t know if that’s how the numbers shake out, but governments are def not doing stuff like this just to throw money in the furnace.

It’s not a weasel word, it’s a word used to describe any program provided by the government that does not bring in enough revenue on its own to pay for itself.

The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.

If the government pays for something through a general fund from income/property/corporate taxes, it’s subsidized.

It’s important to call these out whenever they are because it means the program is not sustainable on its own and that puts it at risk during austerity, etc.

> not sustainable on its own

Or it is something that provides a benefit to society as a whole and therefore deserves to be maintained by the institution established by society to do such things, government, without assuming economic efficiency is 100% correlated with societal benefit.

Yes, that’s the argument for all subsidized things.

>The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.

I'm German and I can tell you it really does not. Like in a lot of countries car infrastructure is treated like the state of nature, it's just somehow there, and the infrastructure burden of parking, road construction and what have you isn't a topic. It's the 'default culture' and the support it gets is just the status quo, when you try to internalize the cost you cause a shitstorm. Look at how well surge pricing or road toll debates go over in most places, or how sensitive people are to fuel prices.

Rail transport be it commercial or individual despite the fact that it's so much cheaper (in particular on emissions as well) is always one political decision away from being privatized or culled.

The far-right Berlin government is currently doing its darnedest to build the most expensive highway in all of Germany, that nobody actually wants, through a cultural area. Probably because their friend owns the highway construction company.

Oh please, far-right? It is leftists, that sees everything beside them as far-right. I would call it conservative. Something the 'left' forgets, that there are also some real people, who do not want to pay for the leftist dreamworld. Yuck.

> people, who do not want to pay for the leftist dreamworld

Except that time and time again, it turns out that the "leftist dreamworld" is actually cheaper.

Providing subsidized housing for poor people costs less in the long run than dealing with homelessness.

Providing nationalized or strictly regulated healthcare costs less than fully privatized systems where healthcare operators do as they please.

Facilitating active transport such as bike lanes costs cities less, and moves more people more quickly, than focusing exclusively on cars.

What these people actually want is not to save money, but to carefully ensure that any money spent suits only their preferences and identity groups rather than benefiting society as a whole.

The thing is, it is never enough and ends up usually in a disaster and people lose their life, because their opinions get in the way.

Subsidy kills innovation. There is no incentive anymore to make things better. You always must know someone, you can bribe, so that something gets done.

I get it, hackernews is flooded with well meaning people making way more money than normal people do. They see, how 'unfair' the world is: why am i making so much more and they so little. It is the ground, where this despicable left mind virus can grow, and then they start to steal people's money for their grandiose ideas.

Then let's stop subsidizing cars and fossil fuels.

Good luck!

I don't see how any government, regardless of location, that spends large sums of taxpayer money on a construction project could ever be considered to be "right wing" in any way, let alone "far-right".

Such behaviour fundamentally contradicts even the mildest of right-of-centre ideologies.

An actual right-of-centre government would never even consider starting such a project.

If a right-of-centre government happened to inherit one that had been started by a previous administration, for example, such a project would be immediately terminated, any assets liquidated, and the proceeds directly returned to the taxpayers.

The only way that such a project would ever exist under a right-of-centre government would be if it were initiated, funded, built, operated, and maintained solely by the private sector, without any government involvement at all.

Practices such as the collection of taxes, raising public debt, and government built/run infrastructure are part of left-of-centre ideologies, and certainly not right-of-centre in any way.

Unfortunately right wing parties throughout the West have been taken over by grifters, and anything like traditional conservatism has been tossed by the wayside.

You're absolutely right that some political parties wrongly use a term like "conservative" in their party name, or otherwise incorrectly portray themselves as being "right wing".

Ultimately, though, they're still left-wing parties in practice, pushing left-wing ideologies, regardless of the facade they might try to put up.

A party doesn't just become "right wing" because they claim to be, especially when their actions and policies are decidedly left-wing.

Pray tell, was Adolf Hitler left or right wing?

Left wing, due to the use of large and intrusive government, collectivism, government-run make-work projects, government-run infrastructure projects, central economic planning, conscription, a disregard for individualism, and other policies that are inherently incompatible with right-wing ideology.

Sure if you define terms in your own strict way you can write a long comment on how everybody else is using the term wrong. Why should people use your definition though?

That isn't "my definition".

Left-wing ideologies inherently promote concepts like collectivist big government, high taxation, massive government spending, and government-controlled infrastructure.

Right-wing ideologies, on the other hand, inherently promote individualism, minimal to no taxation, minimal to no government spending, and privately-controlled infrastructure.

That's just the fundamental nature of a two-dimensional political spectrum. It has nothing to do with me.

Anyone claiming that a government exhibiting decidedly left-wing traits is somehow "far right" is simply making a wrong analysis.

This is observably false. One observation is that the US government debt grows more quickly when the Republican party is in power.

What is true is that left-wing ideology promotes taking a bit from everyone to give a lot to everyone, while right-wing ideology does not promote giving a lot, or anything, to everyone, but often still promotes taking a bit, or a lot, from everyone and funneling it to places that do not benefit very many people.

Leftists will promote plans like: tax carbon emissions and use the money to subsidize clean power plants. Rightists will enact (without promoting) plans like: give a lot of taxpayer money to this company for unclear reasons, and don't worry about how to raise the money - make it the next government's problem to deal with the debt pile. The latter is, of course, individualist.

> Right-wing ideologies, on the other hand, inherently promote individualism

Right wing promotes authoritanism, which is pretty much the opposite of individual rights. Right wing governments stand for strict laws and strong enforcement, where the people must obey or else.

> Left-wing ideologies inherently promote concepts like collectivist big government, high taxation, massive government spending, and government-controlled infrastructure.

Incorrect. Left-wing ideologies promote downward distribution of power from established elites; one particular subset of left-wing ideologies (socialism) promotes labor control of the means of production, and one particular subset of socialism promotes a situation in which the working class controls the state which then acts as the vehicle through which control of the means of production is exercised (but libertarian socialism, for instance, also exists.)

Right-wing ideologies instead promote systems which concentrate power in narrow elites; different varieties of right-wing ideology justify this based in various mixes kf views of inherent merit, whether based on sex/gender, race, individual bloodline, “revealed merit” in notionally competitive environments where capacity at time t is heavily influenced by success at t-1, or whatever else.

You are confusing the left-right axis with the libertarian-authoritarian axis, which is a different axis of ideological (or sometimes merely praxis) variation.

Destroying "degenerate" cultural institutions is very much right wing; so is giving taxpayer money to cronies; so is overloading the government with debt.

This entity you're describing clearly isn't "right wing" if it uses left-wing practices like taxation, public debt, and government-funded "cultural institutions" (whatever that actually means).

Taxation is inherently a left-wing concept. Under right-wing ideologies, there would not be any taxpayer money to give "cronies" because such funds never would be collected from taxpayers in the first place.

Public debt is inherently a left-wing concept. Under right-wing ideologies, there wouldn't even be any government entity capable of incurring debt.

"Cultural institutions" involving the government are inherently a left-wing concept. Under right-wing ideologies, the government simply wouldn't have the resources to create "cultural institutions" and any such entities that did exist would be created, funded, and operated by the private sector alone.

If you're truly upset about the things you just described, then it's because you dislike left-wing ideologies, even if you don't recognize it.

US debt increases much faster when the right wing is in power. This is an empirical fact which trumps theory.

> The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.

More or less all non-toll roads (and a few toll roads too). Which makes "applies" seems a bit pointless.

I don’t think you know what the word “applies” means.

If I tell you that the air is clear, and you respond "That applies to all air on earth", you've provided no additional information.

If I tell you that humans are generally between zero and 120 years of age, and you respond "That applies to most humans", you've provided no additional information.

If I tell you "most comments on HN are well-written and thoughtfully constructed" and you respond "That doesn't apply to yours", you've provided some additional information.

> the program is not sustainable on its own

So arrest, investigation prosecution and imprisonment of anyone who steals from Amazon is a massive subsidy, since Amazon pays no tax.

Not to mention the money spent on funding food stamps for Amazon’s underpaid employees.

Yes. The government massively subsidises owning physical property.

Amazon collects sales tax and most certainly pays property taxes that fund the law enforcement you are talking about.

Most of the value created by public transit goes into the land near the stations. Employers want offices near stations and employees want homes near stations.

You can recover as lot more money from taxing the land than from fares.

I read about train infrastructure development that was privately funded and built from the profits from land speculation near the new stations.

> The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.

It’s very weird how people talk about roads as a sort of universal public good whose construction and maintenance needs to be financed by local authorities and taxation. Yet rail is expected to not just stand on its own two feet but to yield a profit. Both facilitate commerce and improve a regions productivity (rail inarguably does so with greater efficiency, especially when integrated into a public transport system) - why is rail treated so differently?

> why is rail treated so differently?

Because there's a huge ecosystem that is substantially dependent on private use of roadways - car manufacturers, sellers, insurers, storage facilities, cleaners, and repairers; petrol extractors, refiners, transporters and sellers; and so on.

Each of these parties has a vested interest in maintaining the perception that driving is the baseline mode of transport and anything else is a deviation from that which requires extra consideration before it should receive any resources.

On the one hand that's also a lot of jobs and profits, but on the other hand if all this activity is in service of a mode of transport that causes considerable short and long-term damage, and is less efficient for many journeys, then it means we're wasting labor and resources that could be put to better use.

There's also a large percentage of the country that simply wouldn't benefit from rail in their day to day lives, because most of the country doesn't have the population density to make rail make sense. It would at best be an alternative to flying, assuming it didn't take longer.

These are the same people for whom owning a car is an essential part of life.

And all those people are going to look at proposals for rail spending and say "what's in this for me?" This will produce strong headwinds to any rail expansion proposal.

> why is rail treated so differently?

roads are much cheaper per mile than rail, so you can have more roads than you can have rail.

you can also have lower grade roads, which is once again, cheaper (so you can have more of it). You cannot have lower-grade rail - the train will crash.

Therefore, to provide a massive network of transport, roads are the only option. Rail provide cheap point-to-point transport, but only make sense between heavily populated centers, and therefore, you can expect to make back the cost of the rail from this dense usage.

This looks like a strawman. Nobody advocates for replacing roads with rail, it's about complementing.

> Rail provide cheap point-to-point transport, but only make sense between heavily populated centers

Yes, so the idea is to build rail for those use cases (which is somewhat the case in Europe, but not in US).

In the US, we see many places where rail has been abandoned. In the place I live (upstate NY, Finger Lakes) there are multiple walking trails that were previously locations of rail lines, which shut down more than half a century ago. The rails themselves are long gone. In some places you can see where earth was moved and concrete structures were installed to allow drainage. Maintaining these lines made no sense with the existence of a road network carrying motor vehicles. There are also abandoned canals from an even earlier time.

Yes, US had a more built-up rail system in the past. But it's naive to think it died because of fair economic competition.

People certainly didn't complain about having paved roads, or being able to buy their own automobiles. I understand it's frustrating when the public goes charging off in a direction you don't want them to.

Another bad-faith argument. A built-up railway network is not incompatible with a built-up road network. Many countries have both working together (each serving use cases with their own strengths).

They are economically incompatible. Local rail links declined because the customers who would use them used road vehicles instead.

You have invented this.

Rail can absolutely be made to different standards. High speed rail vs a tramway, and everything in between.

Exactly as with roads, the more you pay the faster the vehicles can go. Except with close to zero accidents.

> It’s very weird how people talk about roads as a sort of universal public good whose construction and maintenance needs to be financed by local authorities and taxation.

Because you need roads to e.g., get produce from a farm to the grocery store. You can’t have a functioning society that doesn’t involve roadways for moving people and goods the “last mile.”

It’s not different. The same word applies to both.

Ths US military is not sustainable on its own...

Or maybe, governments have programs that are funded by all to benefit all, because they are onlt beneficial when they are society-scale? 1/350,000,000th of the US army won't be very useful to any individual American on its own.

Yes, that is the argument for subsidies. What’s your point?

There seems to be, implict in the term "subsidy," the notion that it is government largesse. My notion is to rebut that pointing out we do not expect a positive ROI on most government expenditures.

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