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Comment by kdmccormick | Hacker News Reader

It's very simple: Transit in many places is underfunded. Travel info screens cost money to install and maintain. Ads, on the other hand, make money.

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Ads make money, but not that much. I'm not convinced they are enough to be worth the bother. To have ads you need to pay people in sales to sell them, people to install them (now that this is electronic it is easier than the old paper days, but you need a more expensive tech person to keep them working). At best they are 5% of your gross budget, so not very significant and they often hard harmful to your riders.

Transit in the US seems to be constantly on a starvation diet budgetarily speaking so I'm not shocked small sums of money get chosen over options that would be better for their users.

Starvation diet? You should see how much NYC MTA spends, it’s a feast compared to even the rest of the anglosphere

The MTA is a huge outlier but still gets less money for upgrades and upkeep than they need. They limped along for years on extremely outdated train tracking infrastructure and are just getting around to doing updates that needed to be started two decades ago.

They get way more than they need, it’s just burnt on unions, pensions, and consultants

I will literally volunteer my time to canvass for anyone who runs on busting NYC public sector unions

Can you show actual evidence of that. Compare NYC spending to comparably large other systems?

https://transitcosts.com/

Building and operating are different things.

What often happen is a a company comes into install and maintain the displays for "free", on the proviso that they can display ads and keep most/all of the ad money.

5% of a transit authority's budget would be a lot of money! Advertising made £158 million for Transport for London in 2019, much less than 5% of their budget.

Ads just make money out of people, why not cut off the middleman?

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