Somehow the prices are still high enough that it's cheaper to buy a cheap used car and drive it instead.
City streets and roads are paid for through property taxes, so they are subsidized 100%.
Amtrak will pull your private rail car in the right conditions, too https://www.amtrak.com/privately-owned-rail-cars
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B4MI08HWro
At the time of making the video this line had been closed for over 20 years, which is why it's so overgrown and why nobody bothered to disturb the riders.
The second are easy, and you just need permission in general. The first you need communication with the central office.
This is all done for maintenance vehicles for the tracks, which are often contractors.
But bigger roads in and out of town often have federal and state co-payments when built, depending on what and where they are.
Bridge replacements, for example, often involve federal funds.
My state gathers money for a highway fund from gas taxes, vehicle registrations, vehicle sales taxes, etc. They have a program called "Municipal State Aid Street" where they reallocate some highway funds for city and rural streets. There's even a map. [1] I'm quite sure that everywhere has some similar program.
There's this public transit chauvinist myth that roads are, "100% subsidized" as you say, and it's wrong. Stop making things up or just accepting vague collective wisdom. Roads are paid for in significant portions by road users. Not 100% because that would be an undue burden on the poor.
Trains, despite being crazy expensive and heavily subsidized, are more expensive to use than owning a car for a lot of people or they are enormous money sinks that are paid by non-users. They can be incredibly useful and a worthwhile investment, but I've definitely run the numbers in the past and found the train to be more expensive and much more unpleasant than driving (for me it was a Caltrain+BART commute).
1. https://mndot.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?i...
Cars are even more heavily subsidized, maybe?
I still own and use a car because there is enough friction in day to day errands that transit isn't a great option for. For trips to downtown or the various arenas, it works wonderfully though.
Cars benefit from enormous subsidies that are typically even greater than for public transit.
This obviously true for the monetary value of building all the roads and highways a city has, but it's even more true in terms of land usage. Cars in US cities tend to be allotted far, far more land than space reserved for walking, biking, or public transit. Since land use is mostly zero-sum, this is an extraordinary amount of investment that cars receive as a mode.
And of course, it's not just the roads. Mandatory parking minimums in zoning codes in most cities require businesses to allocate huge amounts of space for free car parking. This is a large de facto subsidy that also inhibits every other mode.
The effects of that vary. Relating to TFA, if you were making this trip 6x per year, could plan the dates, were always travelling alone, and didn't need any transportation anywhere the rest of the year beyond what walking and biking could provide, you'd expect the train to be about break-even with gas+maintenance. It wouldn't be worth having the car.
As soon as any of those assumptions change though, that logic goes out the window.
Suppose you have to get to work (and that rent/housing is enough higher near work that it's worth commuting _somehow_ by a substantial margin). The markup for short trips is very high for public transit, Uber, and all your other normal alternatives. You'll be money ahead on a decent used car (clean, no body damage, new enough to easily last 100k miles even if you know nothing about cars) in a year, even counting the entire purchase price, taxes, insurance, and everything else.
Under the assumption you have a car already and only have to consider unit costs (depreciation, gas, maintenance), trips like TFA can start to make a lot of sense to drive, depending on your personal preferences. Every long bus trip I've taken in the US has been so rattly and bumpy that I couldn't sleep or type anyway, and by the end of a trip they've been so full that I couldn't type anyway (tall, broad shoulders, the geometry doesn't work out in narrow seats with so little space to the seat in front of me that I already have to angle my legs just to fit). I'd much rather listen to my own music or a cooking show or something, keep the temperature exactly where I'd like it, have the flexibility to carry a few extra items, and get to my destination in half the time without stopping 20 places to pick up more passengers. When the money's a wash, I'll pick the car every time.
If you're willing to make tweaks to your life to save money/fuel/..., it's also worth looking at the possibility of carpooling. If you can go with one other coworker, you're already a lot of money ahead on the train. If you additionally didn't know your return date in advance (variable length job, which you're staying at for a small but undetermined number of days), the difference in ticket prices would be enough to completely pay for insurance and taxes for the year, on top of depreciation, gas, and maintenance. Those 6 trips would justify owning a used car for any other part of your life where the unit economics made sense.
If you work remotely, live in a nice climate close to groceries, or have any number of other nice properties to your life, a car doesn't necessarily make sense. Our infrastructure doesn't often make the alternatives pleasant though. E.g., I was pretty adamant about biking through college. The city wouldn't plow the bike paths till days after any major snowstorm though, the snow was always falling into the edges of the road, and there was a zero percent chance I was going to bike out in the middle of an icy 45mph road in front of pickup trucks who think it's sane to tailgate in those conditions. 6+ months each year, the only non-car option was walking. I did that a couple winters, but 5 miles each way is a bear when you're trudging through snow, and the one semester I had an evening class I always thought long and hard about whether I'd stay at school an extra 8 hours or add an extra 10 miles to my day.
Details vary, but _most_ Americans are in some sort of similar situation where cars are the only realistic option if you can possibly afford it. Trudging through the snow when it's <-10F the entire month of January is fine if you're young and single, but I wouldn't want to carry a kid to their doctor in that environment. Tons of people just live too far from town for non-car options to be practical. Roads poorly designed for rain and pedestrians limit the safety and practicality of biking in other huge swathes of the country. And so on.
Mind you, I'm not against public transport or anything. The BART trains here in the Bay are something I use a few times a year, and they're perfectly fine. You can even get work done on them if you'd like. My point is that cases where trains and buses are the best option (or even any option) are so rare that for most Americans you can assume that the cost of insurance and taxes for a car have already been taken care of, so that only the unit economics of a given trip play into whether you'd drive or not (when considering it financially).
I find this claim to be incredibly dubious.
More convenient? A practical necessity? Sure.
Cheaper? Gonna need to see some receipts.
Edit: since at least one person appears to be grumpy about my comment, here is an example of a large system with light rail:
https://www.dart.org/fare/general-fares-and-overview/fares
For less than $200/month you can ride however much you want, with reduced price options for local fares and other groups of riders like low income, etc.
If you have a problem with my comment, please explain how you can but and operate a used car for less than that price when you factor in gas, tires, maintenance, insurance, etc. it’s just BS.