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Comment by antennafirepla | Hacker News Reader

Everything costs money. The cost is relatively low to the public and economic benefit from plentiful public transit. Breaking even financially would be icing on the cake. Public transit is a service, we should expect it to cost money — and not necessarily pass 100% of the cost to passengers, since it needs to be affordable to provide the full benefit to people.

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Let's agree that the service should be subsidized. Let's establish that Im amenable to a free service 100% tax payer.

I am, in fact amenable to this.

How do you establish fairness though?

Best case scenario, say in the US ex-NYC, you will always have 20-40% of people needing to ride their cars because the tails of the distribution are prohibitively expensive.

Nor are these people necessarily wealthy - the economically wealthiest class of people are urban dinks.

So how to do you establish fairness to this 20-40% of people subsidizing the others?

> So how to do you establish fairness to this 20-40% of people subsidizing the others?

Well, for a start, they're not, necessarily. That thing they're driving on, it didn't magically appear, you realise. Road maintenance and construction is a _huge_ part of total transport spending.

Yes, and road maintenance is proportional to the fourth power of the axle load. Busses are typically loaded at 4-8 times the per-axle weight of passenger cars.

And speed.

So many problems would go away if we drastically lowered vehicle speeds. For starters we could drive lighter built cars.

Im in favor of raising the gas tax to fully cover road maintenance.

We're back to square one - it doesn't cover the $100/hr that a cleaner has to subsidize. Give me a proposal, or an explanation, that makes this fair and Ill agree.

Like Luxembourg, just make it free for everyone! People will start using it out of convenience. Let it be subsidized by tax money, it is fair.

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