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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

> Public transportation should always be free in cities, with car commuters paying the operation costs

Strongly disagree. There are too many perverse incentives that work against transit. If there are a lot of car commuters (which there will be - plumbers taking their tools to the job for example) they have inventive to pressure politicians to reduce that tax - any voting block will always be more powerful than the distributed masses. Your transit operators need to ensure transit doesn't become too popular: the more people taking transit the less cars there are paying that tax.

Besides almost no transit rider is worried about costs. They are all interested instead in better service, so use all the money you can get - including fares - to build better service. This is long term what everyone needs.

Yes you do need a program for the poor. However the majority of your people shouldn't be in that program.

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I'm going to guess that you're a fellow American. That's our answer to everything - build a ghetto. Why make anything nice for everybody when you can make it suck for 79% of us, Hell on Earth for another 20+%, and nice for the privileged few?

Most ghettos aren't built to be ghettos. They were built as nice neighborhoods and have nothing structurally wrong with them, but then had criminals and shitbags wreck the place. Ghettoification can in fact be reversed without any changes to infrastructure by simply having nice people move in who give a shit and make an effort to clean up and maintain their properties. This is derogatorily called "gentrification".

Also, your ratios are absurdly out of wack. 79% of the country doesn't live in a ghetto and you don't need to be economically or socially privileged to maintain a nice neighborhood. Most working class neighborhoods are not ghettos, nor even resemble one in the slightest.

The ghetto is that bottom 20% living in Hell, not the 79% who merely deal with things that suck.

Although I was more referring to our systems more broadly (health care, education, transportation - the topic of this post), let's go with neighborhoods. Are you really trying to pretend that red-lining didn't happen? Or that de facto sundown towns didn't exist at least into the 1980s?

While things are bad for some people, calling the bottom 20% living in Hell is an exaggeration that is nowhere near correct. People always complain about their situation and think it is somehow much worse than other people, so if you see someone who is in worse shape you can think it is a living hell. However the reality is very different, and if you step back and look you discover most people in that bottom 20% are happy overall despite having imperfections.

I mean in the US a bunch of them are still the remaining product of redlining policies where racial minorities were allowed to live but banks would not give loans. Housing segregation was planned and enforced. That sounds a lot like intentional creation of a ghetto. And later when cities need to invest in building amenities, or raze neighborhoods to make way for infrastructure, often it's been the minority neighborhoods that are neglected or destroyed respectively. Of _course_ ghettos are the result of planning and intentional policy.

Which is a more likely explanation for why banks did not make loans in redlined neighborhoods?

A) Every bank is run by racists who are sufficiently racist to ignore a profit opportunity

B) The neighborhoods are bad credit risks

To be very clear, redlining didn't happen just because a bunch of individual bankers happened to be racist. It was a consequence of federal policy -- the FHA would insure loans in white neighborhoods but not in minority neighborhoods, so even for a rational banker uninterested in race, it made sense to issue the loans for white home buyers, and not minority home buyers, even if they were financially qualified. The "redline" choices were not where a bunch of separate banks had independently decided that some "bad risk" threshold was crossed -- they were picked by HOLC/FHA. The FHA also subsidized construction of white housing developments, but not minority ones.

When people refer to "systemic racism", the "systemic" part is typically literal.

Also, I invite you to take a step back and interrogate the examine the implicit premises of your question. I think you're saying that _in a free market of rational agents_, it doesn't make economic sense to not issue loans to people who _aren't_ credit risks, and I would agree -- except housing segregation was always about a heavily artificially manipulated (not free) market, in which people of color couldn't purchase a home in a white neighborhood regardless of their willingness to pay. Public policy bent over backwards to coerce all parties to maintain segregation (e.g. sundown towns, racial covenants, etc), ironically including during cold-war years when the US simultaneously tried to be a global advocate for free markets.

Thank you for pointing out that history. I will look into it further.

Do you mean today or in 1950? In 1950 I'll go with racists for the majority of banks. Today race is not a factor, but credit risks are still important.

You only need one bank to seize the profit by making a loan. Every single bank was motivated by racism to deny profitable loans?

Wow, that first paragraph is a compelling political economy argument against this policy that I hadn't really thought of. Your model seems to take the assumptions that the trade industries can't reorganize to optimize car usage, and that transit operators have only one stream of income (the car tax).

Both are untrue, IMO, and in the desired steady state the car tax is in fact near zero, substituted by higher taxes on everything else. Even if that ends up making the city more expensive, the variation in utility is still at least positive if we model citizens' utility functions as negatively sloped on the pollution axis, and of course if we are assuming the central planning wants to comply with global warming goals.

I would even question if tradespeople would be against paying the car tax if it gets commuters out of the road, to be honest. I'd wager a plumber would be more than willing to pay even 100$ monthly if you worded it as "you get a fast pass to avoid all traffic and get everywhere as fast as the speed limit" and not "it's a tax on your car".

It's also false that transit prices are small, by the way, at least globally. Where I live (third world), taking the subway daily to and from work amounts to 14% of minimum wage

Cars cost more than transit for most people. However transit is expensive no matter how you look at it. The money to run it much come from someplace.

Yes, transit costs a total X. In the car regime everyone puts in a small amount towards public transit and roads and richer folk put high amounts towards cars, totalling X. In the public transit regime everyone puts in a medium amount towards roads and public transit, and a negligible amount of tradespeople and construction companies buy their work vehicles, totalling X.

You can choose the car regime if you want, the US does, but: 1- public transit is lower quality due to higher income brackets choosing cars. 2- everyone is screwed by the cars' negative externalities (noise and air pollution mainly). 3- lower income brackets are screwed by the traffic generated by the higher guys (50 minimum wage workers occupying the same lane space as 3 SUV-driving middle managers). Also you have to remember how much the mortality increases in higher car traffic areas, so that X figure isn't really true

You shouldn't use X as your only variable as it sort of implies a fixed amount that is the same either way. However the systems are different and should have different costs.

That's just because the roads are built out by the Department of Transportation no?

Like if you had to drive on toll roads built underground then nobody would ever drive (see Hyperloop). I think the big mistake being made is people are arguing for free subways and really we should just go to free buses first.

I'm against free buses in general (though probably not in this particular case) because people want to get places. That money from bus fares should be put to running more buses (or building subways... lots of options, but more service). Nobody proposing free transit has ever proposed anywhere enough money that the city can run all needed services. They can maybe come up with enough money to continue current service, but every city in the world needs more transit service. You need service that can get you from where you are to where you want to be, when you want to go. Sometimes that place is farther away (but not unreasonably far) and you need high speed express service. Sometimes you are running late and miss the bus/train - is the next bus/train coming soon enough that you are not unreasonably late? Sometimes you need to be out late, is service still running? Sometimes you want to do something on a weekend. More service is needed everywhere and that lack of service is the primary reason people buy cars which are ready when people want to go (they claim otherwise but when I dig down it comes down to service)

Here in NYC the transit fare is about 35% of the minimum hourly wage for a round trip. I'd guess it's still cheaper than owning and maintaining a car though.

Minimum hourly wage is a terrible metric - very few people make that wage. In your areas where transit is most useful it is also the most economically productive so even less people are making minimum wage than the normal population. I don't the cities in question, but in general these days minimum wages is what you see paid in the economically depressed dying small towns, or people so disabled (generally mentally) that they cannot do your easiest fast food jobs.

How do costs compare for average people in that area is a much better metric. (understand that in transit areas I'd expect people with cars to have newer luxury cars, while in more car centric areas I'd expect more used non-luxury cars, and in poor areas worn out cars - which is itself a skew of the facts)

If your public transport is so popular that it's becoming infeasible to fund it from car taxes... mission fucking accomplished! That is such a wild and nonsensical fear. "But what if it's too successful?!"

Eh no, that is an actual failure mode. Germany is experiencing it right now. What it means is everyone ends up being forced to use horribly broken public transport and it screws up everyone's business and personal lives.

It is possible for public transport to be too popular. It looks like overloaded, crowded and constantly broken lines that can't get better because they're starved of funding.

Public transport being massively/too popular is the only way for it to get anywhere near the level of funding it needs. That's not really a failure mode, just a symptom of the real failure. It was extremely easy for governments to ignore it and leave it to rot for decades because it had next to no lobby compared to cars.

The 9€ and Deutschlandticket reinvigorated that lobby - although that's being snuffed out again.

Looking at the Swedish railway, the issue is related to budget but the problem is not that simple. The main issue is that the railway system lacks redundancy in track capacity, meaning that any failure require short term fixes in order to reduce short term losses. Those short term fixes eventually leads to overall higher downtime and higher failure rates, which only lead to a even more focus on quick fixes and shoddy repairs. Building out new capacity becomes too expensive and takes too long time, and takes money from the budget that is needed to do all the quick fixes that pop up. When those lines become too popular, the pressure only increases to continue do quick fixes, since any downtime has even larger impact both on the straining cargo traffic and passenger throughput.

It becomes like the meme when people talk about nuclear power. Sure, it would had been an good idea 10-20 years ago, but there is no time to do it now and it cost too much. Next year will be even later, and it will cost even more. Any new funding need to be channeled directly to the starving short-term budget, which will continue to always be too low on funding.

One differente with nuclear power is that today we have a better option - renewables - and so nuclear doesn't make sense at all any price. By contrast we don't have anything completely better than mass transit for some cases and to it makes sense to build it and make it cheaper.

This is backwards. The public transit lobby is the Green/climate lobby which is absolutely massive and incredibly influential because it peddles to politicians a unifying moral story about the end of the world that justifies unlimited exercise of political power.

What does the auto industry have in response? Jobs? The left don't care about jobs to begin with, they view anything linked to capitalism or employers to be inherently suspicious.

To see this is true, just look at which group is a net tax payer vs net tax recipient. Car drivers subsidize public transport everywhere I know of (unless you get into stupid arguments that assume world peace exists solely for the purpose of oil transport).

Much of the green mokement is a hypocrite that wants to appear green- but don't take their cars or gas away. And so polititians exploit that to build minimal transit - enough to look like they did something but not enough to take away cars.

Budget for German train system has been cut and was too low for two decades. It was well known that would result in what we have today.

You have to invest in infrastructure to keep it at a high quality level. It's crowded because it has been lacking proper funding for years. It's a result of politics, nothing stops public transport from being popular and providing reasonable high quality service.

Inability to competently manage finances within the framework of populist democratic politics is one of the top reasons governments suck at running things and "public *" often ends in failure.

"private *" also ends in failure quite often. The German train system started to fail when it was partially privatized.

In general, governments tend to not be able to run a system efficiently, but reliably and robust while for companies it's the opposite.

The German train system isn't privatized in any meaningful way, I don't think any European rail system is. They all have harsh price controls imposed by the government and are unionized, which are classically problems affecting government run services to a much greater extent than normal private sector companies.

I don't know much about what Germany is experiencing, but even Germany's neighbors in the Netherlands and France seem to be having a renaissance predicated upon getting people out of their personal automobiles. Perhaps the problem is actually the outsized influence of the auto industry in Germany?

No, auto industry is dying in Germany and was more powerful in the past. German railway collapse is a recent phenomenon. It's the inverse: the Green push to make everyone use public transport is collapsing both the auto industry and public transit there.

> Your transit operators need to ensure transit doesn't become too popular: the more people taking transit the less cars there are paying that tax.

So, raise the tax. When nobody takes cars any more you figure out another way to pay for it. The existence of cars shouldn't come at the cost of public services.

Public transit makes the most sense to fund with property taxes proportional to the benefit that public transit brings in.

> Public transit makes the most sense to fund with property taxes proportional to the benefit that public transit brings in.

Which is essentially zero in many cities. And even in cities with transit, an expansion should result in a lot more benefit than they are currently getting, but they need that money now not in 10 years after that expansion is done and the city sees that benefit.

> Which is essentially zero in many cities.

??? How does this make any sense at all? You have no basically economy without transit. And you get a far greater return from mass transit than from roads.

> And even in cities with transit, an expansion should result in a lot more benefit than they are currently getting, but they need that money now not in 10 years after that expansion is done and the city sees that benefit.

This is what bonds are for....

When I said transit I mean mass transit. Most people do not refer to roads as transit even though they are part of your transportation network.

Sure, and I'm just saying there's the rational impulse to tax cars to death and then enjoy the fruits of a mass transit network. The way we have things set up now doesn't make any sense to begin with—almost like we're taxing our economic centers for existing.

> we're taxing our economic centers for existing.

Yes. Economic centers need transport. Transport costs money to operate, so it is an external cost for an economic center. Taxes are a ways to price in external costs.

> Transport costs money to operate, so it is an external cost for an economic center

Only by choice! Hence why america has such inefficient transit even compared to other such-dense metros.

Sorry what is the choice here? That transport costs money? That transport is needed by an economic center?

As opposed to the automobile and petroleum industries, who famously have no perverse incentives.

I completely agree. Free for the poor people but don't give free stuffs to the other people (including me). Public services are NEVER really free - they take $$ from taxes. Looks like many people simply don't care about taxes.

You either spend the tax money on roads, or on public transit. Roads aren't free either.

Roads are cheaper than transit as far as taxes go. Most of the costs of driving isn't supported by taxes - you buy and maintain your own car (the large share of the costs), and park in private parking lots. Transit not only needs the roads/rails (granted much less), but also needs to buy and maintain all the vehicles plus pay operators for them. The total costs of transit are far less, but the cost to governments is more.

Roads are much cheaper and more useful. They can be used for moving freight whereas good public transport keeps freight off the lines to avoid timetabling problems caused by blockage.

They're not cheaper, that's an illusion and lie sold by the automobile and petroleum industries.

The interstates in the US alone have costed more than 25 trillion dollars. That's just the interstates, no other highways or roads.

But none of that even considers cost of using said roads. In the US, on average 15% of gross income is spent on automobile transportation.

That's a 15% tax right off the top, before your other taxes.

That spending pattern means that automobile transportation is very valuable compared to alternatives.

Or it means oil and automobiles are lucrative industries with huge amount of influence.

The reasoning of "we spend a lot of money so it must be good" is just bad. No, we spend a lot of money on stupid shit all the time. Both historically and currently.

I don't think people are as foolish as that when spending large amounts of their own money. There must be a good reason for it.

The reason is they have no choice. Consumers are the bottom of the totem pole.

Americans spend on average 15% of their gross income on automobile transportation. That's not including their taxes that went towards said automobiles, roads, and oil.

Nobody actually wants to do that. If you could get to work without an automobile, you would. But you can't, can you?

Automobiles are parasidic in nature. To work, they require vast amounts of space and sprawling urban design. But when you get said vast amounts of space and sprawling urban design, then automobiles are the only thing that makes sense.

That's my point. Automobiles are much better than any other alternative.

We have a car centric built environment because people have rationally decided for many valid reasons that automobiles are the best way to get around. It's not because they are "parasitic", whatever that means.

Mass transit can be just as good as cars for most people at far less cost. For many people transit because it can avoid congestion and go faster than cars (even on an uncontested highway) transit should be better. However transit is lacking the network needed to make it that good.

Note that a large part of why cars are better is the network exists. If you had to drive on dirt (not even gravel!) roads that became impassible when it rains you would call cars a bad way to get around. However the road network is such that you can nearly anywhere in a car.

I would just propose that the transit advocates concentrate on that goal ("Mass transit can be just as good as cars for most people at far less cost") in one small area, because in most areas in the United States, it is currently extraordinarily far from reality.

Also, they should do this without crippling cars, since that would be far easier to do than producing a compelling alternative to them as they currently exist.

> Also, they should do this without crippling cars,

Do you mean without continuing to give them 99% of available resources? Cars are by far the most privileged form of transportation worldwide. We bend over backwards to subsidize them as much as possible at all costs.

So of course, any attempts at clawing back at least some of that privilege are met with outrage, e.g. bike lanes.

99% of what resources? That sounds like quite an exaggeration.

I don't know if cars are subsidized more than mass transit on average. It's quite possible they are. The overwhelming majority of people find cars much more useful and enjoyable than mass transit, and politicians have to provide people with what they want to some degree. It's not a conspiracy of the oil companies.

Most who look like transit advocates in reality are not . They appear to be for transit but they want something else and don't care about transit.

A good reason for a SUV in a city is a pretty subjective matter so I don't think that alone is a good argument.

Rails can and are used to transport freight. Trucks contribute a lot to bad traffic and therefore the same kind of blockage you mentioned.

Rail freight is dying everywhere outside the USA, where passenger rail died instead. Mixing the two on the same lines is very difficult and causes tremendous problems, you can't even do it once passenger rail speeds get high enough. Rail freight has been uncompetitive with trucking for a long time as a result even though rail has huge subsidies and road traffic is a revenue generator for governments.

Is road traffic really a revenue generator for governments outside the US? In the US, it's a huge cost sink and has to be subsidized with general taxes.

Sure. Road and fuel taxes have historically generated a surplus after the costs of maintaining the roads are subtracted.

EVs are changing that because they don't pay fuel tax. So, governments are now proposing to change how vehicles are taxed to make the roads pay for themselves again.

The USA is different to Europe because gas taxes are a political live wire there in a way they just aren't in Europe. Presidents win campaigns by promising to reduce the price of gas! So of course the road network is in deficit there, it's a populist move. The equivalent populism in Europe is to make public transport free instead, as the governments are more collectivist minded there, whereas in the US personal freedom is a major concern.

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