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> Rush hour is more of a problem than people will admit; the biggest issue with public transit (in general) is that it is horribly "unprofitable" (for whatever you want that to be) except curing crush-time. >

Hold on, if we talk about efficiency and profitability, you also need to compare to roads. You can't on one hand subsidise road/car travel and at the same time demand profitability from public transport.

If we would make road charges actually cover the costs it would become completely unsustainable in rural areas and would likely not become profitable in urban centers (factoring the price of the real estate of roads into the equation would likely increase cost significantly) except for rush hour.

The main thing that will bring cost of public transport down is going to be self driving, not cars but trains.

Who is paying for these unprofitable roads?

If it's the people (eventually) then it's just accounting.

All these things can be referenced, and checked. Rural roads are paved because they're used (the ones that aren't - they're gravel or mud).

How come nobody ever points out that roads are “unprofitable”?

Because they aren't. They enable almost all economic activity that involves moving things or people around.

That same argument should apply to public transport then. You can't on one hand argue that roads don't need to be profitable in the traditional sense because of their benefits and the turn around and ignore the same for public transport.

Even if you don't demand profitability, there still needs to be cost/benefit analysis done.

Do you build one rail line or two? Do you build one bus route or two? Do you expand a road or build a new one?

Making it a train vs car or rail vs road obscures the problem AND the solution.

Objectively they are not profitable. If you count gas taxes that are collected, we're only covering about a quarter of the cost to maintain them.

Roads are not generating direct revenue, which is how you determine profit. There's no model where roads are profitable.

Additionally, we've been moving goods and services by rail for approximately two centuries in the United States - long before a car was on a road. Roads are not a requirement to move goods around.

I remember pointing this out to someone who said public transportation was unprofitable and his response was "I don't care".

People tend not to point it out because most don't actually care about the profitability at all, it's just a meme opinion they present because they prefer cars and look at it like a competition. Other meme opinions that get used:

- disabled people need cars and you want to take cars away from them! (fake disability advocacy - disability advocates who have spent 10 minutes thinking about this know that disability is a spectrum and that many disabilities prevent people from being able to use cars or they are unable pay for the necessary modifications to be able to drive; also no one said anything about taking cars away from people)

- cyclists are a danger to pedestrians and cars! (rhetorical trick to get people to think bikes pose a greater danger to pedestrians than cars)

- buses are ugly! (so is your car)

- it increases traffic (so does your car)

- not everyone wants to ride a bike/walk/take the bus (no one said you have to)

They say these things even in non-adversarial contexts. Like in a discussion about wanting more pedestrian infrastructure and bike paths, they will say "just use [existing bike path], some of us have JOBS and ERRANDS to run" as if people only walk/bike for leisure. No, you don't understand, I'm trying to get as far away from the horrible drivers with Texas/Florida plates as possible!!

Someone’s going to push this and the result will be billing the bus for road usage per person …

Great, let's do that when the negative externalities of cars are properly priced into their usage. This is the number one reason that's causing such sentiments, and rightly so. Expecting people to approach it differently before that is fixed is unrealistic. Currently, cars are subsidized to an absurdly higher level than public transit. That's the status quo. A change of that status quo means moving car subsidies to public transit subsidies, unless you raise taxes, which will make the exact same people defensive and hate you.

> At the extremes, a bus (or worse, a train) with one driver and one passenger is obviously worse than one person in a car.

Or driving with no passengers at all, not uncommon for the buses where I live at certain times and routes.

It's sort of a chicken and egg problem. You can optimize equipment usage by running more buses on heavily used routes but you can't encourage new ridership on new routes without running enough buses to make it at least somewhat convenient. If you miss your bus and have to wait an hour or more for the next one, most people don't find that very appealing.

But at some point if you're running a whole bus to move a small number of people, you need to admit it's not worth it and eliminate that route. It would be more economical to just give those people taxi rides.

There was a city that did that - the busses were "on demand" - much more like a taxi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI1yM9mzCAE

Minibuses are a thing. You could easily run them at off-times and on more sparsely-used routes.