All this work is impressive, but I'd rather have better trains
So many people advocate for public transit, but are unwilling to deal with the current market tradeoffs and decisions people are making on the ground. As long as that keeps happening, expect modes of transit -- like Waymo -- that deliver the level of service that they promise to keep exceeding expectations.
I've spent my entire adult life advocating for transportation alternatives, and at every turn in America, the vast majority of other transit advocates just expect people to be okay with anti-social behavior going completely unenforced, and expecting "good citizens" to keep paying when the expected value for any rational person is to engage in freeloading. Then they point to "enforcing the fare box" as a tradeoff between money to collect vs cost of enforcement, when the actually tradeoff is the signalling to every anti-social actor in the system that they can do whatever they want without any consequences.
I currently only see a future in bike-share, because it's the only system that actually delivers on what it promises.
This isn't just happening in America. Train systems are in rough shape in the UK and Germany too.
Ebike shares are a much more sustainable system with a much lower cost, and achieve about 90% of the level of service in temperate regions of the country. Even the ski-lift guy in this thread has a much more reasonable approach to public transit, because they actually have extremely low cost for the level of service they provide. Their only real shortcoming is they they don't handle peak demand well, and are not flexible enough to handle their own success.
I'm not sure if this was intended or not, but this is a common NIMBY refrain. The argument of "This thing being advocated for that I'm fighting against isn't something people want anyway". And like walkable neighborhood architecture, extremely few Americans have access to light rail. Let alone light rail that doesn't have to yield to car traffic.
Regardless, the cost arguments fall apart once you take the total cost society pays for each system instead of only what the government pays. Because when you get the sum of road construction & maintenance, car acquisition, car maintenance, insurance, and parking, it dwarfs the cost of the local transit system. Break it down on a per-consumer basis and it gets even uglier. New York City is a good example to dive into, especially since it's the typical punching bag for "out-of-control" budgets.
Quick napkin math pins the annual MTA cost at $32-$33 billion and the total cost of the car system between $25 and $44 billion per year. Since the former serves somewhere around 5.5 million riders, and the latter only about 2 million, the MTA costs $5,300-6,600 per user annually where the car system costs $12,000–$22,500 per user annually.
I'm NOT saying "people don't want to ride trains."
I AM saying "people don't want ride trains that allow 5% of the riders to smoke cigarettes on enclosed train platforms and in enclosed train cars."
You might says "what? but that's not happening."
In Chicago, yes it is: https://resphealth.org/snuff-out-smoking-on-cta/
People want transit as long as that transit reasonably meets their quality of life standards. The reason why automobiles have been so popular -- even while being wildly more expensive -- is exactly that they allow the user to adjust their travel to their optimal quality of life expectations.
Public transit advocates need to be honest with themselves that anti-social behavioral issues really matter to people. People are willing to pay more to have a more pleasant experience. When a transit system fails to meet that standard, then you'll suddenly find yourself with a transit system that people don't want to use.
Just don't allow that then?
> Public transit advocates need to be honest with themselves that anti-social behavioral issues really matter to people. People are willing to pay more to have a more pleasant experience. When a transit system fails to meet that standard, then you'll suddenly find yourself with a transit system that people don't want to use.
"we can't have good transit because a few people who call themselves transit advocates have bad opinions" is very defeatist. Weak-spined politicians find it much easier to just set money on fire than actually solving problems, so even though most transit advocacy groups in the US emphasize quality and being less wasteful with budgets, your politicians usually prefer the worse options.
>Just don't allow that then?
>"we can't have good transit because a few people who call themselves transit advocates have bad opinions" is very defeatist.
My point here is only that this is a hard problem, not a trivial one. When the transit advocates in my area just say "transit should be free" in response to "transit pricing is a complex problem that affects system fragility" and they say "stop hating homeless people" in response to "quality of life concerns matter to keeping the system functional long term" then we're in bad place, because the non-transit advocates literally want to get rid of the system. The last TWO Muni funding bills in SF failed.
We've built a system that can fail catastrophically, in large part, because transit advocates don't want to deal with the realities of running a functional transit system. This is why I get grumpy when people say "all this work is impressive, but I'd rather have better trains" when it's very clear why Waymo is succeeding as Muni is failing, but it is exactly because Muni is mostly disconnected from market forces that we've got to this place, and the "solution" being proposed by most transit advocates is to just completely remove all market forces which will very obviously be worse is the long run.
It's just that Cars have rotted the American mind so much that to consider anything else is sacrilege.
Why do you expect them to make money? Roads don't make money and no one thinks to complain about that. One of the purposes of government is to make investment in things that have more nebulous returns. Moving more people to public transit makes better cities, healthier and happier citizens, stronger communities, and lets us save money on road infrastructure.
I don't.
That's why I said "variable cost of operations."
If a system doesn't generate enough revenue to cover the variable costs of operation, then every single new passenger drives the system closer to bankruptcy. The more "successful" the system is -- the more people depend on it -- the more likely it is to fail if anything happens to the underlying funding source, like a regular old local recession. This simple policy decision can create a downward economic spiral when a recession leads to service cuts, which leads to people unable to get to work reliably, which creates more economic pain, which leads to a bigger recession... rinse/repeat. This is why a public transit system should cover variable costs so that a successful system can grow -- and shrink -- sustainably.
When you aren't growing sustainably, you open yourself up to the whims of the business cycle literally destroying your transit system. It's literally happening right now with SF MUNI, where we've had so many funding problems, that they've consolidated bus lines. I use the 38R, and it's become extremely busy. These busses are getting so packed that people don't want to use them, but the point is they can't expand service because each expansion loses them more money, again, because the system doesn't actually cover those variable costs.
The public should be 100% completely covering the fixed capital costs of the system. Ideally, while there is a bit of wiggle room, the ridership should be 100% be covering the variable capital costs. That way the system can expand when it's successful, and contract when it's less popular. Right now in the Bay Area, you have the worst of both worlds, you have an underutilized system with absolutely spiraling costs, simply because there is zero connection between "people actually wanting to use the system" and "where the money comes from."
Between toll roads, and the toll lanes, they do?
"The total annual cost for road maintenance in the U.S. is in the hundreds of billions of dollars, with estimates showing over $200 billion spent yearly".
Roads are used and essential to every single person whether they use a car or not. Every single product you consume was transported over roads.
Drivers are the problem, not roads. Drivers kill, maim, pollute, and disturb the peace in ways AVs do not.
1) is a bit simplistic though. I don't know of any European system that would cover even operating costs out of fare/commercial revenue. Potentially the London Underground - but not London buses. UK National Rail had higher success rates
The better way to look at it imo is looking at the economic loss as well of congestion/abandoned commutes. To do a ridiculous hypothetical, London would collapse entirely if it didn't have transit. Perhaps 30-40% of inner london could commute by car (or walk/bike), so the economic benefit of that variable transit cost is in the hundreds of billions a year (compared to a small subsidy).
It's not the same in SFBA so I guess it's far easier to just "write off" transit like that, it is theoretically possible (though you'd probably get some quite extreme additional congestion on the freeways as even that small % moving to cars would have an outsized impact on additional congestion).
You're making my argument for me. Again, my concern isn't the day-to-day conveniences of funding, my point is that building a fragile system (a system where the funding is unrelated to the usability of the service) is a system that can fail catastrophically... for systems where there are obviously alternatives (say, National Rail which can be substituted for automobile, bus, and airplane service) are less to worry about, because their failure will likely not cause cascading failures. When an entire local economy is dependent on that system -- when there are not viable substitutes -- then you're really looking at a sudden economic collapse if the funding source runs dry, or if the system is ever mismanaged.
This is a big deal. When funding really actually does run out and the system fails, then if the result is an economic cascade into a full blown depression, then you would have been much better off just building the robust system in the long term. I just really don't think people appreciate how systems can just fail. Whether it's Detroit or Caracas, when the economic tides turn in a fragile system people can lose everything in a matter of a few years.
And National Rail isn't replaceable at all with bus/cars/planes. You really underestimate the number of people which commute >1hr into London (100km+). There is just no way to do that journey by car or bus. It would turn a ~1hr commute into a 3hr _each way_ and that's not even considering the complete lack of parking OR the fact suddenly the roads would be at (even more) gridlock with many multiples of commuters.
That's not even getting into what you consider fixed vs variable costs. Are the trains themselves a fixed cost (they should last 30-40 years)? Is track maintenance a fixed cost (this has to be done more often than the trains themselves), etc etc. The 2nd point is very important - a lot of rail operators in the UK can be made profitable or not on your metric by how much the government subsidises track maintenance vs the operators paying for it in track access charges.
Equally, are signalling upgrades (for example) fixed costs? But really they are only required to run more frequent services. So you could argue they are a variable cost?
Yes
>Is track maintenance a fixed cost (this has to be done more often than the trains themselves)
Yes
>Equally, are signalling upgrades (for example) fixed costs?
Yes
Fixed costs are the costs that don't go away when the passengers go away. Variable cost, typically labor, go away when you don't actually need that additional marginal train. You still have to amortize that train even if it's not on the tracks. You still need to buy that marginal train when the service levels require it. You still have to do track maintenance even when you're not running trains (though, yes, at the very margin there could be some small rate adjustments). When you want to upgrade the signals, it's basically the definition of a fixed cost, because you do it once and it's done.
>And National Rail isn't replaceable at all with bus/cars/planes. You really underestimate the number of people which commute >1hr into London (100km+). There is just no way to do that journey by car or bus. It would turn a ~1hr commute into a 3hr _each way_ and that's not even considering the complete lack of parking OR the fact suddenly the roads would be at (even more) gridlock with many multiples of commuters.
I don't want to speak to National Rail or British Rail that preceded it. I want to stick to the transit system that I know well.
My point here isn't that money shouldn't be spent on "getting things back in shape" here is where I waffle on the "pay for fixed capital costs and mostly have the marginal variable costs covered by the marginal rider." If a system needs the occasional cash infusion, I'm fine with that, as long as it comes with new leadership.
My concern here is that, in the Bay Area, many, many people are eager to pay $25 for a Waymo to pick them up (they are NOT cheap) while Muni costs $3 (a near 10x increase in cost). When folks are willing to pay that much of a premium, then something is very wrong with the transit system. Muni has had zero enforcement of their code of conduct for decades. When you have a system that are large section of the populous actively avoid when it's perfectly convenient, then something is very wrong with the system.
When I see BART stations that look like abandoned parking lots surrounded by single family home sprawl, then it doesn't surprise me that the system is not sustainable. The stations that may get removed are all in areas that require people to drive, to then take the train, instead of the cities zoning density and retail around the train stations. When I yell at the occasional people smoking in BART stations and I go to tell the station attendant and get a shrug back -- even when we are paying for them to have their own police force -- that's why they are failing. These are political choices that BART has made in how they operate their service
These systems aren't even doing the bare minimum in providing a reliable pleasant service, so people stop using them, and that makes sense. The entire point is that these services should be relatively inexpensive to operate because of economies of scale, but when you don't actually make people pay, when you don't actually ask people to behave like responsible adults, when your running the service like a failing business then we should expect the service to fail, and when it does, when bailouts are needed, they should (and often do) come with strings attached. BART now has gates that stop most turnstile jumping... and they were forced to be installed by the state of California as part of their second bailout. The reason I'm harping on having variable costs attached to ridership is exactly because the systems needs to be forced to respond when a sizable amount of people no longer find the service valuable.
This is about sustainability, because the marginal tax dollar is better spend on something like providing people with the healthcare they need than it is providing people a bus service they're not even willing to actually use.
When ridership plummeted by >50% during the pandemic, fixed costs stayed the same, but income dropped. Last time I checked, if Bart ridership returned to 2019 levels, with no other changes, it would be profitable again.
BART has already been bailed out by the state, twice. It has already failed, twice. It very much needs to reduce the level service it provides if it wants to be sustainable, or seek other forms of revenues while we wait to see if ridership returns. Many have suggested BART explore the SE Asian model of generating revenues by developing residential housing, which seems fairly straightforward.
If ridership never returns, then we ought not continue throwing good money after bad, and we ought to adjust the level of service to meet the level of revenues. Obviously the main problem here is that it's literally illegal to just build high density corridors directly adjacent to the transit stations... which is what we ultimately need to prioritize.
> BART, Muni, Caltrain, AC Transit — which an independent analysis confirmed face annual deficits of more than $800 million annually starting in fiscal year 2027-28
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/california/2026/01/06/ba...
Nearly a billion dollar shortfall per year going forward. That’s nontrivial, and the state has lost patience with the systems after providing two bailouts already.
1. You want to be forward looking, not backwards looking. Cutting services means less ridership means less revenue means cutting services means...etc. Bart is super useful for me during the week because headways from SF to West Oakland are often 5m. As I'm writing this (11 on a Friday) I missed a train and had to wait 20 minutes. Every seat on the car is also full, and while not packed, it's standing room only. If my choice is to wait 20 mins for the next train, other ways of getting places become a lot more appealing.
2. Government services should be good. This is good both because it makes people interested in using them (see 1) and because people who don't have other options deserve good services. The point of government is, at least in part, to serve those who can't serve themselves. I don't expect Bart to be revenue neutral for the same reason I don't expect CalFRESH to be.
That's not true. If you have stations that are revenue positive and stations that are net negative, then cutting ridership at the net-negative stations can put the system in a much better financial position. E.g. If BART didn't end at Antioch, and instead continued to Rio Vista, it's entirely likely that the Rio Vista station would just cost more to operate than is worth operating. It takes time to go back and forth, nobody will ever want to be picked up there because it's car-dependent sprawl. Maybe have one or two stops there during rush hour, but you'll likely be better financially cutting most service.
>headways from SF to West Oakland are often 5m
Nobody is suggesting cutting service between SF and Oakland. I'm sure it's a wildly profitable route. Crossing the bay is the main benefit of BART.
>The point of government is, at least in part, to serve those who can't serve themselves. I don't expect Bart to be revenue neutral for the same reason I don't expect CalFRESH to be.
I also don't expect BART to be revenue neutral. I expect it to be funded -- in very large part -- by taxes. I'm only arguing it should be sustainable. It shouldn't get to the point of literal collapse during economic downturns (again, it's already been bailed out by the state and feds, twice, in the last six years).
I really don't think people realize what I'm getting at. I'm saying the system needs to be functional and needs to function long term. Yes, I think we should subsidize low-income users. Yes, I think people who can't afford it should still be able to use it. But that has to happen in a way that doesn't drive away significant numbers of other users. There's nothing about being low-income that means anti-social. I'm talking about anti-social behavior. I'm talking about people smoking cigarettes and using drugs on BART platforms and in BART cars. I'm talking about people who are actively bothering significant numbers of people around them by their behavior -- behavior that is against BART policy, but is tolerated.
You can't sit here and tell me the current system is working when BART is perpetually collapsing. I care about BART. That's why I'm articulating the systemic problems in the system.
I don't think this follows. Government budgeting isn't zero based. A hypothetical Bart with 2x the government funding in 2019 would have faced cutbacks, but likely has more money today than what we have now!
> or seek other forms of revenues while we wait to see if ridership returns.
Yes, this is called "taxes".
> If ridership never returns, then we ought not continue throwing good money after bad
Agreed if it was stagnant, but ridership is up more than 10% y/y and that was also true last year. It's on track to be revenue neutral again in a few years. Gutting services today would be exactly opposite of what you'd do for something like a startup showing clear path toward profitability.
> Obviously the main problem here is that it's literally illegal to just build high density corridors directly adjacent to the transit stations... which is what we ultimately need to prioritize
While sure it's hard, there's lots of these that exist. There's new stuff in oakland basically constantly, and were even seeing midrise stuff along Bart in SF, but it's units being built now, so they won't be available until 2027, which is when your proposed service cuts would hit.
A hypothetical BART with 2x the government funding wouldn't have existed... because it didn't exist.
>Agreed if it was stagnant, but ridership is up more than 10% y/y and that was also true last year. It's on track to be revenue neutral again in a few years. Gutting services today would be exactly opposite of what you'd do for something like a startup showing clear path toward profitability.
You're mistaking what I'm saying. I want BART to flourish, but I want it to be sustainable. The choice isn't "keep it open" or "close it." How it is operated matters significantly. I'm very obviously going to vote to increase funding, my point is that it shouldn't have to come to a vote. If service is reduced to a more sustainable rate, the system could recover organically. The revenue jump that has happened at stations immediately after the gates were installed, for example, shouldn't surprise anyone. I'm a transit advocate, BART is mostly irrelevant to this discussion anyway, because we're talking about situations where Waymo is a viable alternative, which really doesn't apply to BART.
Rich people want their own methods of highly convenient transportation; they don't want to share with everyone else. They don't pay taxes. Public infra gets worse and the average person taking public infra is poorer. Over time your city has people who don't have houses or jobs, or who do drugs. Inevitably they are relegated to public spaces since they own nothing. The rich people avoid interactions with the poorer members by building gated communities and private infrastructure--rich techies now have concierge physicians and monopolize high quality teaching at their absurdly expensive private schools. Each decision is rational. This is the social rot that is wrought by an oligarchic, and generally value-extracting rentier class.
Many problems today stem from wealth inequality.
That's before you consider how it takes 2-4x as long to get somewhere by public transit outside of peak hours and/or well-covered areas. A 20 minute trip from a bar in Queens to Brooklyn by car takes an hour by train after 2300, not including walking time. I made that trip many, many times, and hated it each time.
I don't want to hear tiktok or full volume soap operas blasting at some deaf mouth breather.
I don't want to be near loud chewing of smelly leftovers.
I don't want to be begged for money, or interact with high or psychotic people.
The current culture doesn't allow enforcement of social behaviour: so public transport will always be a miserable containment vessel for the least functional, and everyone with sense avoids the whole thing.
I quite agree with the overall point but can we leave this kind of discourse on X, please? It doesn't add much, it just feels caustic for effect and engagement farming.
We also police driving behaviour, in a way that nobody does for public behaviour.
And no matter what I don't have to hear or smell other drivers.
Automobiles are a wildly inefficient and expensive form of transportation in urban areas. At the same time, we ought to be willing to ask why a significant amount of our urban population still prefers to pay all that extra money to sit in traffic.
Or the majority of the residents of New York City on their daily commute? I like to think I have sense, and I happily use public transport most days. I prefer it to sitting in traffic, isolated in a car. At least I can read a book. If you work too hard to insulate yourself from the world, the spaces you'll feel comfortable in will get more and more narrow. I think that's a bad thing.
That's the whole problem. Car transportation simply doesn't scale, so there will never be an option to use waymo that's as fast and cheap as the subway. It's worth calling out that an efficient train system is vital to keeping car traffic moving quickly, because once everyone is in a car, it's gridlock.
Living there, without the means to avoid public transport is something I would also consider insane.
Even though the train system in Japan is 10x better than the US as a whole, the per-capita vehicle ownership rate in Japan is not much lower than the US (779 per 1000 vs 670 per 1000). It would be a pipe dream for American trains/subways to be as good as Japan, but even a change that significant would lead to a vehicle ownership share reduced by only about 13%.
I think you'd be surprised. Look at the difference in cost per passenger mile.
I guess you're comparing the total cost of trains vs a subset of costs of cars, as is usual. Road use and pollution are free externalities after all.
As soon as a mode of transport actually has to compete in a market for scarce & valuable land to operate on, trains and other forms of transit (publicly or privately owned) win every time.
Where trains work they are great. Where they don't, driverless electric cars seem like a great option.
https://csh.ac.at/news/over-half-of-global-commutes-are-by-c...
Is there a magic road wand?
Roads are subsidized, free parking (and generally a lot of paid parking) is subsidized, and the sprawl encouraged by car dependence combined with the resulting infrastructure costs has and will continue to bankrupt cities.
I don't think we should "just only have trains", but the current US transit landscape is absurdly stupid and inefficient.
Source? The biggest source of environmental issues from EVs, tire wear from a heavier vehicle, absolutely applies to AVs. VC subsidizing low prices only to hike them later isn't exactly "without subsidy" - we pay for it either way
sure, a private vehicle is better for me, but a train is better for the world
Don't they have those somewhere in South America?
I’d much rather have my own vehicle than share my space with a bunch of people.