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Comment by bbor | Hacker News Reader

  Yup, it is genuinely convenient that Waymo doesn't rely on an unpopular payroll tax for funding while the bus system does

To be fair, it gets far more subsidies from the government in general by simple virtue of being a car, they're just A) longterm and thus assumed and B) less visible in general. So I'd say the connection between transit and controversial taxes is arbitrary, really--I'll grant you "convenient", but definitely not genuinely-so!

Portland car infrastructure in particular does get a little love from me just because of how damn impressive some of it is (namely the mountain passage to the west and the complex bridge interchanges on the east side) but it's still car infrastructure.

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Road maintenance isn't a subsidy, it's a collective good that buses also benefit from along with many other types of human transport. This is separate from the cost to the government of running a bus system, which is exactly what large numbers of people really don't want to pay an additonal tax for and are therefore voting against.

If you only wanted to run buses, you would not build nearly as many roads as we do.

However, busses do tremendously greater wear and damage to roads than cars, and if everyone used busses exclusively the cost of road maintenance and repair would likely go up.

I'd also argue we'd need the same amount of roads, but those roads (mostly highways) could be smaller/fewer lanes.

If the road is privatised by the virtue of it being mostly used by private companies like Waymo (in the future) then they can foot the bill for road construction and maintenance.

How does Waymo get subsidies? If I ride in Waymo, does that mean I get subsidies?

Yes. Roads are subsidized; the true cost of building and maintaining roads comes from general funds, not just from vehicle registrations and gas taxes (which of course Waymo doesn’t pay, being righteously electric).

So you pay Waymo, they pay a few hundred dollars a year per car in registration, and you benefit from billions of dollars a year in highway funds from both state and federal sources.

Good point about electric. Maybe a tax on tires would be more fair, but that would lead to some dangerous behavior.

Waymo and I pay a lot in state and federal taxes. Shouldn't that work out that we're paying for a shared resource we use even if the proportional accounting is not exact?

I’m not sure Waymo pays much in taxes. Do they?

But in any event, cars and roads are massively subsidized, such that drivers get far more than they pay for. See for instance: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59667

Roads are paid for out of the general fund, meaning that even those (few) who don’t use them pay for them, which I’d call a subsidy (as opposed to self-supporting). That’s not necessarily a bad thing; the same is true for many programs that support low-income people, and I think that’s great. But it’s still fair to call it a subsidy.

> by simple virtue of being a car

State and local governments spend a truly obscene amount of money building and repairing roads, and set aside a nauseating amount of publicly owned land to serve as roads, street parking, and parking lots. Those of us who don't frequently drive get some benefit from the roads, sure, because of the efficiencies of shops needing deliveries and whatnot, but not anything close to proportional to what drivers get out of it. And we accept this as the default way that things should be, whereas we assume that public transit needs to "pay for itself".

Road wear and tear increases as the fourth power of axle load. Are you counting the spending on bus stops, bus parking, dedicated bus lanes, and more on the other side of the ledger?

In FY25, according to their budget [1], TriMet - the Portland public transit authority - spent $19M on bus services.

In that same budget, PDOT spent $56M on streets, signs and streetlights, before you even consider the $242M spent on "asset management" - which appears to generally be capital improvements; i.e., rebuilding roads [2, page 509].

I don't care what fraction of that wear and tear is due to buses, it's not remotely close. And in any case, by the same fourth-power law, private 18-wheelers do astronomically more damage than buses.

And yes, PDOT makes revenue back from some of those things, so it's not all straight from the city general fund, but it doesn't matter in any practical way. They don't have revenues broken down as far as I'd like on that budget - there's one big $89M line item for "charges for services", which appears to include parking meters as well as tram fare - but the vast majority of their budget still comes from taxes plus "intergovernmental" sources (aka state and federal money, aka taxes).

[1] https://www.gpmetro.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/2025-Oper... [2] https://www.portland.gov/budget/documents/fy-2025-26-city-po...

Your first link is for the bus budget in Portland, Maine. The system cost for busses in Portland, Oregon in 2025 was $453 million.[1]

1. https://trimet.org/about/pdf/trimetridership.pdf

Oh... that's embarrassing. Honest mistake, I swear.

Buses in my city did so much damage to the asphalt at bus stops that they had to pour thousands of thick concrete pads that wouldn't rut.

> Those of us who don't frequently drive get some benefit from the roads, sure

Where "some benefit" includes transportation and delivery of every single product necessary for daily life as well as garbage removal of the same products.

Bicycling also benefits from road maintenance. Portland does have some innovative bicycle-centered road infrastructure.

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