Hacker News Reader

Comment by milesskorpen | Hacker News Reader

Cars are also subsidized (roads) - isn't that what taxes are for?

If we could go back to pre-pandemic ridership levels, the subsidy rate would be inverted (fares covered 70% versus 30% now). Public Transit struggles with low utilization. It'll take 10+ years to get back to that ridership level though.

View on HN

Sure, but cars aren't subsidized at $18 dollars per trip. The cost to the government of providing and maintaining roads is on the order of several cents per vehicle mile traveled.

For BART, that number is:

$1.07B operating expense / 892.5M million passenger miles traveled = $1.20 per mile. Then subtract out the fare per mile and the government is paying $0.84/mile for people to ride BART.

> the government is paying $0.84/mile for people to ride BART

If BART disappeared tomorrow, how much would the government have to pay to build all the additional roads and parking to support that incremental traffic?

And how much for healthcare for all the incremental pollution and collisions?

> several cents per vehicle mile

It's close to a dollar per mile when you include all the externalized costs.

Incremental property damage, injuries and fatalities, incremental chronic illness from pollution, parking land subsidy, fair market value of incremental land use and rights of way, lost tax revenue from that incremental land use, etc.

Caltrain rides allow riders to be productive during the ride and generate income taxes in a way that cars do not.

In general, this is why semi-private or private transport works so much better. If the end user is getting a bunch more value out of working on the train, they will pay more for the train than the road (if they have to pay the full price of the road vs train each time they use each).

If you look at how American cities are laid out, the cost on society of car infrastructure is massive. Roads and parking space use up a very significant percentage of the real estate in an American city. Public transit is far more efficient with space, so it saves society as a whole a lot of money.

Private autonomous transportation will allow that public infrastructure to be tenfold more productive.

Public transportation will never have the incentive to minimize cost and headcount.

Where we do have public transportation, it should always face competition from private offerings - including on the tracks, as they do in Italy, for example.

That's not true. For example, France is rapidly automating its metros. The US is quite unique in viewing public transport as a jobs program rather than a public service.

Of course it has the incentive. Even in this thread people are getting mad about it costing too much.

When someone says incentive in this context, they usually mean the individual incentives of each of the workers to make money for themselves, get promoted to get a share of profit, not the overall fuzzy public pressure.

And low density suburbs in America are never going to get torn up and re-platted so autonomous vehicles is the only way to improve safety.

On the contrary, our biggest cities started as little groups of houses. Letting places increase their density is a natural solution to a lot of this. The core problem is that we need to take away the power of local government to limit development.

The roads and houses are constructed with such separation and space that it is literally impossible without eminent domain of basically every lot. It’s simply not a possibility to turn the suburbs with huge stroads and subdivisions into mixed use high density living.

The separation and space tends to resolve itself slowly and naturally as density increases. You get the pressure from the new people who live there to make crossings shorter and safer. It's slow, but it is effective.

Citations please? Seriously, you are making up numbers for the cost of cars and the govt subsidies provided. Did you account for the DMV? Did you account for traffic police? Did you account for the installation and maintenance of traffic light systems? Of course you didn't.

The numbers aren’t made up. The Federal government publishes these statistics annually, they're widely used by policy analysts, and they're simple to calculate yourself.

The Federal government spends ~$17.5B/year on maintaining and constructing the interstate highway system. Americans drive 852 billion miles/year on it. The cost per Vehicle Mile Traveled (VMT) is 2.1 cents / mile.

If we look at all government spending (Federal, State, Local) on highways, roads, and supporting infrastructure (which includes traffic management systems), that's around $285B/year and 3.28 trillion miles, or 8.7 cents per Vehicle Mile Traveled.

The cost to the government to provide and maintain roads is on the order of several cents per mile traveled per year. Roads are simply much more cost-effective to build and maintain than dedicated public transit infrastructure.

You're missing a lot of externalities here.

Also, the cost to a driver of the car is around $0.70 not including cost to the government and cost of externalities.

As others are explaining, these calculations are essentially spurious due to all the off-the-books externalities.

In a city the only question that surely matters is: Can the mode of transport be scaled? For private car transit, the answer is no. No city can function if everyone gets around by car. Even Houston has light rail and a bus network. If you can drive and your city somehow remains livable, that is because other people are taking transit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com