Comment by doctoboggan
2 days ago
> they (1) don't actually charge enough maintain the variable cost of operations
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.
>Why do you expect them to make money?
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."
This gets repeated a lot, but is unpersuasive. How much money should a transit system lose? $20 per trip? $40 per trip? There might be mass transit systems that make sense (e.g buses), but most mass transit in the US is terrible quality and a terrible value. One argument is that it's a jobs program for the disadvantaged, but even there we could find a lot of things more useful than moving around empty seats most of the day.
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.
They do through taxes or tolls!
"The U.S. generates approximately $17.4 billion in annual toll revenue".
"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 don't make money and no one thinks to complain about that.
Between toll roads, and the toll lanes, they do?
If they paid for themselves then the DoT wouldn’t have a multibillion dollar highway budget, and that’s not even including all the state funding.
The claim wasn't they pay for themselves but that they don't generate any income. If we want to look at externalities, we'd also have to figure out how much the Iraq war cost.
That is for Capex. Govt can always easily spend Capex, but Opex has to be covered by the users, whether its roads or trains.