Comment by iamcalledrob
21 hours ago
I think this is a US-centric perspective.
In the US, buses (and public transport in general), are thought of as social programmes. Anyone can use them, but they are really for people who can't drive or are too poor to own a car.
The rider makeup then looks like that. The elderly and the poor, sadly. Services run at a huge loss and are dependent on massive and unpopular government subsidies. Quality of service is bad. There's a stigma to using it. You end up with long, slow bus lines because this allows as many of the current demographic (elderly, poor) to take the bus. And there are always bailouts or brutal cuts on the horizon. You end up at a sort-of local maxima of inadequacy.
In an alternate universe, public transport is run to compete with the car, and attracts all demographics. Day-to-day operations are un-subsidised, and therefore relatively expensive. It competes on value. People use it because it's a better experience than driving.
This alternate universe is a city like London. Transport for London has a balanced budget, and despite what grumpy Brits like to say, quality of service is on an ever-upwards trajectory.
In my opinion, operating transport as transportation programme, not a social programme, is how you get more adoption in the long term. You make public transport attractive to more demographics.
Then there's the even better alternate universe. Japan, where there are ~100 train companies, almost all of them are private. There are at least 10 in Tokyo, all but one are private. They are setup so that they have a positive feedback loop. Each train company owns land at and around the trains stops. They open office buildings, apartments, groceries stores and shopping centers around those stops. The more people ride their trains, the better their other businesses do. The more compelling their other businesses are, the more people want to ride their trains to get to them. The also often run buses so you can take a bus to their stations.
These means the trains constantly improve and there's no poltitians trying to cut funding or under budgetting. The 10 companies in Tokyo I can name are JR East, Eiden, Toei, Tokyu, Seibu, Tobu, Odakyu, Keio, Keikyu, Keisei. There are actually more but they generally run 1 line each, at least at the moment.
Of those, only Toei (4 lines) are run by the government. Eiden (the Tokyo Subway) is private but gets some goverment backing. The others are all private. JR East was public in the 70s. The other 7 have always been private.
Unsurprisingly, only Toei, the government run one, is not setup with all of the positive feedback loops that keep the others going.
Note that it's similar in the Osaka/Kyoto/Kobe area. JR West and 5 other big companies, 3 subway companies, a bunch of other 1/2 line companies.
Another thing to note is, AFAICT, the population density of Kyoto is generally less than Los Angeles but they have great transporation from these private companies.
Conversely, the London Underground has had notorious underfunding issues.
Spot-on analysis. I agree that transport should operate on a basically break-even basis, but offset in two ways:
1. Where the Government wants to subsidize some group (e.g. help the disadvantaged by giving them discounts) they should pay the fair price to the transit agency out of the budget of Welfare, not drag on the financials of the transport agency. In other words, it shouldn't be possible that the transport agency is insolvent only because most of their customers are paying next to nothing. Discussions about whether we should spend a certain sum on subsidizing the poor to ride the bus/train/etc are purely welfare budget discussions.
2. The Government should move additional money into the system when they realize an expansion of transport helps further societal goals: e.g. congestion pricing funds should help to expand transit, or the government pays part of the cost to build new rail service to reduce congestion on the roads.
Incidentally, London has a "Freedom Pass" (free transport for retirees), which is funded in the way you describe.
Instead of TfL being forced to take the loss, they are reimbursed by local government cost of the transport.
As an aside, I also take some issue with this pass being completely free to use. In my experience, people end up using it to go a single stop just because it's free, so why not -- which slows bus service for everyone else. I think it should be 20p per journey or something like that.
Fare-charging for public transit has significant frictional overhead. I think in Luxembourg they just made it all free and it didn't cost much money because they didn't need to spend anything on collecting fares. The D-Ticket in Germany too: in some cities, almost everyone has a D-Ticket so the frequency of ticket checks was drastically reduced.
Another counterpoint: if the bus isn't overloaded, taking an additional passenger costs next to nothing, while delivering significant value to the passenger. Don't we want to create as much value as possible?
I agree and disagree with this. Sometimes older people using the busses are what keeps the routes busy and makes it worth running a good service for everyone else. But on the other hand, I have seen abuses. Years ago I somehow got chatting to a fellow bus passenger who liked to ride the busses all day as a hobby. I think rather than charging I'd limit it to 10 free rides a week or something, where a ride is equivalent to a hopper fair - as many connections as you need within an hour of the first touch-in. After that it should use pre-pay credit at a normal rate.
Taking such a fee also has transaction costs, in the time if nothing else.
To liken this back to the old days - the difference in time between flashing a valid transfer slip (of paper) and having to drop change into the automated till.
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But for many old people walking that one stop is difficult. So this charge would partially defeat the object of the pass.
It's a chicken and egg problem. The way to make buses competitive is to build bus only lanes. But to do that you end up removing a lane for drivers and dedicating enforcement resources to keeping bus lanes free of private vehicle traffic.
The usual pattern is when a bus only lane is proposed, drivers complain because they view the bus as a social program. Local legislators often take the drivers' side because they also view the bus as a social program. Even if you get the political capital to push a bus only lane, traffic enforcement will routinely ignore bus lane violations. LA is making waves on the latter problem by attaching cameras to buses which automatically write tickets for cars blocking the bus lane.
Ultimately it's a politics problem. If nobody wants to spend political capital on running a bus system as a transport program, it ends up as a social program.
Bus lanes solve for variability during peak traffic, but speeds even in free-flowing traffic are far from good enough.
In the US, the roads aren't break even either. They are massively subsidized, but people don't even think about it, whereas with public transit the expectation is that it should break even. We aren't comparing like for like.
> In an alternate universe, public transport is run to compete with the car, and attracts all demographics. Day-to-day operations are un-subsidised, and therefore relatively expensive. It competes on value. People use it because it's a better experience than driving.
The problem with this in the US is that it's nearly impossible for the bus to be faster than a car without making the car slower on purpose, and the latter is the thing which is going to create the most opposition, because you're essentially screwing people over during the transition period -- which would take years if not decades.
In the meantime people still can't take the bus because the higher density housing that makes mass transit viable where they live hasn't been built yet etc., and as long as they're stuck in a car they're going to fight you hard if you try to make being stuck in a car even worse.
Meanwhile, cars are expensive. ~$500/mo for a typical car payment, another $100+ for insurance, another $100+ for gas, you're already at $8400+/year per vehicle before adding repairs and maintenance etc. For a two-car household that's more than 20% of the median household income. Make mass transit completely free and people start preferring the housing where mass transit is viable, which means more of it gets built, which is the thing you need to actually make it work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox
Switching a car lane to a bus lane actually makes the cars in the remaining lanes move faster.
Even in a dense city with no parking, it takes an unusually fast and frequent bus to compete with a brisk walk, and a heavy-rail subway to beat a fit or electric-assisted cyclist.
That's assuming you're only going a short distance. The average commute is around 15 miles. That's something like a five hour walk.
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> ~$500/mo for a typical car payment
There is another interesting US-centric perspective here. For some reason, US consumers feel the need to drive new or nearly-new cars.
$5000 can get you a reliable but unsexy used car. I think there is a sort of "Parkinson's law" of consumer spending at play, where financial outgoings will expand to match disposable income.
I also think there's a problem with fixed spend (e.g. car payment, insurance) vs per-trip spend. Per-trip costs are felt more.
A reason that public transport is often more popular in European cities because driving isn't even an option. There's literally nowhere to park. Even the rich need to get around, and this creates pressure to improve non-car transport from all sides.
> $5000 can get you a reliable but unsexy used car.
$5000 can get you a 10+ year old used car with 100,000+ miles on it and no warranty. That's fine if you know how to do repairs and maintenance yourself, because then you're buying a part from the internet with a low markup and installing it yourself instead of paying four times as much for someone else to do it. But not every knows how to do that, or has time, or knows how to tell if a used car with no warranty will be reliable before buying it. And if you plop $5000 down on something with no warranty and then have to scrap it after the first year because your $5000 car needs a $5500 new engine, you're not saving money.
There is also the matter of where used cars come from. You can get one for $5000 because someone paid $30,000 to buy it new ten years ago. If more people did that, fewer new cars are sold and then fewer enter the used market and used car prices go up. So you can buy a used car for $5000, but it's not possible for "most people" to do that because if they tried to, they would no longer be available for $5000.
> I also think there's a problem with fixed spend (e.g. car payment, insurance) vs per-trip spend. Per-trip costs are felt more.
Which is the problem with mass transit. You get in your car and it feels like it costs nothing, the only thing that changed is the gas gauge went down by half a tank and the odometer went up. Meanwhile the amortized cost was actually over $100. Then you go to get on the train and you immediately have to swipe your card and get a bill for $40, which feels like a lot for one trip.
Worse, the car is $100+ per trip only if you're amortizing the fixed costs, i.e. comparing to the alternative of not having a car at all. If the fixed costs of having the car are sunk, the incremental cost of the trip is maybe $15, and then when the train is $40, nobody with a car is saving money to take the train when they can.
Whereas if the train is $0, then it's "hey that goes right where I'm going this time and I don't have to buy gas". Which, if it happens often enough, means more people don't need a car to begin with.
> A reason that public transport is often more popular in European cities because driving isn't even an option.
Obviously if you make something unavailable then people use alternatives. But in the US it's the other way around -- half the population lives in the suburbs where there is no public transport, nor can there be because the density is too low.
So then you need to find ways to make public transit more attractive (like eliminating the fares) rather than making cars less attractive, because making cars less attractive is going to encounter major opposition from the people who have no available option other than to use cars.
This idea occurred to me while I was traveling in Europe. Many of their trains have two classes of cars, where the first class is just slightly nicer. This could be done with buses too. Just alternate buses on the same route, that are expensive and free. The poor can take the free bus, and those who want a more exclusive social experience can pay for the expensive bus.
I can't make any excuses for the social and class implications, but if it got more people on the bus, it might only need to be a temporary measure.
I believe we already have that, and it's called a cab. You pay extra, get an exclusive social experience and, at least in some parts of the world, get to share the bus lanes with other folks taking the bus.
> In my opinion, operating transport as transportation programme, not a social programme, is how you get more adoption in the long term
Yesterday I came across a couple articles that encapsulate this thought.
https://jacobin.com/2026/02/zohran-mamdani-efficiency-nyc-bu...
And
https://coreyrobin.com/2025/11/15/excellence-over-mediocrity...
Busses get tiny subsides in the US.
It’s a large percentage of total bus revenue by design, and a significant expense for some local governments. But the number only look large because of how we split the vast majority of government spending into federal and state budgets with local budgets being relatively anemic by comparison.
The farebox recovery ratio in the US is awful. Most cities are somewhere between 5-25% of operating expenses coming from fares.
Perhaps the tiny subsidies (in absolute terms) are because the bus systems are just so small?
SFMTA's farebox recovery is around 25%. London Underground is about 130%. Osaka Subway is 209%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio
Buses are implicitly subsidized by road maintenance spending. Road wear and tear occurs according to the fourth power of axle weight, which effectively means almost all of the wear and tear is incurred by the heaviest vehicles, which include buses.
Roads still need maintenance even if nobody uses them, so a significant portion is split evenly across all traffic.
Busses are light compared to 18 wheelers and other heavy equipment, they also replace many cars and SUV’s which keep getting heavier.
Finally that rule of thumb isn’t really that accurate, “A 1988 report by the Australian Road Research Board stated that the rule is a good approximation for rutting damage, but an exponent of 2 (rather than 4) is more appropriate to estimate fatigue cracking.” Rutting really isn’t that significant in most cases, but can instantly destroy road surfaces when fully loaded construction vehicles etc drive over something once.
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Private car ownership is a better everyday solution for almost anyone who can afford it, which includes the vast majority of Americans. If buses tried to compete with cars, they would lose. The only remaining niche for the bus is as a public accommodation for the poor, disabled, and elderly, or occasionally in dense city centers.
At least that’s what I think. But if you’re right, and there’s a version of bus transport that’s viable without subsidy, then there should be a market opportunity for a private business to provide that type of bus transport. This actually exists for long range intercity buses already, but you’d think it should be possible inside of some cities. I haven’t looked into this in a lot of detail but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was effectively impossible to try and start a private bus service in most cities, specifically because that would reduce ridership of city transit and threaten all of the unionized public sector jobs in that system. In which case the bus system isn’t really even for the poor and elderly anymore; it’s for the transit workers union, which undoubtedly is a player in city politics.
If people without cars could stop subsidizing those with one i would agree (and include the lost land to mandatory parking places in your account). Car driver should pay a specific tax for that. A bus just need a lane on every road direction and no parking (and use it less than hundred of cars).
I think it isn't as absolute as you suggest, and that it depends on city planning. I own a car but in the city I live it is not a better solution for everyday trips. Walking, cycling, or bus/tram are all far more convenient - it is only when leaving the city that the car becomes better.
(Even then, it depends on the destination - if it's to another city then the intercity trains are still better but for 2+ people it ends up being the premium/expensive option and the car is cheaper.)
Poland? I live in Cracow and have same experience.
But this comes down to how your city is planned. Amsterdam and the Netherlands in general is making it much less attractive to be a driver, for example. Public transportation has its own dedicated roads and even entire regions where cars aren't allowed, bicycles are first class citizens that take equal if not more consideration when streets are designed, streetside parking is limited and getting even more so with basically every city having as a goal the reduction of the number of parking spaces.
Of course, there's still plenty of drivers, but the nice thing is that you have options here. Why would I want to drive if I can just take the metro, or tram, or train, or hell just cycle? Within Dutch cities cycling is often much faster than any other mode of transport, and the great thing is that everyone uses the cycling infra, young or old, rich or poor, able bodied and otherwise.
That can't be the whole equation. Why do so many people in London choose to ride the bus and the tube instead of taking private cars?
Private car ownership is better everyday for suburbs and rural areas but in cities that is not true. Public transit can improve downtown access and reduce congestion. You need some density for transit.