Comment by starkparker

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.

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

This is an implementation problem, not a problem with the underlying concept.

Public transit like buses and lightrail are significantly more efficient per person than personal vehicles. This is because they can transport many more people for the same amount of space and energy. They also typically run on set tracks, which yields more efficiency gains.

The US is really, really bad at doing public transit. It doesn't help that everything is car centric, which makes public transit much harder.

For example, in your comment you're excluding road cost, but you're including the full system cost of transit. That's a car centric side effect, e.g. we take roads for granted. But the cost of cars also includes the cost of roads, the cost of land under those roads, the cost of parking, etc.

Oh wow I didn't know Uber solely relied on private roads, had their own DMV, or fleet of millions of cars; truly an innovative company that doesn't rely on public infrastructure!

try it again while calculating infrastructure and road costs for 262mm uber/lyft rides

What about infrastructure costs for lyft and uber?

Perhaps it isn’t expensive once you consider the peak load and externalities. How many new roads would you have to build to do that?

> cost of providing a bus exceeds the cost of operating a car in many cases

You can fit 40-50 people in your car?

how many people can fit in a bus compared to a car?

Even five dollars a ride would be twice the price. It's just not comparable.

I spent ten years in the trenches of American urban design policy. The best we could do was lose very slightly less quickly. It's not changing. Trains are great, we should build more, and we probably should replace a lot of bus routes by subsidizing rides on Waymo and its ilk. It'll be cheaper and provide better service.

A well run public transit system should obviously be cheaper at scale than robotaxis, but the incentives for Waymo (or Uber, or Lyft, etc.) are very different than the city's incentives. It's very possible that in practice private companies can operate more cheaply at scale than buses because they have much higher incentives to reduce costs and increase efficiency.

It's not a bandaid because American urban design isn't going to change substantially. I don't see American cities changing their mind on how they build and where they build.

“Self driving cars aren't the next stage of public transport; they're a bandaid solution to American urban design.”

That might be an unintentionally excellent analogy, because like a Band-Aid, self self driving cars have the potential to heal the urban environment. The widespread adoption of self driving cars doesn’t take cars off the road, but it does reduce the reliance on destination parking. Entire city car parks could be replaced with medium density residential, substantially increasing density and paving the way to walkable cities.

They won't be better for maintenance but unless Portland can build the state capacity to fund public transport properly this is better than nothing. Plenty of developing countries rely on buses, jitneys, and low footprint vehicles like mopeds for traffic flow because they don't have the state capacity to enforce an urban framework conducive to public transit. Honestly many US states are the same.

> increased pavement wear

That's buses. Even more with electric buses. They are insanely subsidized by public. Robot taxis are vastly cheaper for everyone.

Decriminalizing drugs without full legalization and regulation leads to that. Addicts can't buy drugs of known purity and dosage, and this is what happens.

Similar to alcohol prohibition and methanol poisoning.

>The service changes take affect in August, in large part because they can no longer expect the funding for them to exist by then.

I think a more plausible reason is, "withdraw the services now to get people who want that spending and that service irritated, and therefore more likely to get out and vote for it". Keeping service in place till the vote might supress the vote through complacency.

I'm not passing a value judgement on this top-down pressure on the electorate, governments should in theory be neutral and uphold current law, but governments are populated by politicians, and politicians who advocated this still want to advocate it and give it its best electoral chance. In a like "up is down" sense, people who favor cutting this government expenditure should favor the early cuts, they save money... of course, they don't, just sayin.

Two Santas but it's federa/state vs on a cyclic basis. Disgusting.

The bus system would almost certainly be better if it did cost a somewhat-significant amount of money, because one of the biggest problems with public transit in the US is marginalized people getting on public transit and acting in ways that are unpleasant and disruptive to everyone else using it (think about a homeless drug addict passing out on the bus while splayed across several seats; or a schizophrenic screaming incoherently at everyone nearby and threatening to kill them). Having a meaningful fare and consistently enforcing payment of that fare keeps these people off of transit and makes the experience of being in an enclosed space with strangers better for everyone else.

So use your car instead?

I see. You meant that Waymo showed up with a solution for you, specifically, not the city or the neighborhood that you live in.

Do you live in Oregon? The recent vote was about rejecting the proposed payroll tax increase, which was massively unpopular. The vote was so overwhelming that Kotek attempted to yank that clause, so it can be tried another day.

People here keep asking why do tax payer needs to pay for incompetent politicians' mistakes. Then when Oregonians did something, the same people blamed them. Are you people high?

The wording below of the ballot question is clearly “rejecting a tax increase”.

> A "no" vote repeals five sections of HB 3991 related to tax and fee increases, including increases to the state's gas tax from $0.40 to $0.46, payroll tax for transportation from 0.1% to 0.2%, and vehicle registration and title fees, with revenue dedicated to the State Highway Fund for transportation funding.

> They are voting to give themselves a pay raise

A no vote would mean they earn the same they did before they vote. Earning the same is not a pay raise.

Waymo is subsidized. They operate vehicles without paying for the cost of the road, land, or surrounding parking.

That's like owning a train system and not paying for the tracks. Yeah... that's a huge part of it.

There's also indirect subsidies, for example the cost of land and housing. Cars are extremely space inefficient, so they encourage poor urban design that results in huge amounts of land wasted.

Well... the land and property that's left is then inflated in price. You could consider that cost difference as a subsidy to all drivers.

And you don’t have to worry that some random passenger will piss, puke, or shit in the Waymo during your commute.

The first two happened to me within the span of a month during the three years that I rode Trimet in Portland.

> And they're not profitable.

That part should be worrying; will they need to increase prices significantly when they decide to become profitable?

But more broadly, I agree that Waymo is an improvement over taxis or Uber/Lyft. The comparison to public transit is a complicated and local question (I don't live in Portland and have never ridden TriMet), but in general I think there's a place for both.

>If a tax is a function of the worker's income, it doesn't really matter (except for nominal terms) whether the worker or employer pays the taxes,

yes, I took a lot of micro (and macro too for that matter) but if what you say were true, neither political party nor activists would go on and on about taxing "corporations". You should direct your comments toward the parties that do that. But of course, you would get downvoted because the parties that do that don't want to hear otherwise. That's what I was doing, trying to explain ecomonics in ways they'd be receptive to, because telling people how things work is always a good thing even if they are not ready to go all the way.

also, in terms of pure micro, indirectly taxing things is never as efficient as directly taxing them, which you are not accounting for. The inefficiency tax in the form of "lower overall employment" is not easily measured even though we know it's quite significant and as impactful as "well this tax averages out the same" when it's not the same.

ah, good correction, that's why the self employed hate them, they have to pay both halves.

the main reason for the distaste is that self-employed people generally fall in the class of people who do a better job preparing for retirement, and the govt old age/retirement systems are not intelligently run, it's more like "money under the bed" that gets raided to pay the current generation of old people rather than being saved not saved for the future. That same money in a private insurance account would offer the better returns as investment accounts do.

the reason the retirement funds are set to go bankrupt is that there are a lot of baby boomers. This is not the baby boomers fault, when govt retirement programs were set up back in the depression era, it gave pension eligibility to people who had not paid into a retirement system, paid for by current workers, and that can kept getting kicked down the road. I don't think anybody wants to see penniless old people, they simply want a government that plans ahead and doesn't keep kicking the can down the road, and doesn't raid pension monies to use as "free money" to pay for other government pork.