Comment by joe_the_user
19 hours ago
It’s a pretty normal concept that public transit is not a charitable program and must yield benefit commensurate with spend.
The benefits of public transit derive to all of society not necessarily those immediately riding it. That's true of a multitude of state spending, education, social services and so-forth.
The US doesn't directly charge for many of the costs of roads, certainly it doesn't charge for the drawback in the form of pollution and urban sprawl. But when you get to buses, suddenly "you're not a charitable problem..."
This argument has to face up to the fact that all of the best systems have high farebox recovery and all the American systems have low recovery except for NY (which is still lower than the good ones). Essentially, if it’s so great to have low farebox recovery why does the Tube, HK MTR, and Taipei MRT have high farebox recovery?
Theorycrafting is all well and good but if you claim that some metric X (farebox recovery) is negatively correlated with some outcome Y (frequent good transit) then you do have to explain why all the good outcome Ys actually have high X. Reality has to meet the theory.
> This argument has to face up to the fact that all of the best systems have high farebox recovery and all the American systems have low recovery except for NY (which is still lower than the good ones).
Perhaps drivers/commuters should also be better charged for the resources they use:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_price
We can let The Market™ decide what the alleged convenience of driving is worth.
We don't expect roads to be profitable. We don't expect airports to be profitable. But there is a solution to this as well. If the train operator owns the land around each station and collects rent on the shops and homes, they can become profitable.
Um, many airports are HIGHLY profitable where capitalism took on a Thatcherite turn.
I sudoect that airports can be far more portable than airlines, actually, since shopping, eating and drinking are much cheaper to deliver on the ground. And there’s parking too.
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