Comment by supertrope
21 hours ago
I think even more important than balance sheets is land use. There's a vicious cycle of car dependency. Things that make driving easy make alternatives bad (government built toll-free roads, mandated parking minimums, restrictive zoning, lack of sidewalks, lack of protected line lanes, wide and high speed urban roads).
A train service only earning 50% of its costs through ticket sales is okay if it provides a useful transportation network. But because we are so dependent on cars, people fight removing parking spots for a dedicated right of way. So public transit get stuck in traffic, and funding is kept at skeleton/welfare service levels resulting in 30 min to an hour between vehicles. The useful public transit network can't even get off the ground because no one believes there will be a critical mass of support to fund and build a useful network.
This here, public transit works when the city is built around it. You can't build public transit around a massive car centered pile of crap.
Where I am, we're getting the worst of it, where we're treated as if no one needs a car because there's a bus that comes by every half hour most of the day (unless it just doesn't show up), but we still get driving made more difficult without a viable alternative. It's frustrating.
Any mass transit system with more than 15 minutes between vehicles is a joke.