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Great to see. Our tax money subsidizes car ownership (quite massively) already, glad to see some equity here. Everyone kicks and screams about transit systems "

Great to see. Our tax money subsidizes car ownership (quite massively) already, glad to see some equity here. Everyone kicks and screams about transit systems "paying for themselves" but nobody asks the same of huge highways in the middle of nowhere.

huebomont 7y ago
The problem is there's no additional investment into the system to make it attractive to riders. The KC transit system is poorly designed and making it free isn't going to make it good. Better to keep charging the fare and use the revenue to improve service, then reevaluate when ridership is growing. Transit investment has a LOT of catching up to do to even get close to the types of subsidizing and handouts we give drivers in every corner of this country.
- bobthepanda 7y ago
  Past experience shows generally that things like tolling or road pricing only become politically palatable if an alternative with existing capacity already exists. But funding such alternatives is hard and usually road pricing is proposed in part for the funding. So it's a very chicken vs egg situation.
  - huebomont 7y ago
    It's not a hard chicken/egg situation though - put money into making transit a viable alternative for these roads, then start charging for the roads when there's another option. We don't think twice about spending billions eternally digging up and reconfiguring our highways, so we could do the same to transit, for much more bang for the buck.
    - bobthepanda 7y ago
      The main issue is that historically in the US, transit operational funding is a strictly state and below matter, but the feds are happy to stump much of the bill for highways. And states and cities generally have fewer resources. With such a strong urban-rural political divide these days, and suburban views of transit ranging from apathetic to hostile, federal support for transit operations is unlikely. Personally, I would be a fan of devolving transport funding entirely to solve this issue.
      - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
        The reason for the distinction is that federal highways are interstate. Neither New York nor San Francisco is going to be willing to pay for highways to connect the two cities, but we all benefit from being able to get from one side of the country to the other. But arguing that states and cities have fewer resources is ridiculous. Cities have more resources than anybody -- they're where the highest income people live. It's the rural areas that have no money, but mass transit is useless there anyway, because it's too spread out and there is no need for it there because those areas have no traffic congestion. The cities are where mass transit works as the cities are where the money is. It's only a matter of popular will.
        bobthepanda 7y ago
        Cities give a lot more in federal taxes than they get, hence the "less available resources." Things like eliminating the state and local tax deduction have also hurt urban areas. If transportation taxes were devolved to the states or the localities then there would be a lot more public transportation funding.
        AnthonyMouse 7y ago
        Cities give a lot more in federal taxes than they get, but the percentage of what they give that goes to transportation funding is negligible. >75% of the federal budget is social security, medicare/healthcare and the military, and the next biggest category after that is interest on the debt. Transportation is only ~2%, and almost half of that is things like aviation, railroads and funding for local public transit. If you want more local money in the cities then there's a lot more to be had by e.g. raising the retirement age than by eliminating federal highway funding, which we still kind of need unless you want to stop maintaining the interstate highways. Or if you really want to restore state fiscal control, transfer social security and medicare entirely to the states, and make the National Guard constitute more of the military.
- baddox 7y ago
  > The problem is there's no additional investment into the system to make it attractive to riders. It seems to me that public transit probably follows the law of demand fairly strongly, and reducing the price will almost certainly make it more attractive to riders. Of course this won't fix all problems with public transit, and I don't think that's the goal. It sounds like the goal is to increase ridership (and specifically to increase access to people who cannot easily afford the fares). > Better to keep charging the fare and use the revenue to improve service Or...use tax revenue to improve the service. That's the point, and is exactly what happens with most public roads.
  - bobthepanda 7y ago
    The question is whether or not $9M annually would be better off making more useful transit. As it stands, very little of KC is covered by frequent transit throughout the day, and in fact much of it is covered by services that don't run the entire day. https://ridekc.org/assets/uploads/route-maps/SystemMap.pdf https://ridekc.org/assets/uploads/route-maps/SystemMap.pdf A free bus that runs every hour is still going to screw you over if you mistime your walk to the bus stop and it leaves without you. The bus not being available at noon is not made better because it is free, because there's still no bus to take.
    - baddox 7y ago
      But the point is to offer rides for free and use other money (presumably tax money) to maintain (and hopefully invest in more) infrastructure. I don't see how the current quality of the KC infrastructure is relevant: if it's bad, then they clearly the $9m in fare revenue isn't cutting it, and they already need tax revenue to make it better. If they can't or don't get the tax revenue they need, then that's definitely a problem!
      - huebomont 7y ago
        You leave out the possibility that they could run much better service with the money they have and they need to plan better. I don't know if that's the case here, but it's always the first thing to ask. Too many poorly run transit systems skip right over that to dumping more money into a poorly planned system and wonder why it doesnt work.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  Being free makes it a hell of a lot more attractive to a lot of people.
- rayiner 7y ago
  > Transit investment has a LOT of catching up to do to even get close to the types of subsidizing and handouts we give drivers in every corner of this country. That’s completely untrue. Yes we spend more on vehicles than transit. But way more people drive than use transit. There is not even a comparison. In 2016 federal and state spending on road, transit, and water infrastructure was $416 billion: https://www.bidnet.com/resources/business-insights/us-government-spending-highway-infrastructure-en.jsp https://www.bidnet.com/resources/business-insights/us-govern.... Water is about 1/3 of that, leaving $276 billion for transportation. Spending on transit was $65 billion, or 1/4 the transportation spend. Transit, however, accounts for just 5% of commutes: https://www.bts.gov/content/commute-mode-share-2015 https://www.bts.gov/content/commute-mode-share-2015. 85% is driving alone or in a car pool. So we spend 3x as much on road infrastructure, but 17x as many people drive to work as take transit. If you run the numbers on a cents of subsidy per passenger mile basis, busses and subway trains come out to $0.50+ per passenger mile. Roads are just $0.02 per passenger mile. Even adding in CO2 footprint and pollution (assuming that cars are all ICE) puts you at about $0.25. Transit is incredibly expensive.
  - kasey_junk 7y ago
    I’m not disagreeing with your broader point but none of those studies account for space utilization issues. Transit uses space better due to lack of parking and more density per track. No idea how that impacts the actual dollar numbers but it’s worth noting.
    - weberc2 7y ago
      The cost per passenger per mile is two orders of magnitude lower for roads than for public transit; I can’t imagine parking space accounting for that.
      - kasey_junk 7y ago
        Parking space and the tracks/roads/right of ways themselves? I don’t expect it brings them to parity but I expect it’s non-trivial.
mrep 7y ago
> Everyone kicks and screams about transit systems "paying for themselves" If you mean paying for themselves with fares, then no, as most public transportation does not cover the costs with just fares [0]. For example, I'm in Seattle currently and the fares only cover 20-40% of costs [1]. Not that I am complaining as I take the bus to work everyday, but it's not a slam dunk case of invest more because it has a positive return on investment. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio [1]: https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/fare-revenue-annual-report-2017.pdf https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/fare-revenu...
- milkytron 7y ago
  I think what the original commenter meant was that people get upset because they don't want to subsidize transit systems, and would rather have them break even or turn a profit. What a lot of those same people don't understand, is that taxes pay for the road systems. The people that understand public transit realize that it's hard to recover the costs without assistance (taxes).
  - runarberg 7y ago
    I think exactly that happened in the last Washington state election. The state legislator put on the ballot a measure that would limit the amount the state could tax each car owner. Proponents would claim that the tax was going towards public transit infrastructure (like Sound Transit 3) and that it was unfair to tax car owners for that. The measure was approved.
    - julienb_sea 7y ago
      The measure was sold largely as a general flipping of the bird towards King and neighboring counties by the rest of the state. Generally there is opposition from eastern Washington for car tabs going to fund Sound Transit's investments on the western corridor, which doesn't really do anything to benefit those that don't live in the western corridor. And yes, I am aware that King net exports money to the east. I'm not sure how impactful that argument is for a minimum wage worker living far away from Seattle paying $500 a year on car tabs, for a car that they have no alternative but owning in order to get to their job.
stretchwithme 7y ago
I'd rather see nothing being subsidized. If you want to help the poor afford public transit, lower their taxes. Maybe not taking a substantial their working capital and giving it back to them when their old isn't such a bright idea either.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  One could cease to provide social security as it is structured if one replaced it with an alternative. We already know from US history that it is unwise (in a humanitarian sense) to trust the public to just save enough to retire comfortably (including having the foresight to keep their savings in assets that don't diminish in value before they are needed to offset continued life without labor into the system).
  - weberc2 7y ago
    I thought postwar America was known for investing in real estate to great wealth-building effect? I’m not sure how worthwhile other time periods are for comparison as our economy is so much different.
    - shadowgovt 7y ago
      Approximately 65% of Americans own their home.
      - weberc2 7y ago
        I’m not sure what point you’re making, if any. Care to elaborate?
        shadowgovt 7y ago
        If the up-thread reference to American real-estate investment implied Americans use real-estate ownership as a retirement nest-egg, the numbers do not bear out that hypothesis---or at least, do not show it's a solution much of America avails itself of. ... and that's ignoring that shocks like the mortgage crisis can happen, which indicates that home ownership isn't as stable a store of value as, say, the US dollar.
Koremat6666 7y ago
> but nobody asks the same of huge highways in the middle of nowhere. Building roads should move from government to fully private entities for the same reason. California has built roads from nowhere to nowhere for no reason other than local assemblyman was focused on getting them done. On other hand critical roads that would have helped commute distance, improved public transporation systems are in a bad state.
scarejunba 7y ago
Well, marginal dollar on road yields greater than marginal dollar to economy. Current political structures in the US means that marginal dollar on passenger rail is absorbed by the agents in charge of ensuring the rail existence. i.e. the $500 million railway and the $1 billion version of (say) the Central Subway will both yield probably the same economic benefit. Rent-seekers know that they can extract a large amount of economic rent because of government propensity to spend and political reasons that require governments to chase sunk costs. Because of the large amount of roadway in America, the number of parties you can call to get more road built is pretty big (as Thiel says, competition is the enemy of profit). And the primary place you put more road is out where there's nothing. Because of the existence of a large network of roads, you could build roads where there is nothing and it's easy to get to where there's something. Personally far prefer public transit so I'm pretty interested in ideas that change the structure of the interactions to pursue efficient construction.
- andys627 7y ago
  Do you have any sources for this info?
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    I have not kept them handy.
clairity 7y ago
it's true that public transportation has a net societal benefit, and that portion of the benefit should be paid for by all (through taxes or whatnot). however, fares shouldn't be zero. riders should pay too, not just because we should bear our portion of the direct benefit (we should), but also because it gives us a sense of ownership for the system. those fare revenues give transit agencies funds to improve service, and riders legitimacy in demanding better service. public transit needs to get better in every dimension: frequency, timeliness, coverage, capacity, cleanliness, etc.
throwaway894345 7y ago
Are you really willing to give up affordable transport (outside of your metropolis, anyway) and commercial goods? I know cars are Not Very Utopian or whatever, but public infrastructure has to have one of the better returns on investment with respect to tax dollars.
randyrand 7y ago
Another example SFO adds an additional ~$5 fee to leave or enter on BART, but drivers can arrive and drop off for free. Cars are massively subsidized.

huebomont 7y ago

The problem is there's no additional investment into the system to make it attractive to riders. The KC transit system is poorly designed and making it free isn't going to make it good. Better to keep charging the fare and use the revenue to improve service, then reevaluate when ridership is growing. Transit investment has a LOT of catching up to do to even get close to the types of subsidizing and handouts we give drivers in every corner of this country.

bobthepanda 7y ago
Past experience shows generally that things like tolling or road pricing only become politically palatable if an alternative with existing capacity already exists. But funding such alternatives is hard and usually road pricing is proposed in part for the funding. So it's a very chicken vs egg situation.
- huebomont 7y ago
  It's not a hard chicken/egg situation though - put money into making transit a viable alternative for these roads, then start charging for the roads when there's another option. We don't think twice about spending billions eternally digging up and reconfiguring our highways, so we could do the same to transit, for much more bang for the buck.
  - bobthepanda 7y ago
    The main issue is that historically in the US, transit operational funding is a strictly state and below matter, but the feds are happy to stump much of the bill for highways. And states and cities generally have fewer resources. With such a strong urban-rural political divide these days, and suburban views of transit ranging from apathetic to hostile, federal support for transit operations is unlikely. Personally, I would be a fan of devolving transport funding entirely to solve this issue.
    - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
      The reason for the distinction is that federal highways are interstate. Neither New York nor San Francisco is going to be willing to pay for highways to connect the two cities, but we all benefit from being able to get from one side of the country to the other. But arguing that states and cities have fewer resources is ridiculous. Cities have more resources than anybody -- they're where the highest income people live. It's the rural areas that have no money, but mass transit is useless there anyway, because it's too spread out and there is no need for it there because those areas have no traffic congestion. The cities are where mass transit works as the cities are where the money is. It's only a matter of popular will.
      - bobthepanda 7y ago
        Cities give a lot more in federal taxes than they get, hence the "less available resources." Things like eliminating the state and local tax deduction have also hurt urban areas. If transportation taxes were devolved to the states or the localities then there would be a lot more public transportation funding.
        AnthonyMouse 7y ago
        Cities give a lot more in federal taxes than they get, but the percentage of what they give that goes to transportation funding is negligible. >75% of the federal budget is social security, medicare/healthcare and the military, and the next biggest category after that is interest on the debt. Transportation is only ~2%, and almost half of that is things like aviation, railroads and funding for local public transit. If you want more local money in the cities then there's a lot more to be had by e.g. raising the retirement age than by eliminating federal highway funding, which we still kind of need unless you want to stop maintaining the interstate highways. Or if you really want to restore state fiscal control, transfer social security and medicare entirely to the states, and make the National Guard constitute more of the military.
baddox 7y ago
> The problem is there's no additional investment into the system to make it attractive to riders. It seems to me that public transit probably follows the law of demand fairly strongly, and reducing the price will almost certainly make it more attractive to riders. Of course this won't fix all problems with public transit, and I don't think that's the goal. It sounds like the goal is to increase ridership (and specifically to increase access to people who cannot easily afford the fares). > Better to keep charging the fare and use the revenue to improve service Or...use tax revenue to improve the service. That's the point, and is exactly what happens with most public roads.
- bobthepanda 7y ago
  The question is whether or not $9M annually would be better off making more useful transit. As it stands, very little of KC is covered by frequent transit throughout the day, and in fact much of it is covered by services that don't run the entire day. https://ridekc.org/assets/uploads/route-maps/SystemMap.pdf https://ridekc.org/assets/uploads/route-maps/SystemMap.pdf A free bus that runs every hour is still going to screw you over if you mistime your walk to the bus stop and it leaves without you. The bus not being available at noon is not made better because it is free, because there's still no bus to take.
  - baddox 7y ago
    But the point is to offer rides for free and use other money (presumably tax money) to maintain (and hopefully invest in more) infrastructure. I don't see how the current quality of the KC infrastructure is relevant: if it's bad, then they clearly the $9m in fare revenue isn't cutting it, and they already need tax revenue to make it better. If they can't or don't get the tax revenue they need, then that's definitely a problem!
    - huebomont 7y ago
      You leave out the possibility that they could run much better service with the money they have and they need to plan better. I don't know if that's the case here, but it's always the first thing to ask. Too many poorly run transit systems skip right over that to dumping more money into a poorly planned system and wonder why it doesnt work.
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
Being free makes it a hell of a lot more attractive to a lot of people.
rayiner 7y ago
> Transit investment has a LOT of catching up to do to even get close to the types of subsidizing and handouts we give drivers in every corner of this country. That’s completely untrue. Yes we spend more on vehicles than transit. But way more people drive than use transit. There is not even a comparison. In 2016 federal and state spending on road, transit, and water infrastructure was $416 billion: https://www.bidnet.com/resources/business-insights/us-government-spending-highway-infrastructure-en.jsp https://www.bidnet.com/resources/business-insights/us-govern.... Water is about 1/3 of that, leaving $276 billion for transportation. Spending on transit was $65 billion, or 1/4 the transportation spend. Transit, however, accounts for just 5% of commutes: https://www.bts.gov/content/commute-mode-share-2015 https://www.bts.gov/content/commute-mode-share-2015. 85% is driving alone or in a car pool. So we spend 3x as much on road infrastructure, but 17x as many people drive to work as take transit. If you run the numbers on a cents of subsidy per passenger mile basis, busses and subway trains come out to $0.50+ per passenger mile. Roads are just $0.02 per passenger mile. Even adding in CO2 footprint and pollution (assuming that cars are all ICE) puts you at about $0.25. Transit is incredibly expensive.
- kasey_junk 7y ago
  I’m not disagreeing with your broader point but none of those studies account for space utilization issues. Transit uses space better due to lack of parking and more density per track. No idea how that impacts the actual dollar numbers but it’s worth noting.
  - weberc2 7y ago
    The cost per passenger per mile is two orders of magnitude lower for roads than for public transit; I can’t imagine parking space accounting for that.
    - kasey_junk 7y ago
      Parking space and the tracks/roads/right of ways themselves? I don’t expect it brings them to parity but I expect it’s non-trivial.

mrep 7y ago

> Everyone kicks and screams about transit systems "paying for themselves" If you mean paying for themselves with fares, then no, as most public transportation does not cover the costs with just fares [0]. For example, I'm in Seattle currently and the fares only cover 20-40% of costs [1]. Not that I am complaining as I take the bus to work everyday, but it's not a slam dunk case of invest more because it has a positive return on investment. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio [1]: https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/fare-revenue-annual-report-2017.pdf https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/fare-revenu...

milkytron 7y ago
I think what the original commenter meant was that people get upset because they don't want to subsidize transit systems, and would rather have them break even or turn a profit. What a lot of those same people don't understand, is that taxes pay for the road systems. The people that understand public transit realize that it's hard to recover the costs without assistance (taxes).
- runarberg 7y ago
  I think exactly that happened in the last Washington state election. The state legislator put on the ballot a measure that would limit the amount the state could tax each car owner. Proponents would claim that the tax was going towards public transit infrastructure (like Sound Transit 3) and that it was unfair to tax car owners for that. The measure was approved.
  - julienb_sea 7y ago
    The measure was sold largely as a general flipping of the bird towards King and neighboring counties by the rest of the state. Generally there is opposition from eastern Washington for car tabs going to fund Sound Transit's investments on the western corridor, which doesn't really do anything to benefit those that don't live in the western corridor. And yes, I am aware that King net exports money to the east. I'm not sure how impactful that argument is for a minimum wage worker living far away from Seattle paying $500 a year on car tabs, for a car that they have no alternative but owning in order to get to their job.

stretchwithme 7y ago

I'd rather see nothing being subsidized. If you want to help the poor afford public transit, lower their taxes. Maybe not taking a substantial their working capital and giving it back to them when their old isn't such a bright idea either.

shadowgovt 7y ago
One could cease to provide social security as it is structured if one replaced it with an alternative. We already know from US history that it is unwise (in a humanitarian sense) to trust the public to just save enough to retire comfortably (including having the foresight to keep their savings in assets that don't diminish in value before they are needed to offset continued life without labor into the system).
- weberc2 7y ago
  I thought postwar America was known for investing in real estate to great wealth-building effect? I’m not sure how worthwhile other time periods are for comparison as our economy is so much different.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    Approximately 65% of Americans own their home.
    - weberc2 7y ago
      I’m not sure what point you’re making, if any. Care to elaborate?
      - shadowgovt 7y ago
        If the up-thread reference to American real-estate investment implied Americans use real-estate ownership as a retirement nest-egg, the numbers do not bear out that hypothesis---or at least, do not show it's a solution much of America avails itself of. ... and that's ignoring that shocks like the mortgage crisis can happen, which indicates that home ownership isn't as stable a store of value as, say, the US dollar.

Koremat6666 7y ago

> but nobody asks the same of huge highways in the middle of nowhere. Building roads should move from government to fully private entities for the same reason. California has built roads from nowhere to nowhere for no reason other than local assemblyman was focused on getting them done. On other hand critical roads that would have helped commute distance, improved public transporation systems are in a bad state.

scarejunba 7y ago

Well, marginal dollar on road yields greater than marginal dollar to economy. Current political structures in the US means that marginal dollar on passenger rail is absorbed by the agents in charge of ensuring the rail existence. i.e. the $500 million railway and the $1 billion version of (say) the Central Subway will both yield probably the same economic benefit. Rent-seekers know that they can extract a large amount of economic rent because of government propensity to spend and political reasons that require governments to chase sunk costs. Because of the large amount of roadway in America, the number of parties you can call to get more road built is pretty big (as Thiel says, competition is the enemy of profit). And the primary place you put more road is out where there's nothing. Because of the existence of a large network of roads, you could build roads where there is nothing and it's easy to get to where there's something. Personally far prefer public transit so I'm pretty interested in ideas that change the structure of the interactions to pursue efficient construction.

andys627 7y ago
Do you have any sources for this info?
- scarejunba 7y ago
  I have not kept them handy.

clairity 7y ago

it's true that public transportation has a net societal benefit, and that portion of the benefit should be paid for by all (through taxes or whatnot). however, fares shouldn't be zero. riders should pay too, not just because we should bear our portion of the direct benefit (we should), but also because it gives us a sense of ownership for the system. those fare revenues give transit agencies funds to improve service, and riders legitimacy in demanding better service. public transit needs to get better in every dimension: frequency, timeliness, coverage, capacity, cleanliness, etc.

throwaway894345 7y ago

Are you really willing to give up affordable transport (outside of your metropolis, anyway) and commercial goods? I know cars are Not Very Utopian or whatever, but public infrastructure has to have one of the better returns on investment with respect to tax dollars.

randyrand 7y ago

Another example SFO adds an additional ~$5 fee to leave or enter on BART, but drivers can arrive and drop off for free. Cars are massively subsidized.