I posted another comment that did some analysis on fuel taxes and road spending (in the US). One thing I’d like to point out is that a true comparison is very

I posted another comment that did some analysis on fuel taxes and road spending (in the US). One thing I’d like to point out is that a true comparison is very hard because heavy public vs private transit result in qualitatively different systemic outcomes that are hard to fully account for monetarily (one results in denser development with its own pros and cons vs dispersed development). And you definitely need to account for the personal costs of car ownership (the car, financing, depreciation, insurance, parking, gas) rather than just the government spending on roads when comparing against public transit. Private transit taxes in aggregate do pay for most private transit spending but to me that is not as big of a deal as some make out. For starters those taxes are disproportionately coming from things like freight. Considering private transit costs + government spending vs public transit fares + government spending I don’t think the proportion coming from taxes vs OOP changes much, it’s just a different cost structure where some people (freight, gas guzzler drivers vs heavy transit users and high income people) pay proportionately more. The payment problem is indeed a challenge. I think a big problem with public transit is that it’s really expensive and wasteful to halfass it; you’re better off in a lot of cases accepting a local optimum of little/no public transit than a small or medium amount that ends up being cost-ineffective. In a lot of countries like Germany, granted they are denser than the US (but comparable to Mass) even small towns have good rail or bus connections to transit hubs. That’d help a lot more than forcing someone in the boonies to pay for something they won’t benefit from (though I take issue with that framing as rural areas typically consume more spending than they receive unless they are wealthy suburbs (with wealth coming from the cities) vs urban areas, so if the project truly benefits the urban area economically, it will still help the rural folks).