That still means it is 38% subsidized by the taxpayer, right? Farebox recovery is important but you need to also take into account in absolute terms the cost minus recovery.
Other people have pointed out that roads are subsidized heavily through taxes, but just to be blunt: nobody is asking you to specially subsidize public transit. We are just asking taxpayers to treat public transit with the same deference they treat the road system. The people who use our public transit system in Washington are taxpayers too as we all pay sales tax equally. And if they rent they pay property tax indirectly via their landlord.
Nobody is getting a free ride except if we continue to disproportionately fund the road system at the expense of denser forms of transportation.
That’s about $1,500 per commuter. Note that is an overestimate, because it ignores the commercial uses of roads (package delivery, ambulances, etc). Also it ignores bus riders, who make up most of the 7 million or so transit riders.
State and local sources spend $1.8 billion on WMATA each year. There are about 600,000 linked trips per day, so at most 300,000 commuters. That’s $6,000 per commuter.
(Note both numbers above exclude federal spending, but Metro is heavily subsidized by federal dollars.)
Another thing to consider, for cars, is that these things need PARKING SPACES. For an already dense city that means large, multilevel parking garages dotted all over the city. How many more garages are we talking about for a half million more cars? A lot... enough to impact the nature and function of the city itself.
If you're going to make a case for private cars vs WMATA, there is a wider scope of things to evaluate than just operating cost.
>Another thing to consider, for cars, is that these things need PARKING SPACES.
Every single parking spot at any transit center in and around Seattle is full by 7AM. There was a new one built south of the airport at Angle Lake Station with something like 1000-1500 parking spots and you can't find anything past 7-8AM.
You wouldn't need more parking spots. For people commuting from outside the downtown core, Metro is already car-oriented, and operates 60,000 parking spots at stations (not including lots run privately or by VA/MD). For people traveling inside the downtown core, they could just take the bus--as lower income folks in D.C. already have to do because Metro doesn't go where they live.
The operating subsidy for rail is slightly less than for the bus, but that's dwarfed by the difference in annual capital expenditures (about $1 billion for rail versus $200 million for bus). Metro's fare recovery is a bit misleading, because most of its "capital budget" is actually for maintenance and repair, which is an operating cost.
Also, the bus serves much lower income people than rail--I'm okay with it receiving subsidies.
According to the FY 2019 budget [1], operating expenses of busses are much more heavily subsidized than rail (recovery ratio of 23% for the former if you look at page 35).
There are no negatives to dense transportation. Discussing the economics of it simply ignores the future damages that will be sustained by the continued use of any individual transportation solutions, but particularly those that use fossil fuels.
Once you include those in your calculations, then $6000 per commuter is a drop in the bucket, and probably saved money rather than spent.
Not only that, 600K more trips on the roads would utterly choke traffic. It would be impossible, I think, to accommodate many more cars let alone the increased maintenance required to sustain it.
The capacity issue is relevant, but roads require maintenance due to large trucks and weather, not cars. Asphalt damage increases with the cube of the vehicle weight.
Road damage rises steeply with axle weight, and is estimated "as a rule of thumb... for reasonably strong pavement surfaces" to be proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight. This means that doubling the axle weight will increase road damage (2x2x2x2)=16 times. For this reason trucks with a high axle weight are heavily taxed in most countries.
For a more concrete example, compare a Honda Civic (about 3000 lbs including passengers) and a bike + rider (call it 250 lbs). The ratio of road damage is 3000^4 / 250^4.
The car does over 20,000x as much damage to the road. And heavy trucks are much much worse, hence the taxes that wikipedia mentions.
I've heard people complain that bikes don't pay gas taxes to fund road work. While that may be true of new construction, nobody's ever repaved a road because too many bikes rode on it. And if we're talking about taxing bike riders to pay for new construction, how about we spend it on separated bike paths instead of dumping it into more roads for cars? No bike rider wants to be sharing the road with you, it's just the only option in most places.
I don't think I've ever seen a sidewalk being replaced because of age (or any other reason for that matter). Bike paths don't suffer much more wear. I think you underestimate the life span of asphalt.
>I don't think I've ever seen a sidewalk being replaced because of age
Walking over uneven surfaces is much more comfortable than using a wheeled vehicle, so long as those surfaces are flat. Everyone will bitch and moan about a road that's in rough shape. Nobody really cares if it's a sidewalk (sucks for the disabled though).
I've seen sidewalks get replaced due to age but I don't live in CA where it's 70 degrees year round.
Many places have relatively new construction, so it's not yet been an issue. It's rather common for older cities like DC, or places with a lot of freeze cycles and or trees. https://ddot.dc.gov/service/sidewalk-repair
That's a significant underestimate, it ignores police costs and debt on past highway spending etc. Federal spending is also a much larger subsidy for the highway system than Metro.
Subway system looks expensive largely because it pays for everything under one umbrella.
It's a bit disingenuous to compare these modes of transport solely based on cost per commuter.
Think about how much space along the route is reserved for the typical train commuter versus the amount of space reserved for car commuters. The train commuter has the rail corridor, train stations, bus, bus lanes, etc. all reserved for their use. But the car commuter has the entirety of the roadway, all parking spaces, parking garages, etc. reserved for their use. Drivers are cheaper because they are way more spread out, and if you required the same density for both forms of transit driving would be far more expensive than train travel.
Edit: Additionally, the road right-of-way was purchased and built at the time all of the structures were built. This lead to dramatically cheaper land values than when trains are being retrofitted into existing cities.
The real question is whether you value density or whether you're willing to require that the people in your city sprawl all over the countryside. I don't have a pat answer for that because it's a matter of values, but I do believe that we've gone too far in the direction of sprawl and that a sizeable portion of my home city wants to live closer together with easier access to commercial districts, and we would like to do that without needing a car to get around.
I think that letting us do that benefits everyone because we're basically asking you if we can take up less space in exchange for some taxes. And I don't think it's an unreasonable trade for most people.
Right, but then you also have to account for the value created by the transit system that isn’t captured in fares. A lot of property has higher value because it’s near a transit stop, and a lot of economic activity is created by the ease of access it facilitates.
Imagine if you were the government of NYC (also sub-100% farebox recovery) and someone offered to remove the subway system for free. No more losing money to subsidize it! Would you take that offer? No, that would be insane.
It might be partially funded by taxpayer money. Is that benefiting the taxpayer by reducing road congestion or having cleaner air? (I don’t know the answer to this for any given metro, but it’s the question that needs answering)
That’s probably the wrong way to think about things. Good roads or any transport system allows frictionless trade of goods and services. This means more money moving in the economy and hopefully a boost for the country. This means more taxes back to the govt.
Taxes is how the govt makes money so it’s in their interest to make its citizens wealthier by making it easy for them to move around and do businessy and worky tings.
You dont have to use public transit to benefit from it. You will see reduced traffic and a healthier economy (low income people can get to jobs at all, everyone can get to more jobs in a shorter time span, reducing friction in the basic capitalism of the job market, heck, even things as simple as "can a one car family drop off their car for repair?" (Meaning fewer on-the-road incidents, less stressed people, etc)
It is possible for a transit system to not be worthwhile, but "Do I user it? and "Does it pay for itself?" are inadequate to determine that.
Traffic is a great point. Every time someone chooses to take the subway or a bus over driving, traffic becomes slightly more tolerable for people in cars.
"Report: 98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others"
"Expanding mass transit isn't just a good idea, it's a necessity," Holland said. "My drive to work is unbelievable. I spend more than two hours stuck in 12 lanes of traffic. It's about time somebody did something to get some of these other cars off the road."
Except it won't because there's so much pent up demand for transit. A little extra capacity will be instantly used up by the people who were formerly inconveniencing themselves by leaving late/early.
Increasing throughput doesn't prevent you from being able to max out the system at peak usage times (rush hour), it just means that the rush hour traffic doesn't last as long.
