| >Transportation infrastructure isn’t meant to be financially viable. Not profitable != not financially viable. At some point, anything that loses too much money becomes not become viable. Transportation isn't exempt from this. >Interstates aren’t profit centers. US highways do pay for themselves <https://web.archive.org/web/20170712175437/www.rita.dot.gov/...>, and help pay for other modes of transportation. Transit receives the biggest subsidy per passenger-mile, with rail and airlines in between. (For those wishing more detail: From the executive summary <https://web.archive.org/web/20170628114204/http://www.rita.d...>: >*Highways* >* Users of the highway passenger transportation system paid significantly greater amounts of money to the federal government than their allocated costs in 1994-2000. <https://web.archive.org/web/20170628114204/http://www.rita.d...> This was a result of the increase in the deficit reduction motor fuel tax rates between October 1993 and September 1997, and the increase in Highway Trust Fund fuel tax rates starting in October 1997. >* School and transit buses received positive net federal subsidies over the 1990-2002 period, but autos, motorcycles, pickups and vans, and intercity buses paid more than their allocated cost to the federal government. >* On average, highway users paid $1.91 per thousand passenger-miles to the federal government over their highway allocated cost during 1990-2002.) track |
* This includes an important subsidy from urban road users - who are federal funding ineligible - to highway users. * Federal funding is only 25% of highway spending, the rest being state and local funds. * Most road expansion capital projects deliver worse increased passenger throughput per dollar than highway projects.
Regarding costs, a good rule of thumb is the best performing road networks pay for half their expenses with user fees (Texan highways). Some poorly performing ones like Maryland are at 20% (http://www.actfortransit.org/archives/testimonies/2009Apr29T...). Owen D. Gutfreund’s Twentieth-Century Sprawl is a good reference.
The final logical mistake in this line of analysis is looking at per rider subsidies between roads and transit, since American transit systems are uniquely inefficient precisely because of the burdens on transport laden by the road system. You can’t build densely because everyone thinks their cars won’t fit in the new urban geometry, but density is a precursor to successful transit. So we are stuck in an equilibrium where we prop up despots around the world for gasoline while everyone hates their commute.