[jonhohle]

Isn’t this the communist/socialist philosophy that ends up driving programs into mediocrity at best and awful at worst? If a program can’t pay for itself, what incentive does it have to be efficient and operate in the interest of riders? It’s now become a bureaucrat’s slush fund which will see an ever increasing budget divorced from the service it provides.

Others have mentioned public schools, and I would agree. For as expensive as many private schools are, the average cost per student is about 60% that of public schools.

Getting rid of turnstiles and other populating recording devices spreads the gap between ridership and funding even further. Minus fare evasion, there is a direct correlation between fares and riders. Programs to provide free transportation based on income are already available in many metro areas.

Everyone loves “free” stuff, but when it’s not really free, and the cost are just hidden in taxes, most people lose. Being cheaper to fund through taxes now has nothing to do with future costs that no longer correlate to ridership.

[PaulHoule]

I'd put it this way.

If you paid for the bus 100% with your fare it would be completely scalable. If transit demand doubled, revenue would double and they could run twice as many buses.

A fixed amount of public spending (typically 75% of expenses in many transit systems) is not scalable. You could double or triple bus ridership but service deteriorates because you don't get buses. The municipality, bus company, etc. have every incentive for transit promotion to fail because more people taking transit blows up their budget.

Note there is a good case for subsidization in that people riding the bus create benefits for others: 20 people riding the bus can take 20 cars off the road which makes life better for drivers, pedestrians, etc.

[jonhohle]

I am very much in favor of public transportation, especially light rail. The best systems I’ve used were Seoul and Tokyo. I rode King Metro most working days into Seattle for four years. When I lived near DC I’d rarely drive in because I preferred taking the metro trains.

The solution to congestion, imho, is making public transportation acceptable to the largest customer base by making it clean, convenient, and timely. That might not capture the poorest or the richest, but they still benefit from less congestion, noise, and air pollution.

Making it good would provide more benefits to most cities than making it free, imho.

[nerdbert]

> If a program can’t pay for itself

The problem is that the most valuable benefits of public transit, such as reduced congestion, reduced pollution, saved lives, etc., aren't priced in such a way that the transit system can charge the beneficiaries.

Instead, the way we run things, transit systems are stuck having to recover their operating expenses from the kind people who volunteer to ride them and thereby create all the real benefits.

[uv-depression]

Does the US interstate pay for itself?

> Isn’t this the communist/socialist philosophy

No. This is about changing how something is paid for under capitalism, and is a very normal way of paying for things under this system.

> If a program can’t pay for itself, what incentive does it have to be efficient and operate in the interest of riders?

The main problem with making it profit-based is that skimming off the top is the basic operating principle; you have strong incentives to make it less safe, not do upgrades, abuse inelastic demand &c. One should hope that the people elected (or appointed by someone elected) would have an incentive to work in the public's interest because they won't be re-elected otherwise, though obviously this doesn't always work. But that's _already_ a problem that needs fixing, so why not two birds with one stone rather than switching over to a funding system absolutely filled to the brim with bad incentives that repeatedly fails us?

> Getting rid of turnstiles and other populating recording devices spreads the gap between ridership and funding even further.

I'm not really sure what you're arguing here.

> Everyone loves “free” stuff, but when it’s not really free, and the cost are just hidden in taxes, most people lose.

The costs are not hidden, they're in your taxes. I also strongly disagree that most people lose when you fund things through taxes. That seems completely ignorant of how a ton of infrastructure and much of society is run.

> Being cheaper to fund through taxes now has nothing to do with future costs that no longer correlate to ridership.

The argument was that funding it not through fares is already _better_ because it can be adjusted to those situations.