[midasuni]

Cars have such a low price because the cost of them is not born by the person purchasing them.

[listenallyall]

Are there any large-scale public transportation systems that aren't reliant on huge government subsidies?

London: 3.6b pounds https://www.google.com/search?q=london+tube+government+subsi...

New York: $7.2 billion https://new.mta.info/budget/MTA-operating-budget-basics

Amsterdam: 370m euros for 3 months service https://www.railjournal.com/financial/dutch-government-provi....

Ok, Hong Kong appears to turn a profit.

[woodruffw]

This is the wrong question: the right question is whether public transit is more subsidized per passenger-mile (or freight mile) than our road networks.

(Even more abstractly, it doesn’t matter whether or not public transit is highly subsidized, so long as the positive externalities of that subsidization are deemed worth it. You don’t get to the size and density (and corresponding economic output) of cities like NYC by allocating personal parking space for every resident.)

[dukeyukey]

Not many, especially if you include car travel - very few roads are privately built, compared to what the government does.