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by jltsiren 844 days ago
Subsidizing public transit to make it affordable is a terrible idea. If you want good public transit with stable funding, you must build it primarily for the middle class. For people who pay more taxes than they receive benefits and who could choose to drive instead.

Driving has high fixed costs and low marginal costs. If you have a car anyway, using it for yet another trip is cheap. If you want to make public transit competitive with driving, you must make the fares low enough. That often means paying a substantial fraction of the expenses from taxes. But why would you do that? Because once a city grows large enough and dense enough, public transit becomes cheaper than car infrastructure. Because it requires less subsidies than driving.
1 comments
johnnyanmac 844 days ago
>For people who pay more taxes than they receive benefits and who could choose to drive instead.

that doesn't make sense. You just described the issue: they can choose to drive. And many do in the US.

Government subsidizes transport to get more people into the city hubs, which bolsters the economy of business as more people can reach downtown, which gives the town/city more money in taxes. These business have fixed costs so it's not like a rich person is going to be proportionately better to business than a poor person buying the bare necessities.

It makes a lot more sense to target people who are taken out of the economy pool otherwise without such transportation. Especially if we're talking about a large city like LA.

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and while it's a cliche, it needs to be asked in this context: what even is "middle class" here?

>If you want to make public transit competitive with driving, you must make the fares low enough. That often means paying a substantial fraction of the expenses from taxes.

I argue that such a "low enough bar" for a state like California will never outdo the convenience of a car. You're right in the long term that less cars => lower road maintenance => less road subsidies => more money to go around to other parts of the state. But we're not starting from scratch here.

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jltsiren 844 days ago
Public services used by people who can afford the alternatives are universally better than those intended for the poor. If you don't use the service yourself, you don't care that much about the quality, and you are more likely to support funding cuts. Because the poor are a minority, most people don't really care about services used by them.
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johnnyanmac 844 days ago
>If you don't use the service yourself, you don't care that much about the quality, and you are more likely to support funding cuts.

If you don't use the service it doesn't matter if it's a hunk of junk or a limousine, it's your tax money for a service you don't care about and will cut it anyway. You may be more likely to cut a limousine if you don't personally use it.

>Because the poor are a minority, most people don't really care about services used by them.

I don't know about minority, especially in these times. But minority or not, welfare programs take up 20% or so of government spending. It's a large enough population being serviced that it can't be ignored.

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