[antennafirepla]

Everything costs money. The cost is relatively low to the public and economic benefit from plentiful public transit. Breaking even financially would be icing on the cake. Public transit is a service, we should expect it to cost money — and not necessarily pass 100% of the cost to passengers, since it needs to be affordable to provide the full benefit to people.

[mousethatroared]

Let's agree that the service should be subsidized. Let's establish that Im amenable to a free service 100% tax payer.

I am, in fact amenable to this.

How do you establish fairness though?

Best case scenario, say in the US ex-NYC, you will always have 20-40% of people needing to ride their cars because the tails of the distribution are prohibitively expensive.

Nor are these people necessarily wealthy - the economically wealthiest class of people are urban dinks.

So how to do you establish fairness to this 20-40% of people subsidizing the others?

[rsynnott]

> So how to do you establish fairness to this 20-40% of people subsidizing the others?

Well, for a start, they're not, necessarily. That thing they're driving on, it didn't magically appear, you realise. Road maintenance and construction is a _huge_ part of total transport spending.

[mousethatroared]

Im in favor of raising the gas tax to fully cover road maintenance.

We're back to square one - it doesn't cover the $100/hr that a cleaner has to subsidize. Give me a proposal, or an explanation, that makes this fair and Ill agree.

[GauntletWizard]

Yes, and road maintenance is proportional to the fourth power of the axle load. Busses are typically loaded at 4-8 times the per-axle weight of passenger cars.

[mousethatroared]

And speed.

So many problems would go away if we drastically lowered vehicle speeds. For starters we could drive lighter built cars.

[bgnn]

Like Luxembourg, just make it free for everyone! People will start using it out of convenience. Let it be subsidized by tax money, it is fair.