[venturecruelty]

Call me crazy, but maybe mass transit doesn't need to make money to be useful. Maybe the entire point of government is to provide services to its citizens. I mean, I don't pay $2.40 every time we drone strike some Yemeni wedding, right? Why should I have to pay to take a train in a city, which is about a thousand times more useful to me?

>People that drive cars actually pay most of the cost to upkeep car infrastructure. people that ride the T dont.

This is... so ridiculously untrue. Most car-dependent infrastructure is funded with federal dollars, the vast majority of which are conjured up out of thin air and vibes.

[SoftTalker]

You can say the same thing about most federal spending.

Car and truck owners pay fuel tax and registration tax (hundreds or thousands of dollars a year, especially heavy trucks) which all ostensibly goes to road upkeep and related infrastructure. It may not cover all the costs but neither do transit fares.

I don't know anything about Boston's system but most transit agencies would need to have fares in the tens of dollars per ride, at least, to come anywhere close to covering their costs. This is much closer to the costs of using a car, probably not coincidentally. Getting from point A to point B has a value that is independent of the transport mechanism.

[anthonypasq]

> Call me crazy, but maybe mass transit doesn't need to make money to be useful.

This is such a heinous non-sequiter i dont even know where to begin. Government services take money to operate. Government services are paid by taxes. In a democracy, you need to make people agree that they want to pay taxes for particular services.

The 60% of massachusetts residents who dont live in teh greater boston metro area do not want to pay for a service they dont use, so it is nearly politically impossible to raise the budget of the MBTA.

So if you are a massachusetts state legistlator you have a couple options. you can allow the MBTA to continue to deteriorate while also going over budget every year (current state) or you could increase the fare to compensate for the actual cost it takes to run the service, or your third option, which is to decrease the amount of money that goes to an already deteriorating public service.

edit: 50-55% of car related infrastructure costs are paid by gas taxes, tolls, excise taxes etc. currently <30% of the mbtas budget is covered by fares.

[Arainach]

Services have costs. They don't lose money. No one says the US military "loses hundreds of billions of dollars a year" or expects them to cover it back.

[anthonypasq]

??? did you actively not read my comment before posting this?