[ggreer]

In 2025, TriMet had 262 million passenger miles at a system cost of $812 million, for a cost of $3.09 per passenger mile.[1] Fares covered 7.8% of their costs. The other 92.2% came from payroll taxes and federal grants.

For comparison, a Lyft or Uber in the same area would cost you $1-2 per mile. Obviously it's not feasible for all 200k daily riders to take Uber/Lyft, and the Uber/Lyft cost doesn't include externalities like extra traffic, but TriMet is very expensive per passenger mile.

1. https://trimet.org/about/pdf/trimetridership.pdf

[array_key_first]

This is an implementation problem, not a problem with the underlying concept.

Public transit like buses and lightrail are significantly more efficient per person than personal vehicles. This is because they can transport many more people for the same amount of space and energy. They also typically run on set tracks, which yields more efficiency gains.

The US is really, really bad at doing public transit. It doesn't help that everything is car centric, which makes public transit much harder.

For example, in your comment you're excluding road cost, but you're including the full system cost of transit. That's a car centric side effect, e.g. we take roads for granted. But the cost of cars also includes the cost of roads, the cost of land under those roads, the cost of parking, etc.

[ggreer]

The $812 million figure for 2025 did not include the cost to build the rail system. Nor did it include many other expenses. TriMet's expenditures for this year are $1.185 billion.[1]

If you divide passenger miles for TriMet busses (141,726,107) by the number of revenue miles (21,195,016), you get an average of 6.7 passengers per bus, or around 10% of available seats. For MAX (the train) you get an average of 27.4 passengers per train, or around 16% of available seats. In both cases that's seats, not total capacity including standing room. I realize it's important to provision the system for peak demand, but still this seems very wasteful.

And because road wear scales with the fourth power of axle loading, a bus will typically cause 1,000x more road damage than a car.[2] Assuming every car on the road has only one occupant, this means that, on average, a TriMet bus causes 150x more road wear per occupant. The main externality created by cars is traffic.

I agree with you that public transportation can work. It clearly does in many places. But Portland's public transportation is dysfunctional, and I don't see that changing any time soon. That's why substitutes (even partial substitutes like Waymo) are beneficial. The more options people have for getting around, the better off they'll be.

1. https://trimet.org/budget/pdf/2026-adopted-budget.pdf

2. https://www.kgw.com/article/news/verify/yes-bus-more-road-da...

[bradleybuda]

> This is an implementation problem, not a problem with the underlying concept.

I agree. The question remains - why do U.S. municipalities universally and repeatedly fail to successfully implement rapid transit at an efficient price point? Buses, trains, and subways in America have ever-growing budgets (both in absolute and per customer mile terms) with ever-declining quality of service. Just asking for more tax revenue again and again is not the solution.

[baron816]

The problem seems to be that many people view government services as a jobs program. Unfortunately, you can't maximize the number of well paying jobs a program creates AND provide high quality service AND control costs.

[throwaway2037]

You raise a good point. My guess: It is not possible to provide what people need/want at a reasonable price point, especially in low density cities. As a result, it requires a lot of subsidies. I assume that cities create bus services primarily for people below middle class who may not be able to afford a car.

Re-read your same response, but replace "mass transit" with "private automobiles". The economic case is equally weak/negative. For a moment, imagine there is a small RaspberryPi-like device in your car that records every mile driven within city limits, then sends you a monthly bill for the true cost to maintain and police those roads. The cost would shock most users. Without a doubt, private automobiles are massively subsidised by tax payers. However, it is a democracy, and the voters are OK with it, so it continues.

To go further, there are very few mass transit systems in the world that do not require large gov't subsidies to operate. (I guess less than ten.) In all such cases, the gov't funds nearly 100% of the construction cost of railways.

[rootusrootus]

> buses and lightrail are significantly more efficient per person than personal vehicles

Assuming the transit is fully utilized and the car is mostly not. And maybe that's a good way to look at it. But in Portland the light rail is often well under capacity, and in that case a carpool likely wins on efficiency.

> the cost of cars also includes the cost of roads, the cost of land under those roads, the cost of parking

Partially. Those roads will have to exist even if we did not have personal cars.

[array_key_first]

Right, the reason it might be underutilized is if you're bad at designing cities for it. Which the US is, so it is.

We design cities for cars, which results in the cities spreading out further and further, which makes transit less desirable and more expensive. Other countries don't have this problem to this degree, because they don't design their cities exclusively for cars.

Also, I don't think most roads would need to exist if the amount of cars decreased. Because of the density problem noted above. Cars are sort of self-eating. The more cars you use, the more land-per-car you need as everything spreads further out to accommodate the cars.

[15155]

Portland was originally designed around mass transit and is a completely planned city - this argument does not hold water there specifically.

[xnx]

> is if you're bad at designing cities for it

Consider that the transportation system might not be the best fit if it requires designing the rest of the world differently and against preferences (large, detached, single-family homes with a yard).

[amanaplanacanal]

Those preferences are based at least partially on the available transportation. If the automobile didn't exist, would people still prefer to live so far from jobs and entertainment?

We also have the issue that dense inner cities are subsidizing the infrastructure for the spread out suburbs. If people had to pay the full cost they again might choose differently.

[troupo]

> Assuming the transit is fully utilized and the car is mostly not.

The car is mostly not.

> But in Portland the light rail is often well under capacity,

Haven't looked deeply into it, but looking at how the US plans and designs its public transport, I'm surprised anyone was using it at all.

[xnx]

Train-advocates being against self-driving cars will be recognized as being equivalent to environmentalists being against nuclear power. Fortunately, I don't expect train-advocates as being nearly as successful. Once someone has tried Waymo, there's no going back to the old ways.

[onethought]

But you're ignoring the core point (in both your metaphor and in the argument at hand):

- If everyone took a Waymo... Waymo sucks. Not true of trains.

($/MW of power is stupid with nuclear in the age of solar and batteries, with basically zero safety concern... i.e. you can deploy solar and batteries to houses... not so much for nuclear)

[Sankozi]

All take Waymo dedicated taxi - it sucks just like cars in heavy traffic.

All take Waymo shared taxi/minibus - it is better than current mass transit and almost as good as car during low traffic.

[array_key_first]

I'm not against self driving cars. Self driving cars are an improvement over not self driving cars.

But self driving cars are not public transit. That's a grift that the people making the self driving cars are selling, so they can sell a bunch of self driving cars. The most prominent example is the hyperloop in vegas.

Self driving cars will not solve the traffic, safety, time, or cost concerns around cars. They will help a little bit, marginal gains. But they will not solve it because it's not a departure from the status quo, it's just a continuation of it.

[HDThoreaun]

Public transit is only efficient if people use it. If there’s only 1 person on the bus it is less efficient than a car.

Almost everyone drives so the government needs to pay for roads either way. Public transit on the other hand is easy to cut. What matters here is marginal costs of people using ride shares instead of public transit, not the full cost of driving that would need to be paid either way.

[presto8]

> Public transit like buses and lightrail are significantly more efficient per person than personal vehicles.

I would be interested to see a study on that. I see many buses driving around with zero or one passengers on them. If a bus is full, the efficiency would be off the charts. But for a city like Portland, that only happens during commute times. The rest of the time, the buses are driving around empty.

[coryrc]

> in your comment you're excluding road cost

Partially not, as gas taxes cover part of it. I think gas and diesel taxes should cover the full cost of roads, which would help. Still doesn't mean transit should be run so inefficiently.

[jandrewrogers]

FWIW, some States require roads be funded exclusively with gas and use (e.g. vehicle registration) taxes. This does seem to significantly incentivize efficiency and long-term planning because their budget has to anticipate variable revenue.

[amanaplanacanal]

I didn't realize this was a thing. Which states are those?

[shimman]

Oh wow I didn't know Uber solely relied on private roads, had their own DMV, or fleet of millions of cars; truly an innovative company that doesn't rely on public infrastructure!

[danaw]

try it again while calculating infrastructure and road costs for 262mm uber/lyft rides

[xnx]

Because roads are a shared resource used by everyone (even non car owners) Uber/Lyft's portion is small and covered by taxes they already pay.

[hnav]

The point is that the cost of the road infrastructure isn't accounted for, not to mention the externality of having a half a million cars on the road to move 750k people. Rideshare is slipstreaming in the subsidized flow of cars.

[rhubarbtree]

What about infrastructure costs for lyft and uber?

Perhaps it isn’t expensive once you consider the peak load and externalities. How many new roads would you have to build to do that?