[rootusrootus]

> Why is it fair for public transit riders to have to pay per ride

In my city public transit fares only cover something like 10% of the cost. Isn’t that fairly typical?

> car owners get to use the infrastructure for free

Every place I’ve lived charges a fuel tax to pay for roads.

[ryan_lane]

> In my city public transit fares only cover something like 10% of the cost. Isn’t that fairly typical?

Sure, but the budget for transit is also extremely tight, especially compared to car infrastructure.

If only 10% of the costs are covered, that's even more motivation to not charge fees at all, right? Why impose that burden? More people riding public transit means less cars on the road, and less traffic, which is good for everyone.

> charges a fuel tax to pay for roads

For the most part fuel taxes haven't increased to cover the costs of roads (it hasn't increased with inflation at all, federally), and they typically cover highways. Recently, a number of places have been looking at pausing or removing fuel taxes to reduce costs of fuel, due to the Iran war. Most states cover the cost of roads primarily through their general funds.

[koyote]

> In my city public transit fares only cover something like 10% of the cost. Isn’t that fairly typical?

Quite a few areas have their public transit fully funded by users and some even make a substantial profit. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio)

The US obviously loses out to places like Japan because you have the chicken and egg problem: to make money back you need enough people but for enough people to use public transport you need to invest in it.

> Every place I’ve lived charges a fuel tax to pay for roads.

Which, ironically, often only covers something like 10% of the cost :)

[asdff]

Fuel tax doesn’t often cover everything. LA metro actually spends an appreciable fraction of its budget on highway and road expansion for example.

[rootusrootus]

Sure, I wouldn't expect fuel tax to cover everything. Local roads are quite useful to people who do not drive at all, and major roads and interstates are disproportionately worn by commercial vehicles that also benefit many people who do not drive private vehicles.

[asdff]

Indeed. After all, roads predate the car by thousands of years. But still, often roads are overbuilt and their potential capacity is never close to being reached. The bog standard suburban design we see in america for example is generally severely overbuilt. Plenty of arterials nowhere close to being used to their theoretical throughput limits. If your experience of suburbia is mostly american centric, if you look at say english suburbia where major roads only offer a single lane per direction you'd wonder how society there functions at all. But it does, because those single lane per direction have enough capacity to serve a generally denser version of suburbia than what we might see on the fringes of Dallas, where giant empty roads such as this (1; note how there are barely any cars in frame) are found on standardized 1 mile square grids out of routine more than anything really. Compare with (2) which feels much more right sized for the road demand in this generally denser suburban area on smaller lots with attached housing.

1. https://www.google.com/maps/@33.1890836,-96.7504787,3a,75y,1...

2. https://www.google.com/maps/@51.3698269,-0.1403251,3a,89.7y,...