[Osiris]

SLC light rail is significantly cheaper than RTD. The furthest zones in Denver are $10 round trip. When I was in SLC it was $2.50 round trip for anywhere on the entire line (I'm sure it's more by now).

Personally I believe that public transportation pricing should be based on an algorithm to maximize ridership rather than on being self-sustaining. Since the point of public transit is to reduce traffic, people that prefer to drive should be subsidizing public transit through registration and gas taxes.

[saosebastiao]

Scaling costs for cars is linear (no congestion) to polynomial (congestion), whereas transit has scaling costs that are a step function on the level of an individual vehicle, and somewhat resembling a logarithmic scale in aggregate. That in itself isn't interesting until you understand the implications of subsidy policies.

For example, if you subsidize auto travel, you may pull people away from walking, cycling, or transit, and put them onto a congested freeway. Every marginal person that moves towards car use increases the costs of car use for every other car user. Transit, on the other hand, gets cheaper, on a per rider basis, with each new rider (although this can be muted if transit ridership is heavily biased in one direction, which can be the case for cities with strong central cores and no outer job centers, as half the buses may be riding at capacity while the other half are riding empty).

I essentially agree with you, but I'm of the opinion that if we would stop subsidizing cars, some small percentage of drivers would move back to transit, and that small percentage could be enough to make transit self-sustaining.

[akgerber]

One of the major subsidies for auto drivers is deeply hidden in land use policies requiring huge amounts of free parking at all new construction, rather than the amount the developer desires at the price that the market will bear.

Auto-oriented land-use regulations (single-family-only neighborhood zoning, minimum parking regulations that can only be cheaply satisfied by surface lots, minimum setbacks, minimum lot sizes, building-height limitations, etc) also cause buildings to be built so far apart, with seas of parking in between and a road network that's inhospitable to walking due to poor pedestrian connectivity and the danger of high-speed traffic, that it isn't possible for pedestrianism to offer meaningful competition to automobiles in much new construction in the US. And since most transit trips begin & end with a walking trip, transit (publicly- or privately-provided) likewise becomes uncompetitive. And this is essentially all due to government policy, often at the local level but also sometimes essentially federally mandated due to FHA mortgage requirements and the like.