To be fair, the subsidies are not mostly in highway building. Suburban feeder style streets (4-8 lanes with lights, turn lanes) get bigger subsidies and drive more sprawl. But even those are a smallish factor.
The big subsidy is free and cheap parking. Most American cities require that businesses and new homes provide enough parking for everyone who ever wants to come to park free. That's a subsidy equivalent to about $10-30k per car per year, depending on your local real estate costs. The outright majority of space in real estate development in the USA is devoted to satisfying this centralized Soviet style command-and-control mandate.
Countries with the most free market real estate development in the free world, like Japan, still build freeways. In fact, Japan has a silly amount of freeways because you don't even need or want a car usually. Those countries are different because they require a lot less parking.
So the induced demand and highway subsidy question is not the most central to the car dependence and sprawl question. Parking mandates are much more important to the way life is actually lived in America.
The shorter your commute via public transportation, the less traffic on the road.
With respect to the subsidization effort, there is very little transportation infrastructure in developed countries that is not subsidized in some way - though I'd like to see a discussion of that.
I can think of mining towns, logging roads, private university campuses, Disney World...what else?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_MTA_Maryland#Baltim...
You still can't, because in a society with strong property rights, all the land is owned by somebody, and unless you're out west where one person might own the vast majority of the requisite right-of-way, you have basically no chance of every acquiring all the rights at any reasonable price. Geometry is conspiring to incentivize people in the middle of any given path to hold out for more money by holding the prospect of failure over your head. Reality has even shown that many people irrationally overestimate how much they can squeeze from you, so you realistically face the prospect of many people believing they are the last holdout and trying to squeeze you for so much that it renders the entire project economical.
Thus, the only conceivably private public transport must run on the roads anyhow. Anything else is going to be created by some form of government action; in some sense calling it "subsidized" is almost misleading in that it's entirely created by the government in the first place, even if half-privatized after the fact.
All the instances you name are situations in which one singular entity owns all the land, and thus doesn't have the problem of having to coordinate with dozens of irrational people all trying to squeeze you for cash.
The problem is generating that capital. Most Americans simply don't care enough about transit for a politician running on the "Moar railways" platform to get elected.
Most of our passenger rail mass transit systems got built before reliable auto transportation became cheap. Now that cars are ubiquitous, the political will isn't there anymore.
I'm sorry I didn't spell out what I thought was a common-knowledge topic.
None of this is criticism; for exactly the reasons I discussed I don't see any practical alternatives to collective action at the governmental level.
Not quite - I think that's why you've got so many replies. The comment you were replying to said "subsidised" not "private", which are different things, so it looked like you were answering a question nobody had asked.
You can have unsubsidised state mass transport and subsidised private mass transport. Although not having a subsidy is rare, there are a few state services which are required to run at operational breakeven.
Please explain this further.
I'll say again those are the extremes, but it's a common local- or regional-interest story to read about someone holding out for more money because they're the last parcel needed for some development or something. Usually it's an easy "little guy sticking it to The Man" story for the local news human interest segments.
There is at least a sense in which turning down y is irrational. Of course it doesn't have to be irrational, but if they believe they would be better off with y and are simply trying to get more, there is some degree of unreasonableness involved.
That cuts both ways. There are very few subway systems in the world that are self-sustaining. You can't just say to not subsidize one way of life while demanding people subsidize another.
Secondly, it depends a lot on accounting. Consider that in Europe, most infrastructure doesn't get built until it has a positive cost-benefit ratio. Since transit does get build, it's overall positive economic impact apparently outweighs the cost - so overall they do 'bring in' more money than they take.
Thirdly, if you require a strict sense of 'bringing in more money than they take' as a specific organization building the infrastructure then charging for the access, I have to tell you that there are relatively few roads that 'make money'. In fact it's basically only some highways, and bridges -- high capacity trunk lines, and lines across choke points. This ignores the cost of large feeder networks, which are generally paid for by taxes. In North America, municipal taxes. This gets interesting when people who don't have cars subsidize single occupancy drivers via municipal taxes.
If you ignore feeder networks for transit, for example ignoring the cost of bus feeders, and only considering the cost of major trunk lines relative to the income of the whole system, then I'd say many subway systems in the world 'bring in more money than they take'.
You absolutely can. And you absolutely should, if the one you say should not be subsidized has net social cost compared to the other.
This is also observed in countries in Europe that don't have similar history in racism as the US. The perceived comfort is better in trams.
(Also me personally, I get motion sickness if I read in a bus, but in a tram I can read just fine.)
When it comes to mass transit in cities, quit blowing money on trains. For some odd reason politicians and many people are hung up on light rail and it has the worst cost structure of all mass transit options. It isn't flexible and its cost per mile is staggering let alone the cost of maintenance.
we have no hole dug on our dependence on cars. The only hole is that a lot of road building and maintenance is politically driven as does not fix a problem but instead buy votes in politically sensitive areas.
To substantially reduce road traffic, you need to offer people an alternative that is cheaper and/or faster and/or more convenient.
Since most of the cost of a car is sunk costs (you have to pay your insurance & depreciation on your car whether you use it to commute or not), if there's free parking at work the car is going to be the cheapest option for most people.
So either you have to substantially increase the cost of driving (aka tolls), or you have to give them an option that's faster and/or more convenient. A bus using the same roads as cars can never be faster or more convenient.
Bus rapid transit (buses on dedicated roadways) may be an option, but a good BRT (aka one without traffic lights) isn't substantially cheaper than LRT.
That part may be a feature. A bus stop next to your apartment building might be gone next week, but a light rail station is staying put and developers can more confidently build "transit-oriented" neighborhoods (denser, less parking, etc.).
For many people, Light Rail (or trains / subways) are the only decent mass transit they have ever experienced in the US.
Every single major and minor city has a bus system. Most of them are nearly useless, often intentionally so by design. It's natural for people to demand something useful, and light rail is nearly universally more useful than busing (including BRT) in any given market.
> It isn't flexible and its cost per mile is staggering let alone the cost of maintenance.
Those are benefits of light rail, not drawbacks. The higher costs and inflexibility of light rail represents an authentic long-term commitment to good useful transit in that area.
To replicate that value with a Bus system requires you to build grade separated, dedicated right of way. Which is where 90% of Light Rail's cost comes from. So if your going to spend that money, you might as well put in real Light Rail and get all of the benefit.
European here. Why would someone intentionally design a useless bus system?
http://www.vox.com/2015/8/10/9118199/public-transportation-s...
This is compounded by the fact that in most of these types of cities, most of the jobs and/or the "best" jobs (highest paying, most stable, best health insurance benefits, etc) are located in the suburbs, where transit is least available. Often these places can "opt-out" of transit altogether.
http://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/stephen-hender... (subheading: "Designed for failure")
The "X cost system" is worse than the "2X system". That's why it's cheaper.
The "X" system is slower or carries less passengers or runs less often or goes to less places, or gets stuck in traffic, or is less reliable, or changes it's routes.
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It's like comparing a WalMart Netbook to a MacBook Pro and saying "they're both 'identical' computers, why are we spending 2X on the MacBook Pro?".
We spend the extra cash because they aren't identical, the 2X one is better.
With your notebook computer analogy, the extra cost of a MacBook Pro is not a benefit. The benefits are all the various things that are better about it, with the extra cost being worth it to have those benefits. The only way you'd say the extra cost of a MacBook Pro was itself a benefit would be if you wanted to show off how rich you are or something equally silly.
I'd love it if you could wave a magic wand and simply "make" bikeable-to-work housing in the Bay Area more affordable, but good luck with that.
BUT also decrease cost of density... pretty hard considering the momentum behind sprawl. Sprawl looks less attractive when it's more expensive. Density looks more attractive when it's cheaper.
I'd love it if I could wave a magic wand too. This is going to be a generation long effort. But it's taken a generation long effort to build car land.
I think the thing that we have to get through our heads is that sprawl is the result of many subsidies - NOT just peoples' preference to live that way. Take a look at any place where zoning hasn't required such high parking or low maximum densities; any place where government housing loan guarantees were equally available to dense developments as new single family home developments; or any place where governments have made reasonable attempt to add the cost of negative externalities of driving to fuel taxes. You'll see a lot less driving and a lot more walking, transit, and biking. For example - Canada or Spain.
Every time one of these articles comes up on here there are lots of Bay Area folks saying "but I like to drive my own car". That is fine, but don't make everyone else subsidize it.
We've dug ourselves into a major hole with car dependence. Lots of cities are digging out and building density especially in their abandoned downtowns - this is doubly amazing considering how stacked the deck is against them.