The key reasons buses are better is that they can go where people need to go and are not locked in to where they are built out at.
The sad part is that in many parts of the world ridership doesn't increase much with the cost going down, even to free. hopefully autonomous fuel cell / battery cars and buses will make point to point more manageable and viable overall.
- You can invest around them. Because unlike a bus, a tram can't just be upped and moved somewhere else developers are able to build housing and services confident that there will be service.
- They are easier to segregate and run at speed so that you can run limited stop services that are credible. I suspect this is what you are getting at with airports, but I'm not sure why you think an airport is the only reasonable use for fast limited-stop operation
- They can carry more people easily. 2 or 3 car trams are the norm, and the smoother ride and increased safety means that it is much safer to carry lots of standing passengers
- People like them. You can actually get people out of cars onto a tram, where faced with a bus they will assume that it is going to be dirty and they will be robbed (however untrue that is)
That is not true in some places. MN built its light rail in such a way that interacts with normal traffic quite a lot (including killing people because of a really badly designed interaction on a former turn). I get the feeling someone in the planning office had taken no lessons from street cars.
Businesses, especially consumers, are helped more by the mobility of a car than public transport
>improved mental health of passengers
1. This is not an external benefit. This, if true, should mostly be reflected in people's willingness to take public transport. Of course, people taking public transport are in my experience usually of the most dubious mental health. So that's concerning.
> reduction in pollution and traffic
Fair points.
Traffic is by far the best case for running public transit at a loss, IMO. Though it must be weighed against spending that money on more freeways.
There are benefits, though not as many as you are listing, and we should be weary of running them at too much of a deficit.
In general the idea of running things as a business is not to say they should be run at a profit, it's to say they should be run efficiently like a free competitive market typically does.
What you'll find is that people use public transit in cities where its convenience outweighs the convenience of a car. In cities where that is untrue, only those who can't afford a car use public transit.
Which is to say that public transit isn't somehow magically better than auto travel by virtue of some fixed aspect of public transit.
It's better when it's better, which may sound like a tautology, but is actually just kind of an obvious truth, evidence for which is available all over the world.
In big Russian cities it is way more convenient, cheaper, quick, and as pointed out -- mentally relaxing -- to take a tram or subway than to drive your car in the insane traffic. The clientele on said public transport are, for the most part, friendly, and you will see men scrambling to help old ladies or women with strollers onboard.
For a brief moment I thought Mrs Thatcher had risen from the dead and signed up to HN. Whew.
Sure, but the alternative to inefficient government spending on mass transit isn't some free market solution; it's inefficient spending on automobile infrastructure.
Do governments have to be inefficient? Can they be designed better?
In general, a free market competitive approach is always preferable where possible, but I think there is room to add better incentives in government as well.
This assumes that everyone has access to a car, and that all automotive commutes are possible during "rush hour". Many businesses directly benefit from public transportation by expanding the labor pool to those who would otherwise be unable to commute.