To say that public transit is heavily subsidized ignores that the alternative, building new roads, parking, bridges, and other infrastructure is even more expensive. And it ignores how much regular road use is subsidized.

In the UK fuel taxes raise £50Bn for the exchequer every year and the total transport budget is £25Bn. Maybe it’s different in the US but certainly here, the idea that cars are subsidised just isn’t factually true. Drivers pay for all forms of transportation then contribute as much again to e.g. the NHS.

Just a couple of days ago there was a piece reporting research that the UK had the highest fossil fuel subsidies in the EU, to the tune of £10.5bn a year), along with another piece earlier in the week that we have to increase allocation of public funds for subsidising North Sea oil rig decomissioning. Can't quickly dig up a link for the second, but it was around £25bn.

Not to forget that the escalating climate change tax on petrol was paused some years back.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/23/uk-has-b...

FTA significant part of the UK fossil fuel subsidies identified by the commission is the 5% rate of VAT on domestic gas and electricity, cut from the standard 20%

Taxing something less is not the same as subsidising it and it is disingenuous to claim that it is. Is the government subsidising you by taxing you less than some hypothetical percentage?

Oh yes it is true. As a fellow Brit all the fossil fuel use contributes huge amounts of negative externalities in pollution, health damage and other more subtle environmental impacts. Fuel taxes are not high enough. It should cost much more than 1.20 a litre for the overall damage we do driving.

Subsidies can be very indirect and subtle. E.g. "If you want to build this store, you will have to also build one hundred parking spaces. No, we aren't going to give you any money for it, you figure it out"

How would this work when our cities have been so heavily developed to favor the automobile? I'm for road users paying for the roads or access, but public transit is so lightly used in most of the US and there's so little existing infrastructure that it's at a severe disadvantage and can't take advantage network effects or economies of scale. Instead of a train near my house, there's an interstate highway. Our cities are already so sprawling and NIMBYism so strong. I wonder if it's too late for transit.

Fast HOV lanes would make buses go faster, and if the HOV lane's expensive, most people would find taking a bus to use it most economical. Honestly I think if you instituted congestion pricing, Uber/Lyft would reinvent themselves as bus agencies in many cities.

I think public transit would only be viable in dense urban cores. In other areas, if the city desires to provide transportation assistance, I think it's probably more efficient to provide other forms of transportation to the working poor (who are typically the primary users of public transit in midsized cities). Here in Grand Rapids, the busses are so lightly used that it would probably be cheaper for the city to hand out Uber or Lyft credits for the people that are now using the busses (and it'd provide a better user experience too).

Can one of the people downvoting this into oblivion please explain? If a midsized city with little congestion could provide subsidized point-to-point transit for those who need it at a comparable cost to operating a bus system, what is the possible downside? This would be hugely beneficial to the people actually using the service, since they get all the time back that would have otherwise been spent waiting on transit services.

Don't you think this is relying a bit too much on private corporation like Uber and Lyft? What if they shut down, or leave the city? How long would it take to reorganize public transport?

Also, uber and Lyft would get to decide the prices, that could cost much more to the city.

I think a public transport has to be public, ie publicly owned.

Why does it have to be publicly owned? For example, all of London buses are privately owned, but the bus companies are contracted to operate routes and the city sets the fares, colour scheme etc so that they all look the same.

You're right, that's an other option. But can you say that it is really private if the city sets the price, and the routes?

And wouldn't it be better to have the same thing but public (so that benefits are used to actually improve the service, and not pay dividends)?

There won’t be Uber and Lyft if there aren’t already a road network and a massive pool of people who know how to drive

Everyone at this point is subsidized by general tax revenue; neither transit nor roads pay for themselves, so I'm not sure it makes sense to say one of them is subsidizing the other one. It may be true according to some ways of accounting that transit is more heavily subsidized than driving, depending on the specific transit mode, but if you actually charged rail users what it costs to run a rail system, many fewer people (as you say) would ride the train, and they just wouldn't fit on the roads in major dense metros because cars are so space-inefficient, so you'd need to build way more roads, probably seizing currently-not-road space by eminent domain, and you'd want to account for the loss of economic activity that came out of tearing down a bunch of buildings to replace them with highway. All of which is to say, I'm skeptical that an actual user-pays model would save drivers money over transit riders, at least in dense, transit-heavy cities.

Another way to think about it: you can view drivers paying for transit as a subsidy, but you can also view it as paying for decreased traffic, from which they directly benefit.

> Let users of cars pay for the infrastructure they use

Don't forget a fee for the air and noise pollution they cause.

Reply to danjayh - thread is too large to comment nest comments anymore lol

Though, one more thing I'd tax is noise from music bumpers. Those people drive me up the f-ing wall. I challenge anyone to think about how much damn awful music pollution is. Then come back in a year, after seriously considering it - if you've become the crazy old guy at the end of the street waving his cane (like me), then you know it's a problem.

The externalities of mass car ownership are not covered by the tax in the UK, let alone the US

Exactly, very true.

Already in place, via mitigations that have been implemented. Fuel injection, multiple catalytic converters, exhaust gas recycling, and closed-loop control all add substantial expense to modern vehicles. They do, however, very effectively reduce/eliminate the smog problems that we had 30 years ago (which is a good thing).

Most modern freeway builds include noise mitigation in their designs. This cost should be passed on to the freeway users via use fees.

You say "already in place". While it's certainly true that smog isn't anywhere near the problem it once was, it's still a problem, and others still pay for the consequences of automobile emissions.

Some quotes from various sources:

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-air-pollution-repo... - "Los Angeles remains the nation's leader in harmful ozone pollution from car tailpipes emissions ... but the report said the nation's second-largest city also achieved its best overall air quality score of all those years."

https://www.livestrong.com/article/156537-facts-of-car-pollu... - "The American Lung Association reports that 30,000 people are killed by car emissions annually in the United States alone. Air pollution also causes numerous respiratory and cardiovascular problems and may exacerbate pre-existing conditions such as asthma. More than half of Americans live in areas that fail to meet federal air quality standards at least several days each year."

https://www.pca.state.mn.us/air/motor-vehicle-pollution - "Motor vehicles give off more than half of all carbon monoxide and hydrocarbon emissions in Minnesota. These emissions, including microscopic particles, can contribute to breathing and heart problems along with an elevated risk of cancer."

https://owl.cwp.org/mdocs-posts/elc_pwp6/ - "Metals can follow many pathways before they become entrained in urban stormwater run off. A recent California study sponsored by the Santa Clara Valley Nonpoint Source Program suggests that cars are the dominant loading source for many metals of concern, such as cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, mercury, and zinc."

Fair enough. In those jurisdictions that still have problems, perhaps regulations requiring hybrid and/or plug-in hybrid vehicles make sense. This can't be done at a national level because the benefit of these vehicles falls off dramatically in areas that experience temperature extremes, making them hardly any better than traditional cars.

I drive a PHEV in Michigan, and for around 6-8 months a year, its mileage isn't any better than a standard 4 cylinder due to poor hybrid performance in extremely cold or hot temperatures. You get into the car, the BMS determines that the battery is either baking or freezing, and scales regen/assistance back to minimal levels. You essentially end up with a gas vehicle with an expensive start/stop system (and below about 10-12f, they actually often idle even when stopped to maintain engine temperature).

Are you serious? You think in the US of all places where environmental & air standards regulations are the weakest that all the negative externalities of air pollution from cars is captured in taxes?

  > Let users of cars pay for the
  > infrastructure they use (through
  > gas and plate taxes),

You couldn't. The cost of providing the road structures, lighting, c. 40,000 direct deaths a year, massive numbers of respiratory illnesses, serious injuries, not to mention importing oil and maintaining the largest army in the world to keep that oil flowing in is massive.

Automobile use is insanely subsidized by our society.