I would expect the same expectations also from air and car traffic.

If railways are expected to break even, then I expect the same from public funding in roads and airports.

Using the same metrics.

That’s not going to work out in your favor for the simple fact that roads already exist and maintenance is extremely cheap. It’s paid for with gasoline taxes.

Whereas rail is unbelievably expensive. The MTA budget for the NYC metro area is $18.6 billion. Compare that to the $11.8 billion budget for the entire New York State Department of Transportation.

…and that’s for an existing rail system.

>...roads already exist and maintenance is extremely cheap. It’s paid for with gasoline taxes.

According to [0] no state derives more than 71% of its "State & Local Road Spending" from gas taxes. Unclear to me what proportion of the spending is maintenance though.

The best number I could find for maintenance cost was [1], which says in 2015, the average per-mile maintenance cause of US roads is $28,020.

Can anyone help find a comparable figure for rail maintenance?

[0] https://taxfoundation.org/states-road-funding-2019/ [1] https://azmag.gov/Portals/0/Documents-Ext/FLCP/Roadway-Maint...

That combines maintenance with new projects though, the GP was only refering to maintaining existing roads.

No, in "expected to break even" I was referring to total costs.

Including maintenance, externalities and construction.

(though while I would apply the same standards - I would not expect such infrastructure to directly pay for itself. But expecting it only from rail while not expecting it from roads is extremely weird.)

I've seen it estimated elsewhere that a km of heavy rail track is slightly cheaper to build than a single freeway lane. To what degree all the surrounding infrastructure, maintenance and externalities change that equation I'm not sure, but a single track is surely capable of moving a lot more passengers per hour than one freeway lane. Of course there may be relatively few situations it actually does, but if your goal is to get as many people from A to B as quickly and cheaply as possible, rail is surely cheaper.

> maintenance is extremely cheap

200+ Billion each year & 5th largest category of state and local public spending behind education, general welfare, and healthcare

> It’s paid for with gasoline taxes.

Generated 52 billion so ~25%

The NYC subways alone delivered over a billion rides a year, even with Covid.

Highway maintenance is anything but cheap, unless you only do the barest minimum as has been done in the US for decades.

The MTA is also known for being riddled with mismanagement and waste. If they worked on optimizing their use of funds/directed funds towards worthwhile improvements, credible vendors, and rooted out waste/corruption, that number would likely be a bit (maybe more than a bit) lower.

Not to mention, the 2nd ave line seemed like a big waste.

How are you pricing in car externalities?

> roads already exist

The implication in this is that railroads don't already exist, which is simply false. In fact, nearly every town in the Midwest established before 1950 were built on a railroad line. A few notable examples are Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Birmingham, Chicago, St. Louis, and Portland Oregon. Moreover, many suburbs were formed around a streetcar line, which were later torn up to let cars drive there instead.

> maintenance is extremely cheap. It’s paid for with gasoline taxes

That is demonstrably false. Gas taxes as of 2011 do not cover road maintenance (at most it's RI with almost 80% and median of about 45% [1]). Furthermore, the federal gas tax (which is supposed to pay for the interstate system) hasn't been increased since 1993, and isn't indexed to inflation. The United States Highway Trust Fund has been relying on non-fuel tax revenue since 2008, and that doesn't look to be changing any time soon [2]. Of course, regardless of the actual costs of effective maintenance, you can make any public works project much cheaper by simply not maintaining it. If maintenance was actually "extremely cheap," then it stands to reason that the US would be getting more than a 'D' on roads [3]. Even after all of that, it still doesn't factor in the legal requirements for private expenditure on roads, such as minimum parking requirements and extensive R1 zoning. It also doesn't factor in the vast negative externalities of cars (yes, even electric cars).

> Whereas rail is unbelievably expensive

I'm going to ignore that you chose the MTA, a famously corrupt organization that is responsible for tunneling under the densest metro area in the country, as a baseline for the cost of rail. Instead I'm going to point out that car roads have nearly every bureaucratic advantage in the US, for a multitude of reasons. There is a lot of nuance to this, but for anything short of HSR, the expense in railroads is not engineering. If you're interested in a jumping off point for learning more here, check out [4].

[1]: https://taxfoundation.org/gasoline-taxes-and-user-fees-pay-o...

[2]: https://www.enotrans.org/article/ten-years-of-highway-trust-...

[3]: https://infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/roads-infrastr... (The Infrastructure Report Card is published by the ASCE, which does have an incentive to create more work for civil engineers, so it's worth taking it with a grain of salt)

[4]: https://palladiummag.com/2022/06/09/why-america-cant-build/

> I'm going to ignore that you chose the MTA, a famously corrupt organization that is responsible for tunneling under the densest metro area in the country, as a baseline for the cost of rail.

Sidenote, that's called apophasis - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophasis

> Whereas rail is unbelievably expensive.

Note that rail is uniquely more expensive in USA than elsewhere for various reasons.

Great idea. Maybe we should try paying the cost of car travel via gas taxes. We could start by just paying the for the entire road, bridge, and highway network, and then add in the costs associated with climate change.

Better by vehicle weight as road damage is exponential function of weight

And that's important as well because a lot of people who don't personally drive cars on the roads use goods transported in that manner, take long distance busses, etc.

Not to mention the about 30000 killed in traffic every year in the US.

yes, free inevitably means unvalued and creates distortions in markets that lead to unintended consequences (like homeless people using trains as makeshift housing). in contrast, market competition is one of the reasons cited by the tokyo transit system for why they're so good.

also, economists are capable of estimating the ratio of private good to public good for a transit system, and we can simply apportion the funding of the network accordingly. if 40% of the value of transit accrues to the public, then pay that part out of taxes and set fares so that they pay for the other 60%. i'd rather have a system that responds in some proportion to market signals than one that is entirely immune to them.

in LA, they're trying to make transit free, and while i'd benefit from this, i oppose the initiative on these grounds.

Surely the free road system is the most serious distortion in the market. And free access to public transport could help rebalance that. We may end up with unintended consequences, but that is likely to be better than the negative consequences we live with right now.

yes, we should better price in the cost of free roads rather than try to rebalance by making public transit free. i'd suggest making registration fees even more contingent on length and weight of vehicles, on a superlinearly escalating scale (e.g., some folks suggest to the 4th power due to that being the factor of weight on road wear).

The reason the Tokyo transit system is so good is that the government built all the infrastructure up until the 80s, then private companies came in and reaped the profits. It's a product of planning, and of government infrastructure and spending, not of private competition.

In fact, JR these days makes money by buying up real estate, building a station, and seeing land value skyrocket.

yah, i've heard something like that before. competition wasn't the only factor, but it was a meaningful contributor. the tokyo operators compete on service and amenities (differentiation strategy), which is what allowed them to find profitable niches beyond just ticket sales (complementary/flanking offerings), and buoys the marketplace itself.

in capital intensive infrastructure businesses like rail travel and telecom, it actually makes sense for the government to provide the high upfront capital to build the common infrastructure and lease it to the competitors (but not sell or give it away) to create viable markets like this.

nah, nobody gives a shit about service and amenities. You choose the train that goes where you need to go fastest, that's the only thing that matters. Agencies coordinate with each other to build complementary lines. Nobody chooses to use a train because it's run by Toei vs JR, and train lines generally do not overlap.

Leasing infrastructure sounds alright tho

Have you used Tokyo's multi corp transit? It can be a real headache.

Also, the MTA is private (mostly) and the subway costs a fare, yet there's homeless folks everywhere on the trains. Implementing a fare !== homeless people not setting up shop in subway cars or on the platforms.

* the homeless and housing situation is a deeper issue with many variables. Just pointing at the claim that was made

Huh? The Pasmo card can be used for basically all transit in Tokyo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasmo

Every train and tram is on schedule. In what way is it a "real headache"?

If you don't have to budget or care to, then sure it's not. Otherwise, paying for a fare only to have to pay another to transfer between the different train company lines is a headache.

my experience of tokyo was as a tourist some 10 years ago, so i can't speak to the breadth of the transit experience there. i just remember being very impressed with the quantity and punctuality of trains and don't remember any homelessness. that's not to say i saw no homelessness in tokyo, but it seemed tiny compared to LA. i also rode the shinkansen between tokyo and osaka, which felt almost like flying, in contrast to amtrak's acela train on the east coast, which feels only slightly faster for a few short periods.

Agreed on the impressive quality and timeliness of the subway trains. Seen homeless in Tokyo (not on the subway or at least it wasn't apparent) and it was a culture shock to see that those roughing it still took their shoes off and left them outside of their sleeping areas, and kept their areas neat/didn't obstruct space outside of what they needed.

My point was private companies/fares won't prevent homeless people from staying off the subways or other unexpected results that are assumed to come with "free". MTA is a perfect example of that.

LA's metro, like MTA, also currently has fares and doesn't keep out the homeless, as fare enforcement here is a complete joke, so i hear what you're saying. i think the point was that being unvalued would mean that people would be even less likely to do or say anything about it, and it spirals into an even worse tragedy of the commons situation (the unintended consequences).

i'd personally like to see metro raise base fares, and provide larger discounts to lower income riders via their LIFE program to offset that potentially regressive burden. in the best of times (before covid) fares only covered about 20-30% of operating costs, i believe.

use that money to implement better service (more and more punctual trains), more social/community officers to help the homeless, peace officers on the trains themselves (currently they mostly just walk around stations every once in a while), and more rigorous cleaning and general maintenance.

this all needs to be coordinated with getting housing and services to homeless folks, removing roadblocks to density along transit corridors, and emphasizing multi-mobility (like converting street parking to bus & bike lanes).

Pretty easy to break even if it were fully funded by taxes. Would be a net public good as well.

Why does it need to break even? Basically no other public service is expected to be cost-neutral.

I do think it's worth putting _a_ price on it, since that money can go directly into funding more lines and the like. And hey, popular lines could totally be made profitable. But "it needs to be profitable/break-even" is what leads to public transportation removing unprofitable lines.

And then after you do that a lot, turns out you have terrible coverage and your whole system becomes way less useful!

In the spirit of people paying the true cost for things, in the USA airline tickets to rural airports are heavily subsidized, they would lose money at current rates or could charge the market rate (which I think they should), it's now about 300 million per year, measured per passenger this is higher than Amtrak's subsidies AFAIK. Also the security at airports should be fully funded by airline passengers, instead of only partially being paid by passengers.

Airline tickets are subsidized, but not free. The equivalent would be subsidizing rail, not making it free.

Surely people able to go place to place easily and quickly (and presumably generate tax income at those places) is worth more than whatever fare they paid to get there?

I think this is true in aggregate, but not at the margin where you are making the decisions. Marginal utility should theoretically decline as you increase capacity (five lane road, six lane road, seven lane road - ignoring capacity induced demand for a moment), if the marginal rider is not willing to spend $2.5 to get where they are going how valuable can the economic activity be at their destination?

Yes, except for the car industry, which has a massive lobbying arm.

What if it could be covered by a zoom call and society wouldn’t have to foot the rail bill? Trains cost quite a fortune.

It needs to make money, or break even at least, because it's expensive as hell. Specially since I'm a modal rent and I don't live in Madrid or Barcelona, so hardly able to benefit from this. I can't say I'm very happy subsidizing this operation.

Maybe I'll pay some visit to a city nearby, but I have to be quick since everything which is not HSR has a target in the back for the public operator.

If you’re not enjoying the weather this summer you’re already helping to underwrite the cost of the global car culture.

it's possible to measure or estimate ridership, and make judgements that way

also, like highways it's probably on some level subject to induced demand

Transit is far moreso.

Noone is going to ride two disconnected bus services that run four times a day and require walking 30 minutes in between.

Add a connection and make them all run every 30 minutes and suddenly it's viable.

Add a metro with right of way that runs every 5 minutes and has 5 minute walk or 2 minute walk + bus coverage to the entire city and why would you spend money on a car?

>why would you spend money on a car?

So you can leave the city. Even people I know who live in cities with decent transit systems that they use mostly still own cars to get away on weekends, do larger shopping trips, etc.

There's a decent alternative which is car rentals. Having decent car rental services (and, honestly, pairing that with making car ownership expensive as hell) can resolve a lot of these kinds of issues.

Yeah it's annoying, but it's private transportation! A massive luxury if you think about it long enough. And it means that most houses don't need parking lots.

Renting cars for the weekend is a PITA. Most people I know in cities would rather just own them.

And make living in cities sufficiently unpleasant or incinvenientand people who can will just leave as they did in the 70s and 80s.

And many people would rather not own one.

But only the latter group is having that choice made for them and then having their tax money spent on infrastructure designed to burden them with car ownership.

They still definitely need to track usage in order to know which services to schedule.