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Comment by tjic | Hacker News Reader

Much of mass transit (airplanes, tour buses, Greyhound, ocean cruise lines, etc.) are profitable.

There are things that people are not willing to pay for, and government types have labelled these things "market failures", which, BTW, is a misuse of the term.

Government has then stepped in and run programs that people are not willing to pay for.

So the question really boils down to "how would you make something that noone has ever figured out how to make profitable...profitable?"

It's a bit like recycling: there have been metal recyclers for centuries. People do not recycle glass and paper because it is a value DESTROYING activity.... and thus government got involved, and requires people to separate their trash streams...before recombining about 75% of the "recycled" materials and putting them in landfills.

The only good answer to this question is "mu".

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Way wrong. Airlines are, by and large, not profitable at all, even counting in the various forms of subsidies they receive. By some estimates airlines as a whole have lost money since their inception. Even by the most optimistic estimates the industry has done poorly. I'd rather give my retirement funds to M.C. Hammer to manage than put it in airline stock.

Greyhound's last two decades have been very rocky, and they've been forced to stop service to many places in the last decade. Cruise lines hardly count as mass transit. They're just slowly-moving casinos. Nobody ever thinks "I need to get from Point A to Point B. Should I take a plane, or a Carnival cruise?"

Privately-owned transportation companies might actually be doing much worse than government-owned ones, at least in the USA, in the last decade. I'd love to see the actual numbers there.

Airplanes are profitable thanks to government subsidies/services (TSA/FAA, rural airports, etc). Same for tour buses (they didn't pay for the road!).

Have you heard the term "externality"?

Yes.

Mass transit is subsidized, in most cases, FAR beyond whatever the externalities cost.

In Boston, 75% of the cost of each fair is payed for by other taxpayers. I dated a woman getting her PhD at MIT in transportation studies for a few years and asked her "are there any studies showing that the negative externalities that are dealt with here cost anything like the MBTA subsidy?"

The answer is no - even if you count externalities, most public transit is a huge exercise in value destruction.

You're making a subjective judgment and stating it as a fact.

Most cities wouldn't be able to function if you hard to park a car for every workday commuter. Especially Boston, I used to live there, you telling me there's room between the South End and Beacon Hill for all the people that work there? Maybe if you paved the commons and turned it into a 5-level garage. Sounds lovely. And that's not even getting into what it costs to pay welfare and housing for all the people who would no longer be able to hold a job without a way to get there (not as big a deal in Boston since the subway barely goes to Dot and Roxbury as it is - they're on the bus anyways).

The Boston Commons already has 1300 parking spaces under it. I don't know how many levels. See http://www.mccahome.com/bcg.html.

Does anyone know the approximate percentage spent on actual operations vs. management and build-out of the system?

I lived in Boston for a summer in 2006, and I got to witness the transition from decades-old transit tokens to paper cards.

It was a giant cluster: Horrid machine usability, non-reusable transit cards, and untrained station personnel. It made me wonder what sort of premium the MBTA paid for that "upgrade" and how much rider confidence was lost.

The MBTA's a case study in incompetence, due to years of turf battles between the lege and governor's office. It's run by a bunch of overlapping boards with an org chart that looks like a spider web.

So anyways, they're about 30 billion in the hole over the next 10 years for what it will cost to do routine maintenance on the system going forward, mostly because it was all neglected for 20 years during the big dig fiasco.

I continually wonder why we can't build these things in this country anymore.. in the 20th century, a whole bunch of cities went from 0 to a complete transit infrastructure. These days, adding a single line or extension is a multi-decade fiasco (green line extension in Somerville, or the second east side line in manhattan).

> The MBTA's a case study in incompetence, due to years of turf battles between the lege and governor's office. It's run by a bunch of overlapping boards with an org chart that looks like a spider web.

Why is it that the MBTA, BART, the Phoenix light rail, etc. always have these problems (unrealistic projections, turf battles, overlapping spheres of control, etc.), and yet Greyhound, Southwest Airlines, etc., don't?

I'd suggest that this sort of problem is endemic to government run transit organizations, and doesn't crop up in the private sector because there's competition, and private firms can only get as many dollars of budget as the paying public is willing to give them.

Horrific incompetence results in extinction ... in the private sector.

You know, when I'm talking to engineers, if they say "relational databases are always good" or "relational databases are always bad", I conclude that they're either inexperienced or stupid.

The same oughta be true when evaluating different methods of solving other problems as well. Busses can be run by private companies as long as the government provides the roads, because you don't need government involvement to drive on a road.

Building a road, or a train track, requires some amount of government involvement, especially in dense areas with small lot sizes. Unless we're gonna knock down half the skyskrapers for 30 story parking garages in our major cities, we need to find a way to make mass transit work.

There's 2 approaches towards that -- try to help the right people get into government, or throw your hands up, bury your head in the sand and declare that "databases are never the right solution".

The relevant question is not really whether mass transit is subsidized, it's whether it's more subsidized than competing transit options. Given that streets are a massive taxpayer funded subsidy to drivers (most of that cost is NOT paid by vehicle-specific taxes), it's not clear to me that the subsidies to mass transit are larger. Anyone have such numbers?

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