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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why road taxes aren't used to pay for free public transport. The more people on public transport the more room for cars.

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Free public transport is a can of worms; in general, free tends to attract walkers and bikers but not drivers, since price is not really how a car competes with public transport. And attracting walkers and bikers would probably be a negative. There's also a negative cycle where some walkers and bikers will switch because the free service is good enough, so the services become overcrowded, so more service is provided and the increased frequencies make public transit even more attractive to walkers and bikers. So you end up increasing costs quite a bit with no increase in "revenue".

There's also the fact that in even moderately busy systems, the amount of fares collected is not insignificant. As an example, New York's MTA: http://interactive.nydailynews.com/project/mta-funding/

$6B out of $15B is quite a lot of money. Raising taxes to cover $6B in lost revenue would be quite the feat. And why wouldn't that $6B be better put towards housing, or hospitals, or schools, or even better public transport services? It's generally better to make services more useful, than to just make existing subpar service free.

"Free" is really handy for keeping the service fast & on time though. Not required to be sure, but each rider digging for change takes time. My local bus rapid transit is nominally not-free, but tickets are not checked. It's impressive how fast it is, and that is part of why.

You can effectively achieve most of that with just tap cards and all-door boarding.

Because outside of hyper dense cities roads are "public transit." Making them free to use (if you've already paid the costs associated with a car) has benefits to all that are large enough that increasing cost beyond what it takes to upkeep them at some subsistence level is not in our best interest (except in a few dense cities).

But the upkeep is expensive. One example: Jewel Avenue and Van Wyk Expressway intersection

> New York State Department of Transportation Acting Commissioner Cathy Calhoun said the bridge is set to get $13 million in repairs to enhance safety for pedestrians, bicyclists and motorists.

This is just one intersection and definitely not at the heart of the city. Jewel Avenue Q64 bus is probably symbolic of New York politics. It is frustrating to see no bus for half an hour and then see three buses come together at the same time. However, we can't have a train here even if we somehow we're able to create/take over the land we need.

Road upkeep is really cheap. (Cheap enough that Dominoes Pizza can fix roads for fun as a publicity stunt). The numbers seem high, if you aren't used to transit budgets -- but by those comparisons, roads are really cheap.

A $13 million bridge repair sounds expensive. But to replace that bridge with a BRT line (as one example) has an initial upfront cost of ~$40 million, and has a higher per-day maintenance cost too. To replace that bridge with a real subway line (which is probably what NYC would need to best serve riders) could easily be $160 million or higher.

Roads are the cheapest way to provide public transportation. Not necessarily the best way, but always the cheapest way.

If it is anything like the situation in Pennsylvania I can see two causes - politics and representation of the rural and further-suburban disapproving of services 'just for the city' and the current road taxes alone being insufficient. Free while great for adoption also has a bad revenue curve in the more people who adopt it the less money they make in addition to increased operation costs/decreased quality from more crowding of the system. And then there are issues with metrics and success or failure. If public transit makes the road only need repaired every ten years instead of every notice its benefits may not be accounted properly or in a really bad case not even realized if they have roads on fixed repair timetables and only accelerate them if they clearly need repair ahead of schedule.

https://le.utah.gov/audit/12_01rpt.pdf Page 7, heading "Farebox Recovery Has Improved Since 2006"

If riders are only paying about 1/8 of the total cost, where do you suppose the rest is coming from?

Because it's easy enough to make public transportation's passengers pay?

Is it?

https://le.utah.gov/audit/12_01rpt.pdf

As of 2010, riders paid about 13% of the total cost of public transit operation. (Page 7, heading "Farebox Recovery Has Improved Since 2006")

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