If you look at how people use transit, it skews toward lower-income people [1]. High-income people like the lawyers and government officials you mention use it a lot too, but not as often.
If you want to pick on a failing transit system, pick on VTA in Silicon Valley, not the D.C. Metro.
[1]: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/07/who-relies-o...
[1]:https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/transit_...
That's got to be talking about mean personal income of riders, right?
I just looked up some stats for DC. I started with the numbers from here:
https://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US1150000-washingto...
And also made some conversions between personal&household stats, by estimating that 16% of people in DC are under 15 and thus not counted in per-capita income, together with the average household size being 2.3. Altogether, in DC:
Median per-capita income: $42k
Mean per-capita income: $52k
Median household income: $82k
Mean household income: $100k
Pulling up some random stations shows that the median income at most BART stations is $50k-$75k, which is right what I would expect. Even at the downtown/FiDi ones like Embarcadero and Montgomery, it's just a bit above $75k. Median income in SF is about $95k, so BART ridership skews less wealthy than the area as a whole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_countie...
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/richest-counties-in-the-...
Great way to take the mass transit system out of the reach of the poor.
Nobody is getting a free ride except if we continue to disproportionately fund the road system at the expense of denser forms of transportation.
That’s about $1,500 per commuter. Note that is an overestimate, because it ignores the commercial uses of roads (package delivery, ambulances, etc). Also it ignores bus riders, who make up most of the 7 million or so transit riders.
State and local sources spend $1.8 billion on WMATA each year. There are about 600,000 linked trips per day, so at most 300,000 commuters. That’s $6,000 per commuter.
(Note both numbers above exclude federal spending, but Metro is heavily subsidized by federal dollars.)
If you're going to make a case for private cars vs WMATA, there is a wider scope of things to evaluate than just operating cost.
Every single parking spot at any transit center in and around Seattle is full by 7AM. There was a new one built south of the airport at Angle Lake Station with something like 1000-1500 parking spots and you can't find anything past 7-8AM.
DC would not be DC without the WMATA. And those WMATA trips from the burbs into DC can't be replaced with car trips or bus trips.
Also, the bus serves much lower income people than rail--I'm okay with it receiving subsidies.
[1]: https://www.wmata.com/about/records/public_docs/upload/FY201...
Once you include those in your calculations, then $6000 per commuter is a drop in the bucket, and probably saved money rather than spent.
If the 600k daily rides weren’t taken on the train, how much more would we have to spend maintaining roads due to the higher traffic levels?
Road damage rises steeply with axle weight, and is estimated "as a rule of thumb... for reasonably strong pavement surfaces" to be proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight. This means that doubling the axle weight will increase road damage (2x2x2x2)=16 times. For this reason trucks with a high axle weight are heavily taxed in most countries.
For a more concrete example, compare a Honda Civic (about 3000 lbs including passengers) and a bike + rider (call it 250 lbs). The ratio of road damage is 3000^4 / 250^4.
The car does over 20,000x as much damage to the road. And heavy trucks are much much worse, hence the taxes that wikipedia mentions.
I've heard people complain that bikes don't pay gas taxes to fund road work. While that may be true of new construction, nobody's ever repaved a road because too many bikes rode on it. And if we're talking about taxing bike riders to pay for new construction, how about we spend it on separated bike paths instead of dumping it into more roads for cars? No bike rider wants to be sharing the road with you, it's just the only option in most places.
Remove semi trucks from the road and total budget for road repairs drops slightly but far less than your analysis suggests.
Walking over uneven surfaces is much more comfortable than using a wheeled vehicle, so long as those surfaces are flat. Everyone will bitch and moan about a road that's in rough shape. Nobody really cares if it's a sidewalk (sucks for the disabled though).
I've seen sidewalks get replaced due to age but I don't live in CA where it's 70 degrees year round.
Subway system looks expensive largely because it pays for everything under one umbrella.
Think about how much space along the route is reserved for the typical train commuter versus the amount of space reserved for car commuters. The train commuter has the rail corridor, train stations, bus, bus lanes, etc. all reserved for their use. But the car commuter has the entirety of the roadway, all parking spaces, parking garages, etc. reserved for their use. Drivers are cheaper because they are way more spread out, and if you required the same density for both forms of transit driving would be far more expensive than train travel.
Edit: Additionally, the road right-of-way was purchased and built at the time all of the structures were built. This lead to dramatically cheaper land values than when trains are being retrofitted into existing cities.
The real question is whether you value density or whether you're willing to require that the people in your city sprawl all over the countryside. I don't have a pat answer for that because it's a matter of values, but I do believe that we've gone too far in the direction of sprawl and that a sizeable portion of my home city wants to live closer together with easier access to commercial districts, and we would like to do that without needing a car to get around.
I think that letting us do that benefits everyone because we're basically asking you if we can take up less space in exchange for some taxes. And I don't think it's an unreasonable trade for most people.
Well that's not saying much. The US highways aren't in optimal condition.
Imagine if you were the government of NYC (also sub-100% farebox recovery) and someone offered to remove the subway system for free. No more losing money to subsidize it! Would you take that offer? No, that would be insane.
https://www.bidnet.com/resources/business-insights/us-govern...
If you required transportation infrastructure to all make profit nothing would ever get built.
Taxes is how the govt makes money so it’s in their interest to make its citizens wealthier by making it easy for them to move around and do businessy and worky tings.
It is possible for a transit system to not be worthwhile, but "Do I user it? and "Does it pay for itself?" are inadequate to determine that.
"Expanding mass transit isn't just a good idea, it's a necessity," Holland said. "My drive to work is unbelievable. I spend more than two hours stuck in 12 lanes of traffic. It's about time somebody did something to get some of these other cars off the road."
https://www.theonion.com/report-98-percent-of-u-s-commuters-...
Increasing throughput doesn't prevent you from being able to max out the system at peak usage times (rush hour), it just means that the rush hour traffic doesn't last as long.
I live in Anne Arundel. Folks here are now footing the bill for WMATA thanks to the Maryland funding commitment. Metro is doing nothing to reduce congestion anywhere around here (there is no Metro station in the county).
People that would (without Metro) have no way of getting from MARC to their DC jobs would disagree with you that Metro it doesn't reduce congestion on 295 and other congested roads that pass through Anne Arundel.
2,000 would be 2%. That's in the range of a traffic change (1% - 5%) that would degrade the Level of Service of a highway from D (design goal) to E or F.
It doesn't take much of a reduction in traffic to significantly improve free-flow. Or, conversely, it doesn't take much an increase in numbers to make traffic suck more than it already does.
You could probably say the same thing for >90% of all public roads in, say, California. Why would I need CA route 253, to pick a random example? I've been to Northern California exactly once, and I didn't need the road then.
It transformed a dying, dangerous city into the one we have now.
There is no subsidy that isn't comparable to roads or bridges.
I don't own a car, yet my taxes go to highways, because they are essential infrastructure.
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/10/12/heres-what-a-billion-...
What a ridiculous assertion. Northern Virginia subsidizes transportation spending for the entire rest of the state, not the other way around.
Almost any specific route for any type of transit is going to be used by a small percentage of the overall population. That's pretty obviously true, because most people live somewhere else for any given route.
Directly at least; Which is sad that we can have such short sighted vision.
As a poster posts above; public transit in a lot of way makes your city more viable;
1) Less Traffic, a single digit % of cars off of the road decreases traffic much more significantly (for the remaining 95%)
2) Better equality in housing, jobs. People to actually make your food and clean your wares can actually get to their jobs
3) Better for the disabled
4) Better for liabilities, death, and stress.
The priorities are often out of balance. Surface light rail can be a massive improvement over buses on shared roads, a huge increase in transportation capacity over buses, and can be built for a fraction of the cost of subways, allowing us to serve more people with the same amount of investment. Meaning instead of serving 10% of the population with the best quality transit, we could be serving 50% of the population with slightly slower service. And when the time comes that a tunnel would improve capacity and service, you have 50% of the population voting yes because it's in their best interest instead of hoping and praying that enough people are willing to benevolently pay huge increases in taxes for something they'll rarely use.
I happen to live in Seattle suburbs, about as far away east from it as possible actually while still technically being in Seattle metro area. So all this stuff is not going to be of any immediate benefit... but I still think that it should be done. The area keeps growing rapidly, and I don't see that stopping anytime soon.
Unfair taxes? Well, people in Seattle pay taxes that ultimately pay for the road to my house. I pay for their roads too, sure - but one road in Seattle services a great deal more people than one road out here in unincorporated King County, so all in all, I still get more out of that arrangement than they do. But I don't hear them complaining. In a polity, common good doesn't have to mean that everyone derives equal value from it, or even that everyone derives non-zero value. Sometimes you help your neighbors, sometimes they help you. In the end, long-term, you're both better off.
You can't move people around if your subway doesn't go anywhere because it costs too much to build it out completely.
Take the Calgary CTrain vs Seattle's Link. Link was monumentally more expensive than the CTrain (we built a 2 mile tunnel for about the same cost as their entire system). Calgary built more miles, but at grade. Seattle built fewer miles, mostly subway. Calgary has 314k daily riders, Seattle has 80k. Seattle's system has a higher average speed, but services a fraction of the population because the system is so short. Calgary, on the other hand, has ridership so high that building a tunnel to increase capacity in downtown corridors has an ROI so obvious that they didn't even have to ask taxpayers for more taxes because it payed for itself.
I too voted for ST3 despite not getting any direct benefit from it. But by building a system that prioritizes speed over coverage, ST3 relied on the benevolence of taxpayers to get it passed. Luckily there are enough people willing to shoulder that burden in Seattle, but not every city has the liberal culture of Seattle, and even then it undoubtedly would have been much easier for it to pass if it had a much higher proportion of the population covered.
Let's just imagine that I'm a (entirely too common) taxpayer who only votes to pay for things that I directly benefit from. Would it be easier to persuade me to vote for a system where I save 20 minutes on my commute, or a system where someone else saves 25 minutes on their commute?
Angelenos have realized this for some time now, and the region is correspondingly investing more in transit than anywhere else in the country by a significant margin. They literally have no other options: the 405, for example, is the most congested freeway in the country, and there is no room to widen it anymore. It's an easy sell to taxpayers when congestion has that much of an impact on quality of life.
London has a bus route that runs one bus per minute in peak times. Because London's streets are busy this means you will usually be able to see _several_ of the buses on that route on a street you're on that's served by that bus, and choose whether you'd prefer to walk to the closest stop, or walk in the direction of your bus and catch an "earlier" bus that is further in that direction already.
One per minute is actually a _higher_ rate than is achievable by London's automated and semi-automated underground railways, none of which even aim for more than 38 trains per hour in peak.
Now, of course S-series underground trains carry about a thousand people, whereas a London double decker bus maybe carries 150 (both would be crammed in this scenario but that's not an infrequent occurrence for peak hours), so the trains on a core route are moving about 35-40 thousand people per hour while these buses move less than 10 thousand, but for you as an individual the buses are more frequent, not to mention they're right there in the street, not at the bottom of a shaft somewhere.
It's a deliberate ignorance of opportunity costs, often advocated by those who primarily benefit from an alternative. For example, I can predict whether someone prefers a tall bridge or subterranean crossing versus a much cheaper drawbridge over the ship canal in Ballard, merely by knowing if they live in Ballard or not.