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Comment by jschwartzi | Hacker News Reader

Other people have pointed out that roads are subsidized heavily through taxes, but just to be blunt: nobody is asking you to specially subsidize public transit. We are just asking taxpayers to treat public transit with the same deference they treat the road system. The people who use our public transit system in Washington are taxpayers too as we all pay sales tax equally. And if they rent they pay property tax indirectly via their landlord.

Nobody is getting a free ride except if we continue to disproportionately fund the road system at the expense of denser forms of transportation.

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State and local governments spend about $170 billion a year on highways and roads, for the 115 million or so people who commute by car each day: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.brookings.edu/blog/the-aven...

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.)

How much of the WMATA spending is on buses? Seems like you attributed all spending to the subway.

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?

Not only that, 600K more trips on the roads would utterly choke traffic. It would be impossible, I think, to accommodate many more cars let alone the increased maintenance required to sustain it.

The capacity issue is relevant, but roads require maintenance due to large trucks and weather, not cars. Asphalt damage increases with the cube of the vehicle weight.

Worse, it's to the fourth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_axle_weight_rating

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.

Rods have finite lifespans independent of usage. You will need to repair bike lanes that only see bike traffic.

Remove semi trucks from the road and total budget for road repairs drops slightly but far less than your analysis suggests.

I don't think I've ever seen a sidewalk being replaced because of age (or any other reason for that matter). Bike paths don't suffer much more wear. I think you underestimate the life span of asphalt.

>I don't think I've ever seen a sidewalk being replaced because of age

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.

They do wear out eventually. Most sidewalks that I've seen destroyed were from tree root upheave though.

Many places have relatively new construction, so it's not yet been an issue. It's rather common for older cities like DC, or places with a lot of freeze cycles and or trees. https://ddot.dc.gov/service/sidewalk-repair

The $170B figure does not account for pollution, environmental, health, and other societal costs of sprawled out life.

Another thing to consider, for cars, is that these things need PARKING SPACES. For an already dense city that means large, multilevel parking garages dotted all over the city. How many more garages are we talking about for a half million more cars? A lot... enough to impact the nature and function of the city itself.

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.

You wouldn't need more parking spots. For people commuting from outside the downtown core, Metro is already car-oriented, and operates 60,000 parking spots at stations (not including lots run privately or by VA/MD). For people traveling inside the downtown core, they could just take the bus--as lower income folks in D.C. already have to do because Metro doesn't go where they live.

Of course you would need vast increases of parking spots. But it doesn't matter, this is all hypothetical. WMATA isn't going anywhere.

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.

DC busses appear to be more heavily subsidized than the trains are. Am I misreading the stat, or misunderstanding your argument?

According to the FY 2019 budget [1], operating expenses of busses are much more heavily subsidized than rail (recovery ratio of 23% for the former if you look at page 35).

[1]: https://www.wmata.com/about/records/public_docs/upload/FY201...

The operating subsidy for rail is slightly less than for the bus, but that's dwarfed by the difference in annual capital expenditures (about $1 billion for rail versus $200 million for bus). Metro's fare recovery is a bit misleading, because most of its "capital budget" is actually for maintenance and repair, which is an operating cost.

Also, the bus serves much lower income people than rail--I'm okay with it receiving subsidies.

>Another thing to consider, for cars, is that these things need PARKING SPACES.

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.

I can believe it! Now imagine _ALL_ of those cars having to find parking in the central business district of Seattle.

There are no negatives to dense transportation. Discussing the economics of it simply ignores the future damages that will be sustained by the continued use of any individual transportation solutions, but particularly those that use fossil fuels.

Once you include those in your calculations, then $6000 per commuter is a drop in the bucket, and probably saved money rather than spent.

That's a significant underestimate, it ignores police costs and debt on past highway spending etc. Federal spending is also a much larger subsidy for the highway system than Metro.

Subway system looks expensive largely because it pays for everything under one umbrella.

It's a bit disingenuous to compare these modes of transport solely based on cost per commuter.

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.

"same deference they treat the road system"

Well that's not saying much. The US highways aren't in optimal condition.

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