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Comment by milkytron | Hacker News Reader

I think what the original commenter meant was that people get upset because they don't want to subsidize transit systems, and would rather have them break even or turn a profit.

What a lot of those same people don't understand, is that taxes pay for the road systems.

The people that understand public transit realize that it's hard to recover the costs without assistance (taxes).

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> What a lot of those same people don't understand, is that taxes pay for the road systems.

I don't think those people are failing to understand anything. They're just people who use the road systems and don't use public transit.

And those same people fail to realize the fact that they are moving at all in their car in traffic is thanks to those 50 people crammed in the bus in the next lane. Could you imagine if the million people who take LA metro daily suddenly switched to cars? The city would functionally break.

Yes, for some reason, no one ever thinks of the opportunity costs here. This is why all public transit should be free and all street parking should be paid. If I need to pay 6 bucks to go into town and back on the train, but I can pay a couple bucks in gasoline cost and have free parking, why would I choose the train? The city can change this so easily and maybe even in a way that they lose no money.

I think exactly that happened in the last Washington state election. The state legislator put on the ballot a measure that would limit the amount the state could tax each car owner. Proponents would claim that the tax was going towards public transit infrastructure (like Sound Transit 3) and that it was unfair to tax car owners for that.

The measure was approved.

The measure was sold largely as a general flipping of the bird towards King and neighboring counties by the rest of the state. Generally there is opposition from eastern Washington for car tabs going to fund Sound Transit's investments on the western corridor, which doesn't really do anything to benefit those that don't live in the western corridor.

And yes, I am aware that King net exports money to the east. I'm not sure how impactful that argument is for a minimum wage worker living far away from Seattle paying $500 a year on car tabs, for a car that they have no alternative but owning in order to get to their job.

I thought the SoundTransit car tabs were only paid inside the SoundTransit area? Are Eastern Washington voters really paying $500 car tabs to build light rail hundreds of miles away? That would be shocking to me if true.

You are correct, the RTA tax is assessed at the time of (car tab) renewal using the vehicle's address of record. It only covers Snohomish County, Seattle area, South King County, East King County and Pierce County.

No, they aren't, but they are convinced that they are.

You might want to reference [1], as you are flagrantly incorrect.

https://www.dol.wa.gov/vehicleregistration/docs/VehicleFees....

> If you live in the Sound Transit RTA district of King, Pierce, or Snohomish counties, you may be required to pay an RTA tax that helps pay for local mass-transit projects.

Municipalitis tacks on an additional fee, Seattle's is 80, Spokane's is 20. The only way for someone to be paying $500 in Wenatchee is if they owned 4+ cars.

[1] http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_...

It wasn’t the state legislators who put that on the ballot, but anti-tax activist Tim Eyman. We’ve been down this route before with property taxes and even car tabs. Note that a previous county-wide initiative approved the car tabs in the first place (in those counties only), they were then repealed by this state-wide one. Amazing how the vote can swing when sampling grows beyond King and parts of Snohomish and pierce county.

I have a really hard time believing public transit could reasonably compete with the highway system with respect to return on investment. Consider how much food and consumer goods would cost without highway infrastructure never mind the secondary effects. Consider also that you would be making road travel prohibitively expensive for the lower classes.

Public transit isn't meant for private (commercial) distribution of goods.

There are other trains for that, and they are hugely important to the US infrastructure. We would not be the country we are today without rail.

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