Hacker News Reader

Comment by ahahahahah | Hacker News Reader

Note that generally public transportation funding is already <25% covered by fares and so to the extent that you think "paid for by taxpayers" is positive or negative, this doesn't actually have that much impact on that aspect.

View on HN

I think it’s great! I’m happy for my tax dollars to go to transit! The net positive of keeping drunk drivers off the road, increased access to work for people and increased access to workers for businesses is great!

Not a big fan of fares though, as somebody that’s dropped my wallet in the dark in the middle of the night in a sketchy part of town.

Where do you see that 25% number? According to Wikipedia, most systems around the world seem to be >50%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio

I feel like your comment is rather disingenuous, given that almost everything there that covers the U.S. is actually well below my generous "25%" and (even beyond the sort of U.S. being the default for HN discussions the topic we are discussing is specifically a U.S. case). The biggest case from your link above that threshold would generally not even be considered "public transportation" (Amtrak, that is). Given how overwhelmingly your source supports my position for the topic at hand, it's hard to assume good intent.

Amtrak also includes State subsidies as 'revenue'. They also don't count depreciation. They then want 45Bn or some such enormous figure for maintenance from the Feds.

https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?4,2183214

Reply on news.ycombinator.com