This is an implementation problem, not a problem with the underlying concept.

Public transit like buses and lightrail are significantly more efficient per person than personal vehicles. This is because they can transport many more people for the same amount of space and energy. They also typically run on set tracks, which yields more efficiency gains.

The US is really, really bad at doing public transit. It doesn't help that everything is car centric, which makes public transit much harder.

For example, in your comment you're excluding road cost, but you're including the full system cost of transit. That's a car centric side effect, e.g. we take roads for granted. But the cost of cars also includes the cost of roads, the cost of land under those roads, the cost of parking, etc.

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ggreer 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The $812 million figure for 2025 did not include the cost to build the rail system. Nor did it include many other expenses. TriMet's expenditures for this year are $1.185 billion.[1]

If you divide passenger miles for TriMet busses (141,726,107) by the number of revenue miles (21,195,016), you get an average of 6.7 passengers per bus, or around 10% of available seats. For MAX (the train) you get an average of 27.4 passengers per train, or around 16% of available seats. In both cases that's seats, not total capacity including standing room. I realize it's important to provision the system for peak demand, but still this seems very wasteful.

And because road wear scales with the fourth power of axle loading, a bus will typically cause 1,000x more road damage than a car.[2] Assuming every car on the road has only one occupant, this means that, on average, a TriMet bus causes 150x more road wear per occupant. The main externality created by cars is traffic.

I agree with you that public transportation can work. It clearly does in many places. But Portland's public transportation is dysfunctional, and I don't see that changing any time soon. That's why substitutes (even partial substitutes like Waymo) are beneficial. The more options people have for getting around, the better off they'll be.

1. https://trimet.org/budget/pdf/2026-adopted-budget.pdf

2. https://www.kgw.com/article/news/verify/yes-bus-more-road-da...

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bradleybuda 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> This is an implementation problem, not a problem with the underlying concept.

I agree. The question remains - why do U.S. municipalities universally and repeatedly fail to successfully implement rapid transit at an efficient price point? Buses, trains, and subways in America have ever-growing budgets (both in absolute and per customer mile terms) with ever-declining quality of service. Just asking for more tax revenue again and again is not the solution.

	▲	baron816 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The problem seems to be that many people view government services as a jobs program. Unfortunately, you can't maximize the number of well paying jobs a program creates AND provide high quality service AND control costs.

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rootusrootus 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> buses and lightrail are significantly more efficient per person than personal vehicles

Assuming the transit is fully utilized and the car is mostly not. And maybe that's a good way to look at it. But in Portland the light rail is often well under capacity, and in that case a carpool likely wins on efficiency.

> the cost of cars also includes the cost of roads, the cost of land under those roads, the cost of parking

Partially. Those roads will have to exist even if we did not have personal cars.

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array_key_first 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Right, the reason it might be underutilized is if you're bad at designing cities for it. Which the US is, so it is.

We design cities for cars, which results in the cities spreading out further and further, which makes transit less desirable and more expensive. Other countries don't have this problem to this degree, because they don't design their cities exclusively for cars.

Also, I don't think most roads would need to exist if the amount of cars decreased. Because of the density problem noted above. Cars are sort of self-eating. The more cars you use, the more land-per-car you need as everything spreads further out to accommodate the cars.

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xnx an hour ago | parent [-]

> is if you're bad at designing cities for it

Consider that the transportation system might not be the best fit if it requires designing the rest of the world differently and against preferences (large, detached, single-family homes with a yard).

	▲	amanaplanacanal a minute ago \| parent [-]
		Those preferences are based at least partially on the available transportation. If the automobile didn't exist, would people still prefer to live so far from jobs and entertainment? We also have the issue that dense inner cities are subsidizing the infrastructure for the spread out suburbs. If people had to pay the full cost they again might choose differently.

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troupo 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Assuming the transit is fully utilized and the car is mostly not.

The car is mostly not.

> But in Portland the light rail is often well under capacity,

Haven't looked deeply into it, but looking at how the US plans and designs its public transport, I'm surprised anyone was using it at all.

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xnx an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Train-advocates being against self-driving cars will be recognized as being equivalent to environmentalists being against nuclear power. Fortunately, I don't expect train-advocates as being nearly as successful. Once someone has tried Waymo, there's no going back to the old ways.

	▲	onethought an hour ago \| parent [-]
		But you're ignoring the core point (in both your metaphor and in the argument at hand): - If everyone took a Waymo... Waymo sucks. Not true of trains. ($/MW of power is stupid with nuclear in the age of solar and batteries, with basically zero safety concern... i.e. you can deploy solar and batteries to houses... not so much for nuclear)

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coryrc 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> in your comment you're excluding road cost

Partially not, as gas taxes cover part of it. I think gas and diesel taxes should cover the full cost of roads, which would help. Still doesn't mean transit should be run so inefficiently.

	▲	jandrewrogers 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		FWIW, some States require roads be funded exclusively with gas and use (e.g. vehicle registration) taxes. This does seem to significantly incentivize efficiency and long-term planning because their budget has to anticipate variable revenue.