How does Waymo get subsidies? If I ride in Waymo, does that mean I get subsidies?

GeneralMayhem 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> by simple virtue of being a car

State and local governments spend a truly obscene amount of money building and repairing roads, and set aside a nauseating amount of publicly owned land to serve as roads, street parking, and parking lots. Those of us who don't frequently drive get some benefit from the roads, sure, because of the efficiencies of shops needing deliveries and whatnot, but not anything close to proportional to what drivers get out of it. And we accept this as the default way that things should be, whereas we assume that public transit needs to "pay for itself".

▲

wskinner an hour ago | parent [-]

Road wear and tear increases as the fourth power of axle load. Are you counting the spending on bus stops, bus parking, dedicated bus lanes, and more on the other side of the ledger?

	▲	GeneralMayhem an hour ago \| parent [-]
		In FY25, according to their budget [1], TriMet - the Portland public transit authority - spent $19M on bus services. In that same budget, PDOT spent $56M on streets, signs and streetlights, before you even consider the $242M spent on "asset management" - which appears to generally be capital improvements; i.e., rebuilding roads [2, page 509]. I don't care what fraction of that wear and tear is due to buses, it's not remotely close. And in any case, by the same fourth-power law, private 18-wheelers do astronomically more damage than buses. And yes, PDOT makes revenue back from some of those things, so it's not all straight from the city general fund, but it doesn't matter in any practical way. They don't have revenues broken down as far as I'd like on that budget - there's one big $89M line item for "charges for services", which appears to include parking meters as well as tram fare - but the vast majority of their budget still comes from taxes plus "intergovernmental" sources (aka state and federal money, aka taxes). [1] https://www.gpmetro.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/2025-Oper... [2] https://www.portland.gov/budget/documents/fy-2025-26-city-po...

▲

brookst 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes. Roads are subsidized; the true cost of building and maintaining roads comes from general funds, not just from vehicle registrations and gas taxes (which of course Waymo doesn’t pay, being righteously electric).

So you pay Waymo, they pay a few hundred dollars a year per car in registration, and you benefit from billions of dollars a year in highway funds from both state and federal sources.