Sure, but cars aren't subsidized at $18 dollars per trip. The cost to the government of providing and maintaining roads is on the order of several cents per vehicle mile traveled.

For BART, that number is:

$1.07B operating expense / 892.5M million passenger miles traveled = $1.20 per mile. Then subtract out the fare per mile and the government is paying $0.84/mile for people to ride BART.

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panarky 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> the government is paying $0.84/mile for people to ride BART

If BART disappeared tomorrow, how much would the government have to pay to build all the additional roads and parking to support that incremental traffic?

And how much for healthcare for all the incremental pollution and collisions?

> several cents per vehicle mile

It's close to a dollar per mile when you include all the externalized costs.

Incremental property damage, injuries and fatalities, incremental chronic illness from pollution, parking land subsidy, fair market value of incremental land use and rights of way, lost tax revenue from that incremental land use, etc.

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Zacharias030 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Caltrain rides allow riders to be productive during the ride and generate income taxes in a way that cars do not.

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Schiendelman 3 hours ago | parent [-]

In general, this is why semi-private or private transport works so much better. If the end user is getting a bunch more value out of working on the train, they will pay more for the train than the road (if they have to pay the full price of the road vs train each time they use each).

	▲	2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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

Citations please? Seriously, you are making up numbers for the cost of cars and the govt subsidies provided. Did you account for the DMV? Did you account for traffic police? Did you account for the installation and maintenance of traffic light systems? Of course you didn't.

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DiogenesKynikos 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you look at how American cities are laid out, the cost on society of car infrastructure is massive. Roads and parking space use up a very significant percentage of the real estate in an American city. Public transit is far more efficient with space, so it saves society as a whole a lot of money.

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intrasight 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Private autonomous transportation will allow that public infrastructure to be tenfold more productive.

Public transportation will never have the incentive to minimize cost and headcount.

Where we do have public transportation, it should always face competition from private offerings - including on the tracks, as they do in Italy, for example.

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throwaway473825 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's not true. For example, France is rapidly automating its metros. The US is quite unique in viewing public transport as a jobs program rather than a public service.

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mitxela 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Of course it has the incentive. Even in this thread people are getting mad about it costing too much.

	▲	Schiendelman 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		When someone says incentive in this context, they usually mean the individual incentives of each of the workers to make money for themselves, get promoted to get a share of profit, not the overall fuzzy public pressure.

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lotsofpulp 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And low density suburbs in America are never going to get torn up and re-platted so autonomous vehicles is the only way to improve safety.

	▲	Schiendelman 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		On the contrary, our biggest cities started as little groups of houses. Letting places increase their density is a natural solution to a lot of this. The core problem is that we need to take away the power of local government to limit development.

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bluebarbet 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As others are explaining, these calculations are essentially spurious due to all the off-the-books externalities.

In a city the only question that surely matters is: Can the mode of transport be scaled? For private car transit, the answer is no. No city can function if everyone gets around by car. Even Houston has light rail and a bus network. If you can drive and your city somehow remains livable, that is because other people are taking transit.

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hiddencost 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You're missing a lot of externalities here.

Also, the cost to a driver of the car is around $0.70 not including cost to the government and cost of externalities.