Blew my mind when I learned that about Caltrain. I thought tickets felt a little expensive, then I learned what it really should cost.

You know subsidy per train passenger mile?

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tristanj 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah I was shocked as well when I learned about the financials. I'll the subsidy per passenger mile to the table as well.

I remember talking to a VC a few years back, and he vehemently explained why he will never ever fund companies related to public transit, for this reason. Public transit was one of the two sectors he would not invest in (the other being materials science).

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Barbing 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Incredible!!! Wow, is this apparent extraordinary cost discrepancy anybody’s fault, or is that just how it has to be?

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tristanj 10 hours ago | parent [-]

In my opinion, the primary driver is the astronomical cost of housing in the SF bay area (which is 3x the national average), which drives up the cost of all labor. Public transit is infrastructure heavy, very labor intensive, and the high cost of labor makes it very expensive.

In the bay, low-skilled / manual laborers spend >50% of their income on housing. Many can't afford to live here, so they demand higher wages or leave, which drives up the price of labor even further.

If sufficient housing were built and the Bay Area had the same housing prices as the rest of the US, then 1) the supply of labor would go up 2) wages could fall by 30-40% without a quality of life decrease. Businesses could reduce their labor costs by 20%, which would improve the QoL of everyone in the area, including manual laborers. When local businesses cut costs, then everything costs less (food, housing, transport), and QoL goes up.

Then run this process iteratively and you will see massive reductions in prices everywhere, the cost of everything will go down by 30%+ percent.

For the case of BART, they spend ~$800 million / year on labor, so reducing cost here has the highest RoI. They would save hundreds of millions per year.

	▲	throwaway473825 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's a feature, not a bug. Public transport is viewed as a jobs program in the US. Buy America Act makes buses roughly three times more expensive, and then they use decades-old technology due to a lack of competition. The MTA in NYC has two-person subway crews, which is almost unprecedented in this day and age. BART could be driverless if unions wouldn't revolt. There's an irony that American unions are strong enough to prevent automatization, but weak enough to fear it (unlike say Denmark or France).