Yeah—ideally, fares only need to cover the marginal/fluctuating costs, not the fixed cost of the whole system.
For private transportation, fares need to pay for both, and generate a profit on top of that.
Comment on From what I've seen, public transit is either expensive and terrible or cheap and good.
stoy@lemmy.zip 2 days agoYep, what plenty of people don’t understand, or don’t want to understand is that a good public transport system is seldom directly profitable.
Instead, the profits comes from taxes, public transport enable more people to work in a far greater area, meaning that you get more money through income tax, people earning money also get to spend it, generating more money from sales tax, and so on.
This is also why privately funded public transport systems are less common than state/city funded systems.
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 2 days ago
squaresinger@lemmy.world 1 day ago
What most people intuitively understand, though, is that public roads are expensive, not profitable and still a worthwhile investment.
It’s kinda baffling that the same isn’t intuitively understandable to everyone when it comes to public transport.