Submitted 7 hours ago by YICHM@lemmy.world to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
I have no airtravel experience, but I would assume that it falls in the first category.
That’s because it’s infrastructure. It’s very expensive, and needs to be publicly funded to be good - otherwise you have a death spiral of raising prices, neglecting maintenance, and losing passengers because it’s expensive and terrible
You can easily make it all back from taxes though… Good public transportation means anyone in a city can work, shop, or patronize anywhere, it makes the economy go brr
Air travel can be cheap and terrible.
I’d argue Switzerland is an example of good but expensive.
Depends on the categroy of public transit. Public transit as in subway in cities yes. But public transit as in long distance can be good and very expensive. For example the TGV in France is pretty good. But it still costs a shit ton to use
Good transit is always expensive. Where the money comes from can be hidden from the end users, but it is always expensive. If you only look at the fares it might seem that good transit is cheap, but that is just because the costs have been moved elsewhere - a political question that has nothing to do with transit.
Good transit means you can get a lot of places (there are a lot of routes, with good transfers), and you don't have to wait (meaning there are a lot of vehicles). That costs a lot of money no matter where you are.
However if you look at it a differently - your alternatives are either worse or more expensive.
Your share of the cheapest car (meaning 10 years old and you do all the maintenance yourself) is still going to be more that a great transit network. Most people live in a "family" situation so you could save money if you went down to one car/truck for those random things transit cannot do and use transit for everything, but this is only possible if you have great transit such that for more people this is a reasonable option.
A bike (ebike) is cheaper, but you can get much less distance in a reasonable amount of time. (or at least should be able to - many bad transit systems are slower than a bike!).
Walking is very cheap, but you cannot get very far in a reasonable amount of time and so it is limiting.
Or free, and filled with the unconscious bodies of fent users!
Isn’t that how public shared companies supposed to work? /s
In Northern Ireland it’s okay. Occasional delays but they manage to compensate the timetables for this
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Being good and being cheap are both indications that public transit is being properly funded. When funding is short, they have to raise fares and cut services.
stoy@lemmy.zip 6 hours ago
Yep, 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.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 6 minutes 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.
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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.