“The reason most public transportation is seen as ‘losing’ money is precisely because it charges for trips. If you don't charge fares, suddenly it can't ‘lose’ money. It just costs money, the same as the roads.”

This random comment has given me my new favourite argument for removing fares from public transit.

If you want to see what a road looks like when it doesn’t lose money, look at the 407 in Toronto, which costs $0.50 per kilometre to drive along (about $0.58 USD per mile in freedom units)

(And that has a lot of mitigating factors even so)

@dx
to be fair, you have to pay taxes on your car and on gasoline, so it's not like cars are necessarily a net negative from an "income for state vs its spending on roads etc" point of view..

(I'm all for free public transit, I just think that this particular argument seems a bit.. simplicistic?)

@Doomed_Daniel @dx I think you’ll find any rigorous accounting of the cost of cars on society to not be in cars’ favour. Smarter people than us have already crunched the numbers.

@dx @Doomed_Daniel cars are an unnecessary evil. Let's build the world we want to live in for tomorrow.

Free public transit funded by a massive toll on drivers and parking. In fact all paid parking should be owned by the government. Your parking garage is dead weight loss and only necessary due to the failure of cars.