When it comes to public transportation, they rarely pull a profit on their own. What they do is drive the economy in the places they go, make a city more accessible to everyone (further driving the economy), and cut costs for the city in other places. They’re a loss leader to save money and improve quality of life in a multitude of other areas by huge margins.
Everything is profitable if you raise prices. In a way you’re just offsetting a certain segment of the populations transportation costs to everyone else under that system. Maybe you could privatize the roads too and use the tolls to fund more buses which operate at a profit. Its fun think of insane libertarian free marker solutions to such problems :) Cars might be less appealing if people had to pay the associated infrastructure costs on a per km basis.
That’s not really how that works.
When it comes to public transportation, they rarely pull a profit on their own. What they do is drive the economy in the places they go, make a city more accessible to everyone (further driving the economy), and cut costs for the city in other places. They’re a loss leader to save money and improve quality of life in a multitude of other areas by huge margins.
Everything is profitable if you raise prices. In a way you’re just offsetting a certain segment of the populations transportation costs to everyone else under that system. Maybe you could privatize the roads too and use the tolls to fund more buses which operate at a profit. Its fun think of insane libertarian free marker solutions to such problems :) Cars might be less appealing if people had to pay the associated infrastructure costs on a per km basis.