Reply #6: Mass transit would be much more popular if we had any idea how much auto use costs the government

[taterguy]

I've asked a lot of smart people. No one knows. There are just guesses.

To calculate the automobile subsidy you'd have to analyze the budgets of every government entity in the country.

Even then, you'd have trouble agreeing on what constitutes a subsidy to cars.

My city loses half a million dollars a year on downtown parking decks.

Is that a subsidy to automobile users or downtown businesses?

What do you do with the percentage of First Responder (Police, EMTs) budgets that's spent on automobile accidents?

And of course what portion of our defense budget is devoted to protecting oil fields.

Calculating mass transit subsidies is much easier. You simply take the expenditures and subtract from it the revenues (ie, ticket sales).

So even though mass transit is cheaper, no one really knows how much cheaper it is.

Now watch this thread sink like a stone.