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.
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.
At surface value, this seems true. Until you look at the city with the best train system on earth, Tokyo. There, the trains are cheap. The trains are fast, clean, on time. And all of it is without any external funding
The initial investment can be very expensive, yes, but a good underground system or largely off-road overground system in a city can be profitable from reasonable fares because of the sheer quantity of passengers it can move per hour.
Once you get to the frequency where you don’t look up the timetable before you set off because there’ll be one along shortly and you get to the speed where you beat the traffic, you start winning passengers from cars and them everyone has a better commute.
But if there’s only a few per hour and they have to mix in with the traffic, public transport is worse than going by car, so people don’t use it en masse, so fares are high and it’s not great.
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.
At surface value, this seems true. Until you look at the city with the best train system on earth, Tokyo. There, the trains are cheap. The trains are fast, clean, on time. And all of it is without any external funding
Trains are still expensive - they just have enough users that the amnortized cost is cheap.
The initial investment can be very expensive, yes, but a good underground system or largely off-road overground system in a city can be profitable from reasonable fares because of the sheer quantity of passengers it can move per hour.
Once you get to the frequency where you don’t look up the timetable before you set off because there’ll be one along shortly and you get to the speed where you beat the traffic, you start winning passengers from cars and them everyone has a better commute.
But if there’s only a few per hour and they have to mix in with the traffic, public transport is worse than going by car, so people don’t use it en masse, so fares are high and it’s not great.