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