Many USA transit systems have such a low farebox recovery ratio that they may even save money by getting rid of the overhead of fare collection. Cash handling is not cheap, nor is maintaining fareboxes and electronic fare collection equipment across entire fleets.
Even SF Muni which is heavily used has only a 22% farebox recovery ratio.
> Most other countries have subsidized or even free mass transit systems and they realistically don't expect them to be profitable, but helping people/goods to be moved is considered more important.
Here is a good map of "farebox recovery ratio" (the percentage of operating costs funded by fares): https://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/gallery/Map_World%20.... Quite a few asian systems recover more than 100% of operating costs, and a couple of European systems do, but no American ones. London's public transit system, for example, gets 25% of its funding from the government. The NYC MTA is at 45%.
The farebox recovery ratio in many western nations are not enough to ever fully fund public transport. In many cases, the systems to collect fares end up costing hundreds of millions of dollars. These costs are never made back. It makes sense to make it free.
In 2015, TriMet's farebox recovery ratio was 39.1%.
Funnily enough, that blog post seems to have made up the numbers out of thin air. They quote a 2011 FRR of 27.8%, while TriMet's published numbers are 35.9%.
Regardless, it's a public good. I simply wouldn't expect public transportation to make money, just like I wouldn't expect the court system or the DMV to make money. These things exist to benefit the city or state as a whole. I'm happy to pitch in.
How much it should be subsidized is a fair question, but that it should be at all, not even a concern for me.
Doesn't this just mean that they are expensive? I heard complaints about how expensive Tokyo's subway is. Reducing price and propping the system with tax can be a better approach in the long term, because that can encourage more people to use public transit and reduce demand for costly highways.
(Also, one could argue that the freedom to move around at an affordable price is a basic service the government should strive to provide, although I'm sure some people will regard such an idea as socialist nonsense.)
Gas taxes and tolls don't make up for the amount of spending we do on road repairs, police, rights of way, land for free parking, and the like to build the road network, but somehow public transit is expected to have a farebox recovery ratio greater than 1 when automotive transit is not expected to?
It really depends. Many large metro systems in Asia do better than 100% farebox recovery. Europe hovers between 30 to 60%. In the US anything above 35% is pretty remarkable -and there are a few over 50% but not many. Most recover less than 30% from their boxfare. And that's mostly due to being too "diluted". You have lines in suburban-like areas who cannot sustain the lines via ridership.
I'm a fan of public transit I love punctual, clean, timely, dependable mass transit, but I realize it may not be the best answer for agglomerations like we have in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties in the Bay area or Dallas-Ft Worth, TX.
> ...[no] transit system in the US has a farebox recovery ratio of above 55% and most are around 20-30% .
There are a tiny handful of roads in the country that bother to even attempt to recover their operating costs. Overall, I'd bet that the road system in the US has a "farebox recovery rate" of low single-digits at absolute best.
That doesn't mean we should shut it down.
Publicly-accessible transit systems are a public good... one that delivers far more value than can be easily accounted for.
It almost always gets much farther beyond that point. In Seattle, where I live, farebox recovery is just 27%, which, given that fare is $2.75, means that riding a bus is much less cost effective than driving.
Fairbox recovery rates [1] in the US tend to be around 15-20%. The rest is made up from public subsidies. In the most heavily utilized subway systems, the ratio can increase to around 50% (NYC). [1]
It depends how you count the revenue, but by some accounts public transit is more heavily subsidized by State and Federal government than driving. This is especially true on a per-passenger-mile basis.
I'm not sure that making public transportation free is the right idea to make more public transportation available, since the public transportation networks use the money from fares to function (in addition to money from the gov, any network with farebox recovery ratio [0] < 100% will need an external money source)
Still I agree that public transportation is a common good and I'm happy to live in a country with above-average networks (both at the local and national levels).
The “farebox recovery ratio” of a road is usually zero. Roads are funded through taxes (with the exception of some toll highways). Why can’t transit be the same?
That still means it is 38% subsidized by the taxpayer, right? Farebox recovery is important but you need to also take into account in absolute terms the cost minus recovery.
I can only speak from experience for Hong Kong's MTR system. It has over 100% farebox recovery as well. Fares are distance-based [0] so it's hard to tell, but the average seems to be US$1.20 or so per person (unless you are traveling to Shenzhen) one way, which doesn't include transfers to the privately-run buses. If you believe in the Big Mac index at all this doesn't seem to be much more expensive compared to the US. (Note that it doesn't include transfers to buses.)
But the MTR actually was subsidized by the government, which let MTR Corporation develop the land above the subway to make malls and stuff, which they make even more money on. Presumably some of this profit gets reinvested into the system itself.
Public transit offers a large externality: it provides transportation to employees and shoppers, which means a benefit to employers and merchants. There's also a massive benefit to those who can't (or won't) use transit and benefit by reduced congestion.
Early transit systems were highly subsidized by just those same parties. Concentrating on farebox recovery is a false premise, ignores these benefits, and results in underprovisioning of transit systems.
Ah, your previous statement was unclear. I thought that 100% farebox recovery was a goal, but it is not.
Again, corruption covered by unlimited debt financing. It’s like the US has the worst version imaginable of all sorts of common things. Of course the LRT is not going to make back its costs if it’s not even designed to make back its costs. The best it can do is to be more efficient at getting people to their destinations than spending that amount on roads and parking garages.
Passenger rail used to be a profitable privately financed business, but they all went bankrupt because car infrastructure was massively subsidized, surface rail was missing its schedules due to congestion from cars, and operators were forbidden by law from charging enough to cover their expenses. Now, the existing public transit systems are subsidized by the government, with a few profitable routes that require a lot of unprofitable routes to make them viable; and a farebox recovery ratio of 35% is considered pretty high.
Also, I have learned not to trust Americans when they use words like “very dense.” Looking at ZipAtlas.com, the densest zip code in the Minneapolis-St Paul area has a bit less than 16,000 people per square mile. I think of San Francisco as being not very dense, and it averages over 18,000 people per square mile; over 53,000 in the densest zip code.
Right, but then you also have to account for the value created by the transit system that isn’t captured in fares. A lot of property has higher value because it’s near a transit stop, and a lot of economic activity is created by the ease of access it facilitates.
Imagine if you were the government of NYC (also sub-100% farebox recovery) and someone offered to remove the subway system for free. No more losing money to subsidize it! Would you take that offer? No, that would be insane.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio
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