> Somehow the prices are still high enough that it's cheaper to buy a cheap used car and drive it instead.

City streets and roads are paid for through property taxes, so they are subsidized 100%.

Gas taxes and toll revenue account for about 1/3 of road infrastructure spend these days. This is significantly less than years past as the fixed gas tax hasn't kept up with inflation or adjusted upwards enough to match efficiency gains.

I was careful to say "city road & street" because those aren't generally subsidized by gas taxes, usually only inter-city roads and highways are.

The street in front of a house is often installed by the developer of the neighborhood, maintenance provided by the city or county.

But bigger roads in and out of town often have federal and state co-payments when built, depending on what and where they are.

Bridge replacements, for example, often involve federal funds.

You could say the same about rail infrastructure, but you cannot use private vehicles there (legally).

You actually can, but the hassle is expensive. You have to coordinate it with the railroad and the controller and you have to provide a locomotive and an engineer and on and on and on, but you can do it.

For heavy rail, yes. For light rail, that is more likely to have been built with local funds, is this actually a thing --- I'm sure if you work with the film commission, but I would be surprised if any light rail systems have a plan for private vehicles.

Amtrak will pull your private rail car in the right conditions, too https://www.amtrak.com/privately-owned-rail-cars

All light rails either operate like heavy rail (controlled from a central control area, receive clearances and obey rail signals) or they are just busses on tracks and operate by the rules of the road. Some are both.

The second are easy, and you just need permission in general. The first you need communication with the central office.

This is all done for maintenance vehicles for the tracks, which are often contractors.

Over here we only have rogue motor trolley riders like these guys:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B4MI08HWro

At the time of making the video this line had been closed for over 20 years, which is why it's so overgrown and why nobody bothered to disturb the riders.

So do rail lines?

> Somehow the prices are still high enough that it's cheaper to buy a cheap used car and drive it instead.

Cars are even more heavily subsidized, maybe?

A monthly transit pass costs me $100 where I am in the US. Also, as long as you use the same payment method every time, the system tracks when you've reached the daily max and monthly max and stops charging you for the remainder of the period so you don't even need to buy the pass ahead of time. It couldn't be easier and there isn't a reliable used car you could drive for cheaper.

I still own and use a car because there is enough friction in day to day errands that transit isn't a great option for. For trips to downtown or the various arenas, it works wonderfully though.

> Somehow the prices are still high enough that it's cheaper to buy a cheap used car and drive it instead.

Cars benefit from enormous subsidies that are typically even greater than for public transit.

This obviously true for the monetary value of building all the roads and highways a city has, but it's even more true in terms of land usage. Cars in US cities tend to be allotted far, far more land than space reserved for walking, biking, or public transit. Since land use is mostly zero-sum, this is an extraordinary amount of investment that cars receive as a mode.

And of course, it's not just the roads. Mandatory parking minimums in zoning codes in most cities require businesses to allocate huge amounts of space for free car parking. This is a large de facto subsidy that also inhibits every other mode.

I love trains. But ... the New Mexico Rail Runner (Santa Fe <-> Albuquerque, though technically the southern terminus is Belen) is estimated to have a subsidy of US$28,000 per rider per year.

Find this curious. Surely factoring in the cost of tax and insurance greatly increases the cost of the used car? I'm based in Europe so perhaps things are radically different in the US.

Insurance on a beater can be quite low if you’re not a young male or bad driver. Like $1-200/yr.

The difference is that in America we have politicians who cultivate a fear of cities, public transportation, and not owning a bigger car than you need.

...there's also the kind of housing uncertainty where "maybe I'll have to live in that car for a bit" is often a consideration. You might get away with living on the train for a little while, but a car is a much better bet.

"often" seems slightly hyperbolic...

Maybe I've picked up some bias from the years I spent where my bicycle commute took me through the homeless camp. I'm lucky to have had very few times where I wasn't sure where I'd be sleeping that night, but it's still something that I consider quite often.

Trains and buses in the US, where they exist, have ticket prices on par with the amount of gas a single person would use driving a used car. For very long trips they're a bit cheaper (up to 2x). For very short trips they're often a lot more expensive (up to 5x). For trips more than an hour or two, the one-way cost usually has no significant discount on a round-trip ticket, and you can pay 10x more if you don't buy well in advance and go on the cheapest days.

The effects of that vary. Relating to TFA, if you were making this trip 6x per year, could plan the dates, were always travelling alone, and didn't need any transportation anywhere the rest of the year beyond what walking and biking could provide, you'd expect the train to be about break-even with gas+maintenance. It wouldn't be worth having the car.

As soon as any of those assumptions change though, that logic goes out the window.

Suppose you have to get to work (and that rent/housing is enough higher near work that it's worth commuting _somehow_ by a substantial margin). The markup for short trips is very high for public transit, Uber, and all your other normal alternatives. You'll be money ahead on a decent used car (clean, no body damage, new enough to easily last 100k miles even if you know nothing about cars) in a year, even counting the entire purchase price, taxes, insurance, and everything else.

Under the assumption you have a car already and only have to consider unit costs (depreciation, gas, maintenance), trips like TFA can start to make a lot of sense to drive, depending on your personal preferences. Every long bus trip I've taken in the US has been so rattly and bumpy that I couldn't sleep or type anyway, and by the end of a trip they've been so full that I couldn't type anyway (tall, broad shoulders, the geometry doesn't work out in narrow seats with so little space to the seat in front of me that I already have to angle my legs just to fit). I'd much rather listen to my own music or a cooking show or something, keep the temperature exactly where I'd like it, have the flexibility to carry a few extra items, and get to my destination in half the time without stopping 20 places to pick up more passengers. When the money's a wash, I'll pick the car every time.

If you're willing to make tweaks to your life to save money/fuel/..., it's also worth looking at the possibility of carpooling. If you can go with one other coworker, you're already a lot of money ahead on the train. If you additionally didn't know your return date in advance (variable length job, which you're staying at for a small but undetermined number of days), the difference in ticket prices would be enough to completely pay for insurance and taxes for the year, on top of depreciation, gas, and maintenance. Those 6 trips would justify owning a used car for any other part of your life where the unit economics made sense.

If you work remotely, live in a nice climate close to groceries, or have any number of other nice properties to your life, a car doesn't necessarily make sense. Our infrastructure doesn't often make the alternatives pleasant though. E.g., I was pretty adamant about biking through college. The city wouldn't plow the bike paths till days after any major snowstorm though, the snow was always falling into the edges of the road, and there was a zero percent chance I was going to bike out in the middle of an icy 45mph road in front of pickup trucks who think it's sane to tailgate in those conditions. 6+ months each year, the only non-car option was walking. I did that a couple winters, but 5 miles each way is a bear when you're trudging through snow, and the one semester I had an evening class I always thought long and hard about whether I'd stay at school an extra 8 hours or add an extra 10 miles to my day.

Details vary, but _most_ Americans are in some sort of similar situation where cars are the only realistic option if you can possibly afford it. Trudging through the snow when it's <-10F the entire month of January is fine if you're young and single, but I wouldn't want to carry a kid to their doctor in that environment. Tons of people just live too far from town for non-car options to be practical. Roads poorly designed for rain and pedestrians limit the safety and practicality of biking in other huge swathes of the country. And so on.

Mind you, I'm not against public transport or anything. The BART trains here in the Bay are something I use a few times a year, and they're perfectly fine. You can even get work done on them if you'd like. My point is that cases where trains and buses are the best option (or even any option) are so rare that for most Americans you can assume that the cost of insurance and taxes for a car have already been taken care of, so that only the unit economics of a given trip play into whether you'd drive or not (when considering it financially).

Car owners live in denial about the costs of their vehicles. They often believe their only cost is gas and maybe insurance.