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Originally Posted by Hatman
It is a perception issue - Everyone knows that both roads and transit are built with taxpayer money, but to ride transit requires you to pay again while driving on a road does not.
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That's because drivers (or sometimes their company) pay for their car's capital and operating costs and drive themselves and their passengers. Meanwhile transit users almost never pay directly for the capital costs and usually only a fraction of the operating and labor costs.
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It doesn't matter that roads get many multiples the money that transit gets, because very few people know how lopsided the funding structure is.
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Because cars carry many multiples more passenger-km. If we spent on a purely modal share basis, it would be even more lopsided.
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It has also been shown that improvements to transportation is one of the best ways to lift people out of poverty:
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Realistically in North America, that would be gifting poor people, who can't afford a car, a 15 year old but well-maintained Toyota Corolla or Camry and subsidizing the fuel, insurance and licensing costs. There are numerous examples from articles about the LA bus ridership collapse about how many poorer people, sick of terrible service, saved up and got a car and their lives changed for the better and they're never going back.