Depends on licensing fee collections and various vehicle-related taxes. In the 2000, for example, total revenues from user fees, licensing, vehicle related taxes, and, where the roads are tollways, toll collections totalled $101.5 billion. Total construction and maintanence costs spent on them were $124 billion. Made up about 82% of its costs in various fees.
By comparison, light rail brought in $0.2 billion in fares and user fees but cost $1.8 billion, or 9 times as much, to operate. Rail made back only 11% of its costs.
Packed trains at rush hour are a good thing.
Not necessarily, and I say that having lived in cities with trains and used them frequently. They do carry volume, but at high costs - the cost of tax subsidy for their operation and the cost of the space the above-ground ones occupy, which often consumes space that could easily and more effectively be turned into two or more freeway lanes.
Most cities with rail systems would need to double or more their freeway lane-miles to get the same throughput.
Do you have statistical evidence of this? The numbers I have seen indicate that freeways are significantly more efficient uses of space.
What's cheaper and more aestehtically pleasing? 20+ new lanes of expressway into a city (with a concomittant increase in parking lots and automobile servicing businesses), or a basic rail system to handle the peak load?
I don't know about you, but I'll vote for the freeway any day over a dirty grafitti-covered train car. Educate them of the cost inefficiency of rail, and most people would probably agree with me.
Source? Those figures are bogus, whoever compiled them has done some artful data manipulation. My guess is that they are mixing in capital and operating costs. Given that some rail systems have been running for 130+ years, will operate for another century(if it is so outdated, why is ridership on those lines at all time highs?)those 2 should not be combined. Yeah, you might be able to depreciate track and equipment over a set # of years, but its the ROW that is ultimately most valuable and it is misleading to apply that cost over any set period of time.
I don't know about you, but I'll vote for the freeway any day over a dirty grafitti-covered train car.
I absolutely hate this type of argument, regardless whether it comes from pro or anti transit groups. Naw, a freeway is never dirty, never noisy, never built with a huge eminent domain landgrab(< / sarcasm >) And why do you assume that building rail is done in place of building a freeway? What freeway was canceled to build any of the DART light-rail lines? Answer, none. My opinion is that freeways should be built first, arterials maximized, and then build transit(if the project and system make sense). There are some corridors where freeway expansion is just too prohibitive. Right now TX DOT is looking at tunneling for much of the length of I-635 on the north side of Dallas. That gets into Big Dig dollars. I am not yet advocating transit in that corridor(haven't studied it), but that is one example of where a freeway expansion may end up being cost/politically prohibitive. I-610 on the westside in Houston is another example of a nightmare of ROW issues. Again, not yet advocating rail transit in Houston, but I can see where a well-planned system would be a popular and well-utilized alternative to the roads. The operative word is 'well-planned', which given Brown and METRO's politics, I have my doubts about and likely will actively oppose their Nov. rail referendum. But each case is different, and these blanket condemnations of transit is the kind of silly tactics I expect from the left.