John,

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to convince you, and frankly I’m beyond sick of wasting my time responding to online inanity, but I come to defend my good name. I only need the asthma meds on muggy, smoggy summer days. Where does the smog come from? Car tailpipes. Who pays for that inhaler? I do and my boss does; I bicycle, he takes the ‘L.’
Simply put, there are internal and external costs and benefits to all actions. Driving has high internal benefits and high external costs (although you write them off, these are in fact well proven). Transit has high internal costs and high external benefits — there are many “free riders” who gain economically from transit, even if they don’t use it. Thus, transit’s balance sheet looks a lot worse: its benefits mostly accrue off its own balance sheet. Some of what we as a region gain from transit is enhanced productivity and incredible land value. It’s hard to untangle these benefits, but suffice to say that the existence of Chicago (and thus its suburbs) can be seen as a singular external benefit of railroads (or at least the I&M Canal, which was financed through selling land alongside the canal). Most of the railroad companies that serve Chicago long went bankrupt — including the old street railway companies! — but the properties that they gave access to have continued to appreciate in value. Hence, the world’s only profitable subway system is Hong Kong’s — not coincidentally a subsidiary of a giant real estate corporation.

The CTA’s costs were shown by the Auditor General to be roughly in line with its peer systems, although they are rising quickly and service quality is lower. However, contract privatization (again, it’s never going to make money) has not proven a panacea wherever it’s been tried, whether the Hired Truck Program here or Railtrack or Metronet in the UK.

Okay, I’m officially beyond tired of pointing this out several times a day: the Texas Transportation Institute pegs mass transit’s time savings to Chicago area drivers at $1.6 billion a year! That’s twice as much as the region spends “subsidizing” mass transit — and doesn’t even begin to count countless other benefits of mass transit that you take for granted. For instance, state spending on transit generates far more local economic activity than spending in any other sector of the economy. In fact, a recent study about transit service cuts in Philadelphia calculated that “saving” $100M through transit cuts would cost local governments nearly twice as much in lost tax revenue.

Your gas taxes pay for roads, but they sure don’t pay for my asthma medication. (The asthma hospitalization rate for neighborhoods along the Dan Ryan is four times higher than the national average.) Gas taxes also don’t pay for fire trucks and hospital bills when a child gets run over in a hit-and-run. Gas taxes don’t pay to mitigate the 19 pounds of carbon dioxide produced by that gas — just that one cost is worth $1.61 (per gallon!) under Sweden’s carbon tax. Gas taxes don’t pay to keep aircraft carriers stationed in the Persian Gulf. Gas taxes didn’t pay for the Deep Tunnel sewer system, which was only needed after suburban sprawl paved over the whole of Cook County. Gas taxes pay for roads that could be 90% smaller if all they carried was commercial and emergency traffic. Your gas taxes and tolls, according to any fair study of “the full costs of driving,” amount to a small fraction of what driving costs our society — the taxes should be anywhere from $1 to $5 more per gallon if they did.

Why shouldn’t fares go up? Perhaps they should go up some, but since you don’t ride transit, you’d never realize that the cost of a CTA cash fare (assuming “doomsday”) has gone up nearly 60% since 1998, even while the cost of driving (according to AAA) has actually declined 10% since then. We as a society (and thus our government) have an economic, environmental, and social interest in not only providing transit, but in fully utilizing that investment (i.e., convincing people to ride it) — raising fares while the cost of driving declines sounds like a stupid way of doing that.

I don’t even ride transit all that much, but having lived in cities that weren’t built around transit, I appreciate that having transit allows Chicago to be the compact, lively, interesting city that it is. If I wanted to live in a sprawling, traffic choked dump — and if mass transit collapses, that’s what we’ll be left with — you think I’d have chosen to move here?