Personally I feel it's fine for them to operate at a loss, it's a public service, akin to the fire department or library. The amount of good it does society to get cars off the road is staggering.
The lack of bus drivers simply comes down to an unwillingness to pay more. It's the exact same problem with teachers, where the wage is extremely low but they would rather just have a shortage rather than paying more.
Once you realize the sheer amount of commerce and business that is enabled by a decent metro system you see that they pay for itself several times over.
That's even easier to measure because these gains are localized.
yes but I am about to go to bed so the link mihht come only tomorrow.
Also some studies have calculated the impact on health in the society and calculated a cost to the society per km of driving a car and the money saved when doing the same km walking or with a bicycle.
From what I'd read, the majority of road wear comes from tractor trailers, who don't nearly cover their costs.
It may help to either tax them directly, or indirectly via diesel. Yes, costs pass to consumers, but it would also encourage more done via ship and train, I feel. Even that would be a huge help to clearing up traffic and lowering infra spend.
The difference is that the gas tax or similar user fees could easily (if politically feasible) be scaled up to cover both capital and operating expenses for the entire road and highway network.
If you tried to do that for merely the operating costs of many transit systems, they’d enter a death spiral.
The lack of bus drivers simply comes down to an unwillingness to pay more. It's the exact same problem with teachers, where the wage is extremely low but they would rather just have a shortage rather than paying more.