The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) has a solution to the high cost of living: make other taxpayers subsidize your lifestyle. Specifically, APTA reports that people can save $9,000 a year by riding public transit instead of driving.
What APTA doesn’t mention is that transit appears inexpensive only because most of the cost of transit is paid by non-transit riders. In 2007, subsidies to transit average 66 cents per passenger mile.
To calculate the $9,000 annual savings, APTA assumes that people would substitute transit for 15,000 miles of driving each year. At 66 cents per mile, that works out to $10,000 of subsidies to save $9,000 in costs. Not only are transit riders making other people subsidize them, they are making other people pay more in subsidies than the former auto drivers are saving.
