> car commuters are subsidizing public transportation via gas and other taxes, not the other way around.
Do you have numbers for this? Last I checked, gas taxes didn't cover the costs for road construction and maintenance, let alone have enough left over to subsidize public transportation.
Billions of dollars are taken from so-called Highway Trust Fund, paid for by your gas taxes, to fund public transport. Cite:
http://reason.com/archives/2012/02/14/house-aims-to-stop-hig...
>>Every time you buy a gallon of gas in this nation, you pay 18.2 cents to Uncle Sam. The original rationalization for the federal gas tax was that it was collected in a "Highway Trust Fund" and used to pay for road infrastructure. In 1983, a transit account was created [pdf], diverting 20 percent of the trust fund to pay for the mass transit dreams of local potentates.<<
That's not counting $$$ coming from general FedGov income tax revenue. Because far more people use cars regularly than use public transport regularly, those are additional subsidies extracted (involuntarily) from automobile and truck owners.
Year, those numbers make basically no sense. Even your link doesn't prove what it claims in the headline. The government shovels billions from the general fund into the highway fund every year. The highway fund disburses a much smaller number of billions into transit projects every year. Therefore the fuel tax does not cover the cost of highway spending.
I'll stop here because I have a policy against arguing with libertarians on the internet, but in case you are interested in facts from actual research rather than from political mouthpieces here's one. The URL says it all:
For some reason, the other side basically looks at interstates and then calls it a day, ignoring that the vast majority of road expenditures isn't federal.
(OK, the reason is pretty obvious: it's the only way to make the numbers come out "right".)
Do you have numbers for this? Last I checked, gas taxes didn't cover the costs for road construction and maintenance, let alone have enough left over to subsidize public transportation.