In 2025, TriMet had 262 million passenger miles at a system cost of $812 million, for a cost of $3.09 per passenger mile.[1] Fares covered 7.8% of their costs. The other 92.2% came from payroll taxes and federal grants.
For comparison, a Lyft or Uber in the same area would cost you $1-2 per mile. Obviously it's not feasible for all 200k daily riders to take Uber/Lyft, and the Uber/Lyft cost doesn't include externalities like extra traffic, but TriMet is very expensive per passenger mile.
This is an implementation problem, not a problem with the underlying concept.
Public transit like buses and lightrail are significantly more efficient per person than personal vehicles. This is because they can transport many more people for the same amount of space and energy. They also typically run on set tracks, which yields more efficiency gains.
The US is really, really bad at doing public transit. It doesn't help that everything is car centric, which makes public transit much harder.
For example, in your comment you're excluding road cost, but you're including the full system cost of transit. That's a car centric side effect, e.g. we take roads for granted. But the cost of cars also includes the cost of roads, the cost of land under those roads, the cost of parking, etc.
The $812 million figure for 2025 did not include the cost to build the rail system. Nor did it include many other expenses. TriMet's expenditures for this year are $1.185 billion.[1]
If you divide passenger miles for TriMet busses (141,726,107) by the number of revenue miles (21,195,016), you get an average of 6.7 passengers per bus, or around 10% of available seats. For MAX (the train) you get an average of 27.4 passengers per train, or around 16% of available seats. In both cases that's seats, not total capacity including standing room. I realize it's important to provision the system for peak demand, but still this seems very wasteful.
And because road wear scales with the fourth power of axle loading, a bus will typically cause 1,000x more road damage than a car.[2] Assuming every car on the road has only one occupant, this means that, on average, a TriMet bus causes 150x more road wear per occupant. The main externality created by cars is traffic.
I agree with you that public transportation can work. It clearly does in many places. But Portland's public transportation is dysfunctional, and I don't see that changing any time soon. That's why substitutes (even partial substitutes like Waymo) are beneficial. The more options people have for getting around, the better off they'll be.
> This is an implementation problem, not a problem with the underlying concept.
I agree. The question remains - why do U.S. municipalities universally and repeatedly fail to successfully implement rapid transit at an efficient price point? Buses, trains, and subways in America have ever-growing budgets (both in absolute and per customer mile terms) with ever-declining quality of service. Just asking for more tax revenue again and again is not the solution.
The problem seems to be that many people view government services as a jobs program. Unfortunately, you can't maximize the number of well paying jobs a program creates AND provide high quality service AND control costs.
> buses and lightrail are significantly more efficient per person than personal vehicles
Assuming the transit is fully utilized and the car is mostly not. And maybe that's a good way to look at it. But in Portland the light rail is often well under capacity, and in that case a carpool likely wins on efficiency.
> the cost of cars also includes the cost of roads, the cost of land under those roads, the cost of parking
Partially. Those roads will have to exist even if we did not have personal cars.
Right, the reason it might be underutilized is if you're bad at designing cities for it. Which the US is, so it is.
We design cities for cars, which results in the cities spreading out further and further, which makes transit less desirable and more expensive. Other countries don't have this problem to this degree, because they don't design their cities exclusively for cars.
Also, I don't think most roads would need to exist if the amount of cars decreased. Because of the density problem noted above. Cars are sort of self-eating. The more cars you use, the more land-per-car you need as everything spreads further out to accommodate the cars.
Consider that the transportation system might not be the best fit if it requires designing the rest of the world differently and against preferences (large, detached, single-family homes with a yard).
Those preferences are based at least partially on the available transportation. If the automobile didn't exist, would people still prefer to live so far from jobs and entertainment?
We also have the issue that dense inner cities are subsidizing the infrastructure for the spread out suburbs. If people had to pay the full cost they again might choose differently.
Train-advocates being against self-driving cars will be recognized as being equivalent to environmentalists being against nuclear power. Fortunately, I don't expect train-advocates as being nearly as successful. Once someone has tried Waymo, there's no going back to the old ways.
But you're ignoring the core point (in both your metaphor and in the argument at hand):
- If everyone took a Waymo... Waymo sucks. Not true of trains.
($/MW of power is stupid with nuclear in the age of solar and batteries, with basically zero safety concern... i.e. you can deploy solar and batteries to houses... not so much for nuclear)
> Public transit like buses and lightrail are significantly more efficient per person than personal vehicles.
I would be interested to see a study on that. I see many buses driving around with zero or one passengers on them. If a bus is full, the efficiency would be off the charts. But for a city like Portland, that only happens during commute times. The rest of the time, the buses are driving around empty.
Partially not, as gas taxes cover part of it. I think gas and diesel taxes should cover the full cost of roads, which would help. Still doesn't mean transit should be run so inefficiently.
FWIW, some States require roads be funded exclusively with gas and use (e.g. vehicle registration) taxes. This does seem to significantly incentivize efficiency and long-term planning because their budget has to anticipate variable revenue.
Oh wow I didn't know Uber solely relied on private roads, had their own DMV, or fleet of millions of cars; truly an innovative company that doesn't rely on public infrastructure!
The point is that the cost of the road infrastructure isn't accounted for, not to mention the externality of having a half a million cars on the road to move 750k people. Rideshare is slipstreaming in the subsidized flow of cars.
The cost of providing a bus exceeds the cost of operating a car in many cases, like lower population density neighborhoods. It may save the public money to centralize transit on major corridors and then subsidize trips on Waymo in some areas and at some times.
It depends on the population density. You may have a perfectly well designed route for the area, but there are only so many people per hour that want to take a trip. You can delete routes and make people walk further, but that makes the trip take longer and not everyone can or wants to walk a long ways to the bus stop.
Different population densities have different optimal vehicle sizes. It's the same reason a small city airport might have one or two regional jets per day serving it instead of 2 747s per week.
"Centralize transit on major corridors" is about full buses. But transit agencies spend as much per hour on an empty bus as a full one. Transit agencies run empty buses on routes that are rarely full, and run vans and even microtransit that may just be a waste of money.
Too many, but at least some are directly on vehicles. Transit (in the USA, on the West coast) is funded >90% by taxes on income, property, vehicle registration, fuel, etc not by the people using it.
I cannot speak for every state ever, but I remember that roads in WA were mostly funded by gas/diesel taxes + vehicle registration fees.
Which is also why WA state has been charging an additional significant car registration fee on EVs (on top of the usual annual registration costs), since EVs don't contribute to this normally through gas/diesel taxes.
Everyone uses the roads. You have to reach for very obscure examples to find commerce that doesn't utilize roads. Every bit of concrete and steel to build transit was at some point transported over roads.
Assuming an average fare of 2.47$ per to make the math even, that's 6.00$/ride total cost.
When a company / government gets the cost per mile to run a fleet of autonomous EV's down to ~60cents/mile or so, which is a plausible enough number, then a lot of those transit rides are going to look real silly from a cost effectiveness POV.
Yes. If the government were able to provide transit more cheaply in the future by using new vehicles then the transit that the government provides would be cheaper than it is today.
And the meaning of the truism you so adoitly picked up on is that at reasonable projections trimet and similar public transit will be uncompetitive in price (and service) relative to self driving EVs. Ergo it is correct to deprioritize their funding.
This of course is in refutation to the various points made up the thread that self driving EVs are not cost competitive and glorified taxis -- not viable public transit for the masses.
> Waymo is an expensive taxi service, not a solution to public transport.
Why not both?
The absolute biggest problems with mass transit in the US are the "first mile" and the "last mile".
If I wanted to take mass transit, I had to show up before 7:00 AM in order to park my car. Every single train after 7:00AM became useless to commuters. That's idiotic.
And then I needed a car at the destination station to drive to my workplace. So, a bunch of us had completely idle cars parked at the commuter station that we used roughly 15 minutes per day but needed parking at both the station AND the workplace--just to use the train. Good lord that is stupid.
Waymo at the right price solves a whole bunch of these issues. Suddenly utilization of your train can go up because you've decoupled train utilization from train station parking. In addition, train utilization isn't so dependent upon close distance to the station. Now, you can build a transit station and allow it to organically fill in instead of getting killed because it's an expensive money sink for 10+ years until housing builds around it. etc.
Sure, you should be able to take a bicycle from the station; that's not how the US is laid out so you have to deal with what you are stuck with today. Sadly, this isn't the old days where everybody works at the mill and dropping a station right there gets you 80% of the population; you have to put that station in and wait a decade while things adjust.
Waymo gets you across the interim while the mass transit convenience transitions from poor to something useful over multiple decades.
In 2025, TriMet had 262 million passenger miles at a system cost of $812 million, for a cost of $3.09 per passenger mile.[1] Fares covered 7.8% of their costs. The other 92.2% came from payroll taxes and federal grants.
For comparison, a Lyft or Uber in the same area would cost you $1-2 per mile. Obviously it's not feasible for all 200k daily riders to take Uber/Lyft, and the Uber/Lyft cost doesn't include externalities like extra traffic, but TriMet is very expensive per passenger mile.
1. https://trimet.org/about/pdf/trimetridership.pdf
This is an implementation problem, not a problem with the underlying concept.
Public transit like buses and lightrail are significantly more efficient per person than personal vehicles. This is because they can transport many more people for the same amount of space and energy. They also typically run on set tracks, which yields more efficiency gains.
The US is really, really bad at doing public transit. It doesn't help that everything is car centric, which makes public transit much harder.
For example, in your comment you're excluding road cost, but you're including the full system cost of transit. That's a car centric side effect, e.g. we take roads for granted. But the cost of cars also includes the cost of roads, the cost of land under those roads, the cost of parking, etc.
The $812 million figure for 2025 did not include the cost to build the rail system. Nor did it include many other expenses. TriMet's expenditures for this year are $1.185 billion.[1]
If you divide passenger miles for TriMet busses (141,726,107) by the number of revenue miles (21,195,016), you get an average of 6.7 passengers per bus, or around 10% of available seats. For MAX (the train) you get an average of 27.4 passengers per train, or around 16% of available seats. In both cases that's seats, not total capacity including standing room. I realize it's important to provision the system for peak demand, but still this seems very wasteful.
And because road wear scales with the fourth power of axle loading, a bus will typically cause 1,000x more road damage than a car.[2] Assuming every car on the road has only one occupant, this means that, on average, a TriMet bus causes 150x more road wear per occupant. The main externality created by cars is traffic.
I agree with you that public transportation can work. It clearly does in many places. But Portland's public transportation is dysfunctional, and I don't see that changing any time soon. That's why substitutes (even partial substitutes like Waymo) are beneficial. The more options people have for getting around, the better off they'll be.
1. https://trimet.org/budget/pdf/2026-adopted-budget.pdf
2. https://www.kgw.com/article/news/verify/yes-bus-more-road-da...
> This is an implementation problem, not a problem with the underlying concept.
I agree. The question remains - why do U.S. municipalities universally and repeatedly fail to successfully implement rapid transit at an efficient price point? Buses, trains, and subways in America have ever-growing budgets (both in absolute and per customer mile terms) with ever-declining quality of service. Just asking for more tax revenue again and again is not the solution.
The problem seems to be that many people view government services as a jobs program. Unfortunately, you can't maximize the number of well paying jobs a program creates AND provide high quality service AND control costs.
> buses and lightrail are significantly more efficient per person than personal vehicles
Assuming the transit is fully utilized and the car is mostly not. And maybe that's a good way to look at it. But in Portland the light rail is often well under capacity, and in that case a carpool likely wins on efficiency.
> the cost of cars also includes the cost of roads, the cost of land under those roads, the cost of parking
Partially. Those roads will have to exist even if we did not have personal cars.
Right, the reason it might be underutilized is if you're bad at designing cities for it. Which the US is, so it is.
We design cities for cars, which results in the cities spreading out further and further, which makes transit less desirable and more expensive. Other countries don't have this problem to this degree, because they don't design their cities exclusively for cars.
Also, I don't think most roads would need to exist if the amount of cars decreased. Because of the density problem noted above. Cars are sort of self-eating. The more cars you use, the more land-per-car you need as everything spreads further out to accommodate the cars.
Portland was originally designed around mass transit and is a completely planned city - this argument does not hold water there specifically.
> is if you're bad at designing cities for it
Consider that the transportation system might not be the best fit if it requires designing the rest of the world differently and against preferences (large, detached, single-family homes with a yard).
Those preferences are based at least partially on the available transportation. If the automobile didn't exist, would people still prefer to live so far from jobs and entertainment?
We also have the issue that dense inner cities are subsidizing the infrastructure for the spread out suburbs. If people had to pay the full cost they again might choose differently.
> Assuming the transit is fully utilized and the car is mostly not.
The car is mostly not.
> But in Portland the light rail is often well under capacity,
Haven't looked deeply into it, but looking at how the US plans and designs its public transport, I'm surprised anyone was using it at all.
Train-advocates being against self-driving cars will be recognized as being equivalent to environmentalists being against nuclear power. Fortunately, I don't expect train-advocates as being nearly as successful. Once someone has tried Waymo, there's no going back to the old ways.
But you're ignoring the core point (in both your metaphor and in the argument at hand):
- If everyone took a Waymo... Waymo sucks. Not true of trains.
($/MW of power is stupid with nuclear in the age of solar and batteries, with basically zero safety concern... i.e. you can deploy solar and batteries to houses... not so much for nuclear)
All take Waymo dedicated taxi - it sucks just like cars in heavy traffic.
All take Waymo shared taxi/minibus - it is better than current mass transit and almost as good as car during low traffic.
> Public transit like buses and lightrail are significantly more efficient per person than personal vehicles.
I would be interested to see a study on that. I see many buses driving around with zero or one passengers on them. If a bus is full, the efficiency would be off the charts. But for a city like Portland, that only happens during commute times. The rest of the time, the buses are driving around empty.
> in your comment you're excluding road cost
Partially not, as gas taxes cover part of it. I think gas and diesel taxes should cover the full cost of roads, which would help. Still doesn't mean transit should be run so inefficiently.
FWIW, some States require roads be funded exclusively with gas and use (e.g. vehicle registration) taxes. This does seem to significantly incentivize efficiency and long-term planning because their budget has to anticipate variable revenue.
I didn't realize this was a thing. Which states are those?
Oh wow I didn't know Uber solely relied on private roads, had their own DMV, or fleet of millions of cars; truly an innovative company that doesn't rely on public infrastructure!
try it again while calculating infrastructure and road costs for 262mm uber/lyft rides
Because roads are a shared resource used by everyone (even non car owners) Uber/Lyft's portion is small and covered by taxes they already pay.
The point is that the cost of the road infrastructure isn't accounted for, not to mention the externality of having a half a million cars on the road to move 750k people. Rideshare is slipstreaming in the subsidized flow of cars.
What about infrastructure costs for lyft and uber?
Perhaps it isn’t expensive once you consider the peak load and externalities. How many new roads would you have to build to do that?
The cost of providing a bus exceeds the cost of operating a car in many cases, like lower population density neighborhoods. It may save the public money to centralize transit on major corridors and then subsidize trips on Waymo in some areas and at some times.
> cost of providing a bus exceeds the cost of operating a car in many cases
You can fit 40-50 people in your car?
how many people can fit in a bus compared to a car?
Doesn't matter if there's only four people willing to ride on a given schedule.
That is an argument for buses on well-designed routes and schedules, not an argument against buses.
It is like saying “that bus would be useless at the bottom of a lake”
well, yeah. The first step would be not driving it into a lake
It depends on the population density. You may have a perfectly well designed route for the area, but there are only so many people per hour that want to take a trip. You can delete routes and make people walk further, but that makes the trip take longer and not everyone can or wants to walk a long ways to the bus stop.
Different population densities have different optimal vehicle sizes. It's the same reason a small city airport might have one or two regional jets per day serving it instead of 2 747s per week.
Yep, you definitely want a range of bus sizes. Some areas are served perfectly well with a couple of these
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Minotour
"Centralize transit on major corridors" is about full buses. But transit agencies spend as much per hour on an empty bus as a full one. Transit agencies run empty buses on routes that are rarely full, and run vans and even microtransit that may just be a waste of money.
The OP you're responding suggested using Waymo's to help fill the buses, not get rid of buses.
I suggested both. Milk runs through suburban neighborhoods likely make sense to get rid of entirely.
Which are almost always fairly empty so the critic's comments about bus capacity is irrelevant.
If it can deliver transit to the public at a reasonable price…
Even five dollars a ride would be twice the price. It's just not comparable.
How many tax dollars go into subsidizing a public transit ride? Varies from place to place but it's not insignificant.
how many tax dollars go to roads and bridges just for cars?
Too many, but at least some are directly on vehicles. Transit (in the USA, on the West coast) is funded >90% by taxes on income, property, vehicle registration, fuel, etc not by the people using it.
I cannot speak for every state ever, but I remember that roads in WA were mostly funded by gas/diesel taxes + vehicle registration fees.
Which is also why WA state has been charging an additional significant car registration fee on EVs (on top of the usual annual registration costs), since EVs don't contribute to this normally through gas/diesel taxes.
Everyone uses the roads. You have to reach for very obscure examples to find commerce that doesn't utilize roads. Every bit of concrete and steel to build transit was at some point transported over roads.
Or rail and ships.
Varies from place to place but it's not insignificant
https://trimet.org/budget/pdf/2026-adopted-budget.pdf
Tax revenue was $555mm
https://trimet.org/about/pdf/trimetridership.pdf
~122,300,000 rides (originating + boarding)
So about $4.53 per ride.
The Portland metro is ~2.5mm people, so about $222/resident/yr.
Portland metro area residents pay on average about sixty cents per day to subsidize TriMet.
Roughly 1/43rd the average cost of ownership for a new car in Oregon.
https://info.oregon.aaa.com/how-much-does-it-really-cost-to-...
Assuming an average fare of 2.47$ per to make the math even, that's 6.00$/ride total cost.
When a company / government gets the cost per mile to run a fleet of autonomous EV's down to ~60cents/mile or so, which is a plausible enough number, then a lot of those transit rides are going to look real silly from a cost effectiveness POV.
Yes. If the government were able to provide transit more cheaply in the future by using new vehicles then the transit that the government provides would be cheaper than it is today.
And the meaning of the truism you so adoitly picked up on is that at reasonable projections trimet and similar public transit will be uncompetitive in price (and service) relative to self driving EVs. Ergo it is correct to deprioritize their funding.
This of course is in refutation to the various points made up the thread that self driving EVs are not cost competitive and glorified taxis -- not viable public transit for the masses.
At the margin, it substitutes for some trips.
> Waymo is an expensive taxi service, not a solution to public transport.
Why not both?
The absolute biggest problems with mass transit in the US are the "first mile" and the "last mile".
If I wanted to take mass transit, I had to show up before 7:00 AM in order to park my car. Every single train after 7:00AM became useless to commuters. That's idiotic.
And then I needed a car at the destination station to drive to my workplace. So, a bunch of us had completely idle cars parked at the commuter station that we used roughly 15 minutes per day but needed parking at both the station AND the workplace--just to use the train. Good lord that is stupid.
Waymo at the right price solves a whole bunch of these issues. Suddenly utilization of your train can go up because you've decoupled train utilization from train station parking. In addition, train utilization isn't so dependent upon close distance to the station. Now, you can build a transit station and allow it to organically fill in instead of getting killed because it's an expensive money sink for 10+ years until housing builds around it. etc.
Sure, you should be able to take a bicycle from the station; that's not how the US is laid out so you have to deal with what you are stuck with today. Sadly, this isn't the old days where everybody works at the mill and dropping a station right there gets you 80% of the population; you have to put that station in and wait a decade while things adjust.
Waymo gets you across the interim while the mass transit convenience transitions from poor to something useful over multiple decades.