Local streets are paid by property taxes. The gas tax, license tabs and vehicle sales taxes do not pay for 80% of state aid roads and highways. Not sure the exact amount but a large portion is the general fund (so income taxes are a big chunk?) and debt and bonds.
(oy. long, exhaustive post alert)
This argument gets very tricky depending on how you slice it. Statewide, user fees (including federal gas tax, state gas tax/MVST/registration) cover pretty damn close to what *MnDOT* spends on trunk highways, county and state aid roads through the HUTD. I'll admit to sympathizing with someone who looks at a MnDOT budget and sees it basically in the black and thinks user fees cover expenses (but admitting we've been delaying maintenance so we just gotta spend a tiny bit more). When you throw in all the local streets and local funding for CSAH/MSAS streets, that user fee:spend ratio drops to
40-50%. Remember, that's statewide.
Now, if we look at the entire metro area (taken in this case as MnDOT's Metro District), I think that's a better comparison to a transit agency that only serves commuting and regular trips within the metro (even if more limited than our road coverage). User fees generated in-district are greater than spend. I dug into 2014 numbers by summing all reported MSAS, CSAH, and Trunk Highway (which includes distribution from the federal gov't) spending within the district ($832m), and also did a rough calculation of user fees (MVST & license by metro district population % of state's total * total revenues of those sources, gas tax using reported metro district VMT/avg mpg * state + federal gas tax). That came to $1.4 billion. I'ts $1.1 billion if you cut out the federal gas tax. Some of that goes to other local uses (ex. 40% of the MVST), and some of it goes to subsidize the rest of the state.
And of course, local governments are still spending tons of money building and maintaining local streets and their share of CSAH/MSAS. So that "farebox recovery" would obviously shift negative, but in the metro I'm not sure how much below 80% it'd go. Honestly, in big metros where there are millions of people driving long, but not TOO long, distances every day in their car... user fees are quite high. A 4 lane death road doesn't cost much more to build than a 2- or 3-lane one when you factor everything in. A suburban arterial doesn't cost much more than a Lyndale Ave. Hell, it might cost less since they don't put in real sidewalks or ped lighting or street trees or bus stops. It's why Minneapolis is denser than Bloomington or Edina but our public works budget per capita is still
higher (and that doesn't even count transit ops/capital). The obvious problem with a gas tax/etc vs highway cost view is that it ignores if the resulting tax base from a car-oriented land use can cover the local roads and pipes. And that there are things not included in a DOT's transportation budget like safety, pollution, climate change, making the bottom 20% of people who can't afford cars not able to have equitable access to opportunity, etc etc.
Bringing this back to transit - that proposal is mostly bad, but it's okay to have mixed feelings. It's an obvious rural/exurban swipe at poor (minority) people and they don't really want better transit through improving finances but rather no transit because they don't really care who's screwed. On the other hand, we don't need to be transit sycophants to oppose the idea behind it. There are cities in
first-world countries where transit revenues come much closer to covering (operating) costs. Some of that has to do with land uses that support more all-day trips in more directions. A lot of it has to do with the cost of owning and operating a car being higher - making transit and living in transit-friendly places a more natural option. Some of it has to do with our federal requirements (ex. Buy America for bus purchases, and on). Some of it has to do with transit governance and operations, things like:
- Competitively bidding routes with private operators
- Wider stop spacing (reduces ops cost per revenue mile)
- All-door boarding (same)
- Transit signal priority at lights, even for regular routes (same)
- Cheap improvements that make waiting for transit more informative and comfortable, therefore attractive
- [maybe the biggest] Ratcheting back on employee pay/benefits (this is hard to compare how good they had/have it vs our PPP salary/benefits for transit workers)
Anyway, it's hard to hear the GOP constantly pull this shit. But it's also hard to hear how we can't do it here. Metro Transit operates in environs that aren't THAT incomparable to random German towns. Why can they get 77% FRR across an entire country while ours is 25%? Hell, even some of our
most productive bus routes through the densest parts of Minneapolis don't hit 77% total - so it's not like the answer is getting the lower-ridership ones more full of people. And in case you're wondering, I don't think covering more ops cost with fares is a goal unto itself, merely it would be indicative of a successful transit agency providing a greater share of residents' total trips at a higher level of service (frequency, coverage, span, etc). To that point, I don't even really care if the user pays 0% of the operating cost - a city or county could just cover that existing share from our property taxes, which would be more equitable anyway. I could drive for literally miles around Minneapolis or Lakeville and only be paying
14% (or less!) of that road's costs in "user fees" by staying on local and MSAS streets, but nobody from the GOP gives a damn. Why should anyone?