It's a lie. The true cost is around $20, and with capital expenses of new construction, it's closer to $30. Although pricing the capital construction cost is always tricky.
You just don't see the true cost in the _ticket_ price, because productive citizens in suburbs are forced to subsidize inner-city transit through taxes.
You can compute the true cost of a ride by trivially dividing the total yearly budget by the total number of trips.
> Do you mean 80 mi total?
No, 40 miles of total driving within a day.
> Square footage in NYC is smaller, of course, which has the side effect of density. Overall people far prefer NYC to Houston
No. People don't so much _choose_ as are forced to stay in NYC by economics mercilessly crushing them into dense shoebox-sized apartments.
If we are going to talk about how much the cost of public transportation such as trains or buses are covered by taxes it would only be fair to look at roads and personal vehicles too.
It actually is! It's a statistic that is tracked by the Census. It turns out, that the majority of road maintenance is paid directly by user fees: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-infrastructur...
> If we are going to talk about how much the cost of public transportation such as trains or buses are covered by taxes it would only be fair to look at roads and personal vehicles too.
Absolutely! I agree that we should be pricing pollution and other negative externalities. But in addition, we should fairly price the all public services. And people who need public assistance should just get money.
And of course, we should be penalizing density pollution. There's no reason to build high-rise offices, and we should be demolishing them by now (except for historically-significant buildings).