Comment Re:Government roads (Score 1) 244
The BTS's cost estimate for 2002 was still significantly lower than any of the public transportation rates cited for that year, and that's a pessimistic number because there is often more than one person in a car. I didn't cherry-pick cost per passenger-mile; it is the right number to look at to analyze your (frankly idiotic) claim that private-vehicle commuters would have gotten more value by spending money on public transportation than on their cars.
On top of the fact that the average cost to drive a car is already cheaper than every form of public transit, the cost per passenger-mile for existing public routes is lower than what you would expect to see for new routes: existing routes generally serve the highest densities of residences and workplaces, so they have more people per vehicle than new public transportation routes would. In that respect, you are right that transportation costs do not scale linearly. Reaching more people with public transportation increases per capita costs, making it even less cost-competitive with privately owned automobiles.
Public transportation works better in high-density urban areas than in most the US. If you look outside the cities of Europe and Japan, for example, you'll find that most households own and use cars -- and for the same reason that so many Americans drive themselves to work. As long as the US has suburbs, it will have a lot of people for whom driving a car is the best way to get around.