jxzz wrote: ↑Sat Oct 26, 2019 11:06 am
Train60 wrote: ↑Fri Oct 25, 2019 8:16 pm
Break even? Some of the MBTA Commuter Lines cost over $100 per passenger to run on the weekends. Baker's people tried to kill these trains and people went nuts, rightly so. We run these trains because for the same reason we maintain state highways in the far corners of the state, because we provide transportation to the public as a whole - not just for the populated regions, or for the rich.
Break even talk is silly. Nothing is breakeven, highways for car driving, bus etc. Public transportation are part of government subsidy for greater good and overall economy. It is priority which gets more , which gets less.
In comparison to CT, it seems that MA as richer state that does not want to spend more dollar on Western Mass while CT is spending a lot on three rail lines covering almost whole state.
Of the 3.5mm people in the State of Connecticut, 2.7mm live in Fairfield, New Haven and Hartford counties. That, and the shore line from New Haven to the Rhode Island border, is where the trains run. There's no passenger service at all in Litchfield, Tolland or Windham counties.
Of the 6.9mm people in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 5.5mm live in the 7 eastern counties surrounding Boston. That, again, is where the trains run.
The two states are almost identical, with commuter trains serving counties with ~80% of the state population. It just happens that the population is somewhat more equally distributed geographically in CT than it is in MA.