Privatize it and stop letting local politics strangle it
https://www.econlib.org/no-more-public-mass-transit-infrastr...
> In Japan, being in the railway business means being in the real estate business, explained Egon Terplan, SPUR’s regional planning director, at Thursday afternoon’s panel discussion about what the Bay Area can learn from Japanese transit station area development. “They are able to capture the value of the train stations they are building and beyond. One third of the revenue is from retail, services, hotels.”
> That’s because rather than contracting out the business opportunities on the real estate around their stations, they own it all–everything from department stores to vending machines on the platforms. That has turned Japan’s six passenger railway companies–Hokkaido Railway Company, East Japan Railway Company, Central Japan Railway Company, West Japan Railway Company, Shikoku Railway Company, and Kyushu Railway Company–into hugely profitable corporations.
> “These are companies listed on the stock exchange; they make money,” said Terplan. They also, together, carry nearly a third of the world’s railway passengers.
> In Japan, the profit motive of real estate, retail, and office space–in addition to the trains–becomes a bit of a feedback loop. The Japanese railway companies want to maximize the value they derive from space around the stations. So transit oriented development isn’t just about housing. In Japan, it includes department stores, office buildings, shops, and hotels, and housing on different levels directly above and below the stations.
Regulation is a serious problem in "free market" USA. Subway construction is 7x the cost in NYC than Paris because of land and labor regulations. It's out of control, nobody cares because most just blame some other thing like funding being insufficient when that's not really the case. Instead they'll try to get more from the gas tax instead of fixing the root problem.