Bought

How much does it cost you in tolls to drive across town? In most cities, the answer is nothing.

How much does it cost you to take a bus or subway across town? In most cities, if it's available at all, quite a bit.

How did that come to be?

Mass transit is safer, cleaner and more efficient. It gives more people more access to work and amenities. A city with great mass transit works better for more people. Even those that don't use it. It's at least a useful public good as the streets are.

It's technically easy to put tolls all over a city, wastes no time, and it's economically efficient to make it incrementally free to hop on a bus and expensive to drive a car.

So why haven't we? Why, in fact, are we going the other direction?

Because left to our own devices, we go for the short-term cost savings at the expense of the long-term investment.

Because we like the status quo.

Because there's familiar profit in the car-industrial complex. The extraction industries, the manufacturers, the dealers, etc. It's an ongoing, widespread income stream. This generates cash to pay lobbyists and others to create a cultural dynamic in favor of the status quo.

It turns out that it's pretty cheap to buy outcomes that benefit a minority. And business loves a bargain.