And businesses saying it had a negative impact were more than twice as prevalent (10 to 4) than businesses saying it had a positive impact, with 25 saying no impact.

So, overall, a negative impact. You can debate the magnitude and whether it is “worth it,” but it’s definitely a negative impact on commerce.

In addition to making for a more pleasant environment, it's also worth pointing out that in a dense urban area, cars are pretty terrible in terms of people throughput compared to alternatives. People traveling in cars take up way more space than the same number of people riding buses, subways, bikes, or even walking, and the cars don't have enough extra speed to make up for it (in fact they're probably slower than everything except the pedestrians). This doesn't matter as much in less urban areas where there's plenty of room to spread out and the higher speeds that enables, but in downtown areas cars are realistically a pretty slow way for a bunch of people to get around.

The idea is that transit has benefits beyond what it gives to the riders. If a bus takes 20 cars off the street that's a huge boon to the other cars.

In Ithaca, for instance, Cornell doesn't have a lot of space for parking, if you do get a parking space it is probably far enough away that you'll ride the bus in anyway. Employees get a free bus pass and even though it means I have to fit my schedule to the bus, it drops me off right by the door of a building that's connected to my building so it's as convenient as can be.

It's doubtful that congestion pricing is going to lose money given that the roads already exist.

>A great example is Pennsylvania where they privatized the turnpike but as part of that deal, the turnpike had to pay half a billion a year for 20 years to fund public transit in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. So tolls I paid that should have gone to improve the turnpike were instead used as a form of price controls to keep people happy in the cities.

A mandatory payment enforced by the government is a "tax", not "price control".

That is the cost of living in world class cities with services.

I don't use every single suburban street of the state or every single interstate freeway. I still must pay taxes for it so that society functions.

If you are really so opposed to a functional society, you should really consider moving to rural villages with no services, and no taxes for them.

People without children subsidize public schools. Healthy people subsidize sick people's insurance. Part of living in communities involve subsidizing services you don't use, that it occurs is not a problem, you need to argue that it should not be subsidized in the first place, and moving people by bus is better than moving people by car in a variety of ways.

how much state intervention/subsidies are those companies getting?

Ths US tax system makes capital intensive business difficult to operate in the private market. It’s one of the larger distorting influences in our economy. Most public transit is operated by authorities, which are public corporations with their own books and tax exempt bonding authority.

Based on your saying “tax and spend”, I assume you identify as a modern conservative. The tax and spend aspect is really the road system - one of the ways that Nixon tried to prop up the flailing economy was to invest billions into highway aid and projects. Roads = lots of oneshot construction jobs and local patronage.

Rural, exurban and suburban towns didn’t have broad paved highways until those programs took off, as states didn’t have the will or the dollars to fund them. Drive around upstate New York and you’ll see lots of “old state route XX” — all of those roads were built in the last 50 years, all paid for by external federal dollars. (And narrower than the ridiculous wide streets in subdivisions today)

Right, and sadly this describes the downtowns of many U.S. cities since Robert Moses.