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Mass transit, which is typically ambiguously defined, is only better at moving people where the system operates in a hub and spoke system.
If everyone goes to a place for work and then goes home, mass transit is awesome if the place for work is all the same.
However, if there is slight divergence, mass transit loses spectacularly on time. It often even loses spectacularly on price when public subsidies are factored in.
Usually the target for mass transit is a 3-seat ride. Collector, trunk, distributor. This is already bad, but in fact there will be many destinations for which you can't even get that, and they're even worse. Manhattan has some advantages for mass transit; overall density (meaning the walking leg can get you a lot of places) and the linear layout of the island. The linear layout means a one or two seat ride is practical for lot more users than in a typical mass transit system. That there are express tracks helps too, though those could have been built elsewhere; they just weren't.
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Public subsidy is a funny charge. Typically after all fuel taxes from every level of government are accounted for, it adds up to a quarter of the budget for road construction and maintenance in America. Tolls, registration and other fees only provide another 10 percent. 65% of funding is unrelated to usage. Which, this is typically how subsidy is defined when applied to rail networks.
This probably isn't true; it probably fails to count fuel taxes diverted elsewhere (such as mass transit). But note that even if it were, 100% of the operating cost of the rolling stock is covered by users of automobiles. The mass transit target is typically 50%. 100% of the capital cost of the rolling stock is covered by users of automobiles; for mass transit that number is 0%. And even if the amount for road construction collected from drivers is 25%, that number for mass transit is, again, 0%.
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