Do you know how the total amount of subsidies to mass transit compares to the subsidies to drivers by supplying a completely tax-funded street network?
The amtrak yearly subsidy is in the neighborhood of 1.3B a year (http://www.heritage.org/Research/Budget/bg2072es.cfm) while congress generally passes highway bills which number in the 100s of billions every other year or so.
Incomplete story as it's totally ignoring state/local roads and city-level metros -- but that's one data point for you.
I've always wondered how that would shake out. My guess is that roads are subsidized more per trip but less per mile than transit, because road networks are huge and trips are long but drivers pay for the vehicle and labor. I have no doubt that car trips cost more because drivers pay for their own vehicles but the economic advantages of point to point travel are tremendous and generally worth it in a society that's wealthy enough to afford cars and doesn't have parking congestion problems.
Fuel taxes are a huge moneymaker for the states; with far more being taken in taxes than is spent on roads. Whether that money makes its way to cities, or exactly how it is split up, is no doubt a very complex question.
Stop and think about the statement/article you quoted.
Figure a 10 mile stretch of road is built.
A suburban householder drives the length of it when commuting in a 30 mpg (most cars get less mpg) car, 200 times a year at a minimum (this doesn't even include trips to grocery store, spouse's car, etc.).
Yearly, 2000 miles traveled, about 70 gallons of fuel used by the 30mpg car, means $14.00 in fuel taxes (TX gets 20 cents/gallon in taxes), or, $1.40 per mile; each year. Definitely a far cry from the "2-3 cents" quoted in the article.
Your units are off. You're calculating dollars per mile per year. The article talks about dollars per mile, which could be an imprecise way of talking about dollars per mile per year, but taking the words at face value gives about 1 cent per mile at 20 mpg, the Department of Transportation's average fuel economy as of 2005. If you include the federal 18.4 cent tax, you get 1.92 cents per mile.
If we're paying it off over 20 years, that's 8.4 cents per mile driven. This doesn't include any necessary maintenance over those 20 years. I doubt the 20-30 cents figure is wrong. The person who was quoted was an elected official who dealt with a lot of transportation issues.
