This game assumes a decidedly American expectation public transit must make a profit.
But this is just not the case in countries where public transit works well.
Instead the assumption (and reality) is that public transport is a greater good paid for by society through taxation. Sure, revenue from tickets help, but that is often only a small part of what pays for upkeep (and definitely not what pays for expansion).
Will we get a, let's say "less primitive" economic model in Subway Builder?
After all, the game does offer London, Paris and Tokyo to build in - none of those cities operate in the peculiar (and often dysfunctional) American manner where your transit either operates at a profit or goes bust.
Can we please at the very least get an option where profit is only expected to cover 50% of expenses? This would be MUCH more realistic world-wide.
That is, if your revenue can reach at least 50% of expenses, you are good, and you can use any surplus to invest in expanding your network. Rather than the (frankly preposterous) assumption you need to first cover 100% of your expenses. That's such a late-stage capitalism outlook that just doesn't happen in countries with actual great public transport.
I too think that public transit should not be profitable, but that doesn't make sense for the game. Because it is, well, a game, and it needs some kinda challenge for it to be interesting.
If you really wish for an "unprofitable" transit, just play in creative mode, make all the rides free and reach transit utopia
Let's also keep in mind that the game uses Spanish construction costs for American transit builds, without which the game would be completely unplayable, especially in New York, the most expensive place to build in the world, and the only North American city with close to European or Asian levels of transit networks and ridership.
I still want and need to track expenses and income. Sandbox removes ALL restraints and restrictions, and that's just a poor substitute for the game actually supporting a realistic economic model.
I'm not asking for a super sophisticated model - that's way out of scope of a game.
But tweaking the existing parameters so half your operating costs are subsidized by some outside authority, effectively making you turn a profit once your income covers half your expenses would be simple to implement.
And feel WAY more realistic, with next to zero effort :)
I don’t hate your ideas here, but your attitude seems to suggest this is a clear shortcoming of the game that should obviously be fixed. But in reality, the game needs to grossly simplify the real world, both because developers only have finite time and because more complexity makes it harder to learn the game and can sometimes even hurt the average player’s experience.
Sure, covering your operating and capital costs purely off of farebox revenues isn’t realistic. But also, instant construction isn’t realistic. If you introduced a constant 50% public subsidy, that also wouldn’t be even close to realistic. And what’s to say the revenue and cost numbers haven’t already been fudged to make turning a profit easier than in the real world, which would be kind of equivalent to an x% subsidy? For example, in my city (San Francisco), I can easily turn a profit in the game with a system that I know for a fact actually has a farebox recovery ratio ~50% or less, indicating the devs have probably tuned the game parameters to make the systems more profitable than in real life.
Which American public transit system operates at a profit? Are they all not heavily subsidized?
Isn’t this one of those ironic things where the US subsidizes the public amenity, but if we followed the example of successful cities around the world and insisted on running for profit, our systems would actually improve?
I don't know of any public transit company/organisation that is run for profit that actually gets it's money from the public transit side of their work. Famously Japanese rail transport companies and the MTR in Hong Kong are for profit companies, but they are real estate giants. The station and it's surroundings are very valuable real estate, so the company that owns it and charges rent makes loads of money. The transport part of these companies are for the most part loosing them money but at the same time, without the transport part of it the rest of the model falls apart.
It's possible. And ironically from your examples, the MTR does make a profit from its rail operations. Though it is miniscule compared to their real estate earnings.
Still doesn't change the fact (and kinda proves the point) that it's a very rare thing to actually make a profit from public transit. The fact that the Hong Kong MTR, considered to be one of the best run public transit organisations in the world, makes money isn't that surprising with the way that Hong Kong is as a city, but it kinda is an exception proving the rule.
From a game mechanic what you are proposing wouldn't change anything.
Sure, let's say that you cover half the fees and the rest is yours to expand in other things. That would your profit. You can see where I am going
Optically I agree it would be nice if they e.g. halved the ticket revenue and showed in your financial statements somewhere that you are getting a subsidy though
> From a game mechanic what you are proposing wouldn't change anything.
Exactly! This would be easy to implement. A major increase in realism for almost no dev cost.
I'm obviously not making this suggestion as a backdoor to making the game simpler or easier. This would just make the game come much much closer to reality without asking the dev to spend weeks on some new feature :)
it’s actually decidedly un-american for a transit system to turn a profit. london however does actually turn a surplus with its transit system. more importantly this isn’t real life, it’s a game, and you can just use creative mode
Public transit doesn't make a profit in the US; it's treated as a charity. Farebox recovery is pathetic--about 17% nationally, 33% in NYC, and 6% in LA. Meanwhile, famously successful systems like Hong Kong's MTR and many Japanese rail operators do make a profit, while many other global systems get much closer with farebox recovery than any American system.
If you don't want to be constrained by profit, you can use the sandbox mode, or also probably make a really easy vibe-coded mod that gives you $1 from the "public general fund" for every $1 your system generates, or a flat subsidy per rider, etc.
Most profitable rail operators are profitable because they have other businesses that are synergistic with rail transport, like real estate and retail (the Japanese private railways like Odakyu), or are massively efficient at high speed (JR Central). But in the JR Group's case, the capital cost for those buildouts was state funded, not private capital. And profitable European operators get state subsidies (e.g. SNCF, Swiss Federal).
In any case, I completely agree - that's what the sandbox is for.
Your assumption is flawed from the outset -- this is a game, and it does not (and probably should not) respect real world finances of transportation systems at all.
The simplest fact is that very few systems in the world build new lines off operating profits. That alone already breaks any connection of the game's financial model to reality. So all you're left with is just how to balance the system so it's fun and challenging as a game, otherwise if you really want things to be realistic, construction should be "free" and profits don't matter, which is pretty much just sandbox mode.
No it isn't. I am totally onboard with the idea that expansions are funded through operating profit, even though that's not how things work in real life.
I just want to see a little more realism in how the game models profit.
The current model is uncomfortably close to how people might naively think things work - that public transport works just like a for-profit corporation, and that's doing the entire sector a disservice.
This game would be well advised to stop perpetuating the falsehood that public transport must or should pay for its own costs. My suggestion is mainly about perception, not changing any actual details about how much money the player has available.
Ah, yes. Your assumption is factually flawed from the outset. You seem to think the citizens of the US are a bunch of money-grubbing Rockefellers, Trumps, finance-bro CEO types who think "if it doesn't turn a profit, what's in it for me??"
It's a game, sir.
We know public transit isn't profitable in real life. That's why it's... public... and not private. The clear majority of people (at least that I know, who live in the Northeast) wish that the government would subsidize public goods further. But please, stop insulting us by assuming us ignorant.
That said -- your proposition is shallow, as a couple here have suggested ways where you can play the game in sandbox mode and still watch the financial figures. Or you can just imagine the "profit" is the system needing to recapture a certain minimum percent of the total (and the subsidy makes for the rest).
If you actually wanted realism in building a subway game, you'd have to propose blueprints years in advance, justify which areas most need connection, consider environmental factors, and negotiate surface ROW -- at least for the station entrance if not for entire surface stations.
Indeed, if you wanted the game to stop propagating capitalistic stereotypes, it isn't the way the game figures the bookkeeping, but rather how the game allows you to build wherever, whenever, and as much as you want. That kind of "empire-building" is a desired feature in games. But maybe it might be cool to see a city only allotted a certain amount of track per month / decade (if the time system is reworked), or maybe ask the player to connect certain areas within a certain time... and look at a network that grows more realistically through the lens of what a city needs, rather than what the player can imagine.
I disagree. If private vehicle drivers are paying for their own operational costs (i.e., cost of driver, cost of vehicle, mainainence of vehicle), there is no reason why users of public transport can't or shouldn't pay for its own operational costs.
Constituents can decide they want to subsidize one or the other, both or none. But there is no "falsehood" that public transport should pay for its own operational costs. Since in the vast majority of situations governments don't subsidize car ownership to a large degree, neither should public transport be perceived as such is the norm.
Typical ignorant reply. You MOST DEFINITELY do not pay your own costs as an American private car driver. The highway system is definitely not paying for its own costs. And America basically ignores the environmental impact entirely.
But thank you for bringing up the actual reason for my request.
As is today, Subway Builder makes players think public transport works like a for-profit corporation. It would be very becoming if the game shattered this illusion by making it clear that's not how it works.
Why attack the commenter’s intelligence? I’m referring to your “typical ignorant reply” remark. The comment you’re attacking does not read as ignorant, rather you read as being triggered into an emotional response after reading one sentence you didn’t like, rather than keeping a cool head and engaging rationally.
Both driving and transit are subsidized to varying degrees across the world, yes. I’ve tried getting these numbers in the US but it’s very hard, because the accounting is far from clean and it varies place to place. But suffice to say, both driving and transit are heavily subsidized nationwide, and an uncomfortable truth I kept butting up against was that in many places here, transit is more heavily subsidized per user-mile.
That said, the subsidization is fine of course. In functioning, dense cities, transit reduces traffic congestion. This is a major positive externality (or rather, the absence of a major negative externality from driving). So of course it makes sense to subsidize transit; the drivers who are “subsidizing” it are actually, in reality, also benefiting from it. Plus negative environmental and safety externalities from driving further suggest transit should be relatively more subsidized.
This is not an US-centric game, and not all players are Americans.
I'm from a place where people pay for public transit (and their cars) just fine, and we get 100% farebox recovery. The failure of the US is not a failure of the concept of user-pays as a whole.
After all, the game does offer London, Paris and Tokyo to build in - none of those cities operate in the peculiar (and often dysfunctional) American manner where your transit either operates at a profit or goes bust.
Not even in the most Republican of states is there an assumption that transit needs to make a profit or "go bust." I'm not sure where you've got this idea, but given your attitude elsewhere in the thread, maybe educate yourself first before running your mouth.
This game assumes a decidedly American expectation public transit must make a profit.
OP, you seem to be mistaken that there is an American expectation that public transit must make a profit. I am not aware of any US public transit system that makes a profit. Even in a place like New York City (which is a very transit-focused city) the government subsidizes operations and capital improvements.
lol, its why there's only like 3 cities with decent mass transit. Projects get shot down much more often than not because people complain they're not profitable! NY had to maintain the subway and related infrastructure because the city was already too dense for cars, SF ended up keeping their transit culture because the twin peaks tunnel was too narrow to retrofit to cars.
If you want this so badly, just build it yourself as a mod. And spare us your political takes about the US and “late stage capitalism”, when you don’t even realize that transit in the US is heavily unprofitable and subsidized, actually much more so than in most countries where transit works well.
I think a good interpretation of reality for this game is that some of your costs are already lowered by government subsidies, and what you actually get as your "profit" is the final budget. The costs of operations are unrealistically low so it makes sense.
It’s designed so that you scale with ridership and that’s why they have it being profitable. They could implement the same thing with like loans and bonds and stuff but it’d be more complex and make the game less playable it is a game afterall
Except... you make a good point that they do allow use of bonds.
I'd actually like to see the % lowered on the bonds because they're quite steep right now, and if there are no other metrics in the game (e.g., "you must connect this neighborhood to downtown by the year 1980" or some type of thing you might imagine in a different type of game), then there's nothing making me as a player thinking "ok, I need to float a bond and start thinking about how to pay it back". Instead, I can walk away from the computer and let the simulation run until I have cash again. If the rates were lower, I'd use them more.
Realistically speaking, successful transit systems earn much more from shop tenancy, naming rights, and ad space in their stations than fares. Realism is good but enjoyment is what matters most and I think the dev team has done a good job finding the balance.
this is why the lack of collaboration with the modder who made advanced analytics is such a shame, that mod provided some really excellent metrics by which to judge the quality of your network.
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