If you just flatly assert that received wisdom is false then of course you'll just be dismissed. Have you got anything to substantiate your claim that "Gas taxes, tolls, and other user fees pay far more of the total expenditure on roads than transit fares pay for their infrastructure and operating costs"?
Sure. Can you substantiate the claim that suburbs have infrastructure costs that they do not pay for and that cities do not? That assertion was equally unsourced, and it's not very polite to demand sources when you yourself don't provide any.
53.4% of US roads are paid for by user fees, user taxes, and tolls. [1]
Transit comes nowhere close:
In the US, 13.1% of capital expenses are paid for by transit agencies, and 33% of operating costs are covered by fares. [2]
That's ignoring the cost of land usage, which is the whole argument. If your only measure is direct costs then we should use dirt roads everywhere since the capital/maintenance costs of those are 0, so then they would be infinity% covered by user fees. (And note that the land taken by car-based systems is not just the space directly occupied by roads but also the hidden expropriation of setback requirements, parking minimums etc.)
Since car ownership is much higher in the suburbs, all of the car-first laws amount to a hidden subsidy of the suburbs by the cities - parking minimums, exemption from usual transport safety standards (this can be a huge factor in the cost of transit systems), lax environmental standards, exemption from public service requirements that are applied to other transport systems.
I'm all in favour of everyone bearing the actual costs of their lifestyle (and that would certainly include a carbon tax reflecting the energy costs of construction, though I'm very skeptical that that would end up being lower for a suburban home than an inner-city one). But the idea that subsidised transit fares are a subsidy to the city doesn't add up to me: rather they're a subsidy to the poor, who are forced to live in the city, because the suburban lifestyle is simply unaffordable to those who can't afford a car. (And ultimately everyone, including the suburbanites, depends on those people as service workers etc.). It's like saying homeless hostels are a subsidy to the city because the homeless are in the city - but the reason for that is that if they were homeless in the suburbs then they'd starve.
Lots of infrastructure in rural areas is subsidized. Remove the requirement for phone companies, ISPs, power companies, and USPS to provide service to unprofitable areas. It is much cheaper to wire up and provide those services in densely populated areas.
I’m not talking about rural areas. I’m talking about low density cities and suburbs. They have population densities in the low thousands of people per square mile, more than enough for all services to be profitable.
