Widening Highways Doesn’t Fix Traffic. So Why Do We Keep Doing It?

[editor]

In a New York Times article this past Sunday, the Katy Freeway is one of three poster children for why you can't build your way out of traffic.

Quote

Immediately after Katy’s last expansion, in 2008, the project was hailed as a success. But within five years, peak hour travel times on the freeway were longer than before the expansion.

The other ones highlighted are the Long Beach Freeway in Los Angeles, and the Jersey Turnpike Extension.

[mollusk]

Before the last expansion the Katy ran pretty well inside the loop.  Since then, not so much.

[Ross]

The expanded Katy does carry more than twice the number of cars as before the project, and travel times are generally better than before, especially during off peak hours. I have no doubt that the growth in the greater Katy area would have occurred without the freeway expansion, but travel times would have been pretty horrific. I wasn't a huge fan of the expansion, but since my Mom lives in Katy, I have to use I-10, and it is definitely better than before. I don't think it's possible to expand further, but I'll probably be dead by the time that's an issue.

The worse traffic inside the Loop on I-10 is most likely due to the giant increase in capacity outside the Loop.

[dbigtex56]

1 hour ago, Ross said:

The worse traffic inside the Loop on I-10 is most likely due to the giant increase in capacity outside the Loop.

In other words, Inner Loopers are being accosted by suburban cars' traffic.
And pollution. And need to permanently kill off acres of land to provide 50 hours a week for parking.
The Katy Freeway expansion displaced a functioning railroad track which could have been converted to commuter rail.
But, this is Texas, and that's commie talk.

[MaxConcrete]

Widening highways doesn't eliminate traffic congestion, but it reduces it (often drastically), and also empowers improved mobility and economic growth.

In a growing area, you normally can't eliminate all traffic congestion in a corridor with heavy employment and economic activity. But you can drastically reduce it, and limit it to only the peak periods. The Katy Freeway accomplished that. Before the expansion it was congested throughout the day and on weekends. Now it is congested only at peak periods on weekdays, and less congested at peak periods than pre-expansion. Plus, everyone has the option of using the managed lanes.

It has empowered mobility for Houstonians that was previously not possible. The Katy Freeway at Gessner serves 349,000 trips per day, which is down from the pre-Covid high of 388,000. Trips served on the entire corridor is much greater.  For comparison, in September 2022 Metro served 208,000 weekday boardings on its ENTIRE system on all modes (bus, rail, park & ride).

The expansion has empowered economic growth, including Memorial, Town & Country and Katy and beyond.

There are many reasons freeways need to be expanded, including

1. Accommodating population growth
2. Accommodating and promoting economic growth
3. Improving access to new housing
4. Reducing the amount of congestion
5. Improving mobility for Houstonians
6. Providing managed lanes as an option, which is also used by public transit
7. Bringing outdated freeways up to modern standards

[Ross]

8 hours ago, dbigtex56 said:

In other words, Inner Loopers are being accosted by suburban cars' traffic.
And pollution. And need to permanently kill off acres of land to provide 50 hours a week for parking.
The Katy Freeway expansion displaced a functioning railroad track which could have been converted to commuter rail.
But, this is Texas, and that's commie talk.

Commuter rail on that right of way would have been tough, as it wasn't wide enough for two tracks. And, the rail caused a lot of issues for people trying to get to the other side of the freeway, especially at Gessner. I have friends who live off of Witte, the street East of Gessner, and there were times where the wait for rail to pass was 20 minutes or longer. Replacing the freight with commuter rail would have made it worse, and there's not enough room to put the streets over the rail, and buried underpasses seem to be avoided these days.

Commuter rail would solve some issues, but isn't the panacea many think it is. There are too many people commuting to jobs all along I-10, and not just in the Galleria area or Downtown, which means there have to be good ground connections to the job centers. Even with good connections, and parking for all of the stations along the route, public transport isn't going to be used as much as you might think, because it's slow. After TS Allison, my car needed repair, which took 6 weeks. I took the bus to work during that time. The bus stop was 6 blocks from my house, and dropped me off in front of my office off of the West Loop. So, convenience wasn't a factor. However, taking the bus turned a 10 or 15 minute drive into a 45 minute ride. As soon as my car was fixed, I went back to driving,.

[samagon]

what a timely post!

Not Just Bikes released this video.

sure the channel is an advocate for other forms of travel than cars, but wow that video really just shows that the same exact arguments are being thrown out today.

I love driving, but I am very conscious that our reliance on cars is not by choice, it is by design from half a century of marketing products to the public, and lobbying our government.

Edited January 10, 2023 by samagon

[mattyt36]

The root problem is land use.  Everything else is a symptom.  Transportation is a derived demand.

I'm not sure what people think they're proving by writing articles such as this. 

[IWantTransit555]

Quote

Widening Highways Doesn’t Fix Traffic. So Why Do We Keep Doing It?

Because we voted for politicians who support/get paid to widen highways. The first step to fixing car dependence in Texas is to get people vote Republicans out of office, and we have not even gotten there yet.

[TacoDog]

Widening Highways Doesn’t Fix Traffic. So Why Do We Keep Doing It?

Maybe the point isn't to fix traffic? 

 

[samagon]

3 hours ago, IWantTransit555 said:

Because we voted for politicians who support/get paid to widen highways. The first step to fixing car dependence in Texas is to get people vote Republicans out of office, and we have not even gotten there yet.

I haven't seen anything to demonstrate this is a party line driven issue.

do you have any meaningful data as a source for your claims?

[Heights88]

This is a pretty silly (typical) NYT take...Does anyone remember how terrible 290 was before expansion? The NYT staff lives in a fantasy world where everywhere else is as dense as Manhattan and everything is free. The 'induced demand' argument is really not persuasive, but it's one we continue to hear from anti-development, anti-growth outlets like the NYT. 

[editor]

45 minutes ago, Heights88 said:

This is a pretty silly (typical) NYT take...Does anyone remember how terrible 290 was before expansion? The NYT staff lives in a fantasy world where everywhere else is as dense as Manhattan and everything is free. The 'induced demand' argument is really not persuasive, but it's one we continue to hear from anti-development, anti-growth outlets like the NYT. 

It's a trope that's centuries old: Blame the messenger. When you can't refute an argument, argue something else. 

The article very clearly cites dozens of sources and interviews with experts to back up the writing.  Since you have a contrary view, we'd all benefit from seeing your sources and studies  

It's also laughable to call the New York Times anti-development, and suggests a knee-jerk reaction, rather than any knowledge of the Times, or it's history. 

[editor]

5 hours ago, TacoDog said:

Widening Highways Doesn’t Fix Traffic. So Why Do We Keep Doing It?

Maybe the point isn't to fix traffic? 

 

But that's how TxDOT and the politicians keep selling these expansions. That makes it a fair benchmark, especially if it fails to do what was promised after spending billions of our tax dollars. 

[Ross]

I would be happy to read the NYT article, but I'm not going to risk the wrath of the wife unit on another news subscription. Is there an alternate source?

[Skyboxdweller]

The underlying dynamic is that the extra lanes fill up with cars because the additional capacity makes land on the periphery within commuting distance  for workers heading into the core and  for those in the core who are employed  in warehouses and manufacturing operations that need large facilities on cheap land  built on the edge off the sprawl. . The road system is the necessary framework that supports our particular type of urban development : suburban sprawl , so that Houston now covers 650 plus square miles of relatively low density development.  As the prairies, swamps, farmland and forests get paved over they lose their capacity to retain and detain storm water. The costs of flooding are shifted to areas down gradient. .  Finally, it commits us to a built environment  in which individuals are  dependent for almost every task : work, school, shopping , entertainment , on auto transport, which for the next decade at least is powered by gasoline,. and makes mass transit and densification in the future not feasible. 

If commuting patterns have really been changed by work-at home options, and 25% of our office space remains vacant  in perpetuity, projects like the I 45 expansion may be overkill, as the workers it intends to serve during rush hour may not be driving to downtown offices as anticipated before we got comfortable with Zoom meetings and working remotely. 

 

Edited January 11, 2023 by Skyboxdweller

[Skyboxdweller]

It is incorrect to characterize the NYT and NYers in general as anti-development.  Real estate interests are perhaps the most powerful political players in NY State and the City, they build on a scale that dwarfs our  projects. Compare Hudson Yards to one of our town centers in physical size,  the amount of capital committed and the engineering challenges overcome . But it's a different type of development than our format of commerce on the feeder road, two thousand houses on curving streets with retention ponds on a thousand acres, a scaled down outpost of our hospital system every 15 miles.  Houston is fortunate in that it has no natural barriers to development , except south of Galveston.  For better or worse , our model can metastasize all the way to Dallas going north and to San Antonio and Austin on the west and to the Louisiana border on the east.  We truly could be what we have been described as, the "blob that ate East Texas". 

[editor]

8 hours ago, Ross said:

I would be happy to read the NYT article, but I'm not going to risk the wrath of the wife unit on another news subscription. Is there an alternate source?

You're in luck!

As a New York Times subscriber, I am able to "gift" articles to other people to read.  I just sent you this article in a PM.

Subscribers can also add (I think up to four or five) friends to their accounts. So if you have five friends, you can always split the cost of the $17 subscription to $2.83 each per month.  That's less than ad-free HAIF!

(Been reading the Times dead tree edition almost daily since 1982.  Been a dead tree subscriber for coming up on 25 years. The Texas edition is printed in Houston.)

[editor]

For those who consider the notion that adding more lanes doesn't improve traffic, it's not some crazy eco-socialist-transit-rainbow-unicorn cabal putting out that notion.  It's called Braess' Paradox, discovered by a German mathematician.

Quote

"For each point of a road network, let there be given the number of cars starting from it and the destination of the cars. Under these conditions, one wishes to estimate the distribution of traffic flow. Whether one street is preferable to another depends not only on the quality of the road, but also on the density of the flow. If every driver takes the path that looks most favourable to them, the resultant running times need not be minimal. Furthermore, it is indicated by an example that an extension of the road network may cause a redistribution of the traffic that results in longer individual running times."

Wikipedia explains it a little more plainly:

Quote

Adding extra capacity to a network when the moving entities selfishly choose their route can in some cases reduce overall performance. That is because the Nash equilibrium of such a system is not necessarily optimal. The network change induces a new game structure which leads to a (multiplayer) prisoner's dilemma. In a Nash equilibrium, drivers have no incentive to change their routes. While the system is not in a Nash equilibrium, individual drivers are able to improve their respective travel times by changing the routes they take. In the case of Braess's paradox, drivers will continue to switch until they reach Nash equilibrium despite the reduction in overall performance.

 

[Heights88]

12 hours ago, editor said:

It's a trope that's centuries old: Blame the messenger. When you can't refute an argument, argue something else. 

The article very clearly cites dozens of sources and interviews with experts to back up the writing.  Since you have a contrary view, we'd all benefit from seeing your sources and studies  

It's also laughable to call the New York Times anti-development, and suggests a knee-jerk reaction, rather than any knowledge of the Times, or it's history. 

I am simply acknowledging the messenger and their bias. The NYT has a very strong bias against anything that isn't abiding by the 'smart growth' theory of urban design. NYT has a point of view...nothing wrong with that, but their arguments are not persuasive in my view. The induced demand theory underlying this piece is what I really am attacking. The theory basically posits that building new roads is useless because they will just fill up and the problem won't get better. It's a false argument that is waged inconsistently...do we not build new rail or bike lanes or hospitals because they would just 'fill up'? Well executed Highway / roadway expansions relieve congestion while expanding citizen's access to employment opportunities, commercial ventures, and lower cost housing. I think we could do a better pricing the usage of road use, but overall roads are not the problem. Perhaps the NYT should spend a bit more time looking into the utter catastrophe facing the MTA rather than attacking the Katy freeway. 

[mattyt36]

20 minutes ago, Heights88 said:

I am simply acknowledging the messenger and their bias. The NYT has a very strong bias against anything that isn't abiding by the 'smart growth' theory of urban design. NYT has a point of view...nothing wrong with that, but their arguments are not persuasive in my view. The induced demand theory underlying this piece is what I really am attacking. The theory basically posits that building new roads is useless because they will just fill up and the problem won't get better. It's a false argument that is waged inconsistently...do we not build new rail or bike lanes or hospitals because they would just 'fill up'? Well executed Highway / roadway expansions relieve congestion while expanding citizen's access to employment opportunities, commercial ventures, and lower cost housing. I think we could do a better pricing the usage of road use, but overall roads are not the problem. Perhaps the NYT should spend a bit more time looking into the utter catastrophe facing the MTA rather than attacking the Katy freeway. 

I don't believe the NYT is particularly "biased" except in the sense that they generally adopt the academic consensus view, and this is the academic consensus view.

However, it is simplistic in the sense that it does not consider the alternative.

The truth of the matter is, traffic or not, most Americans (especially those who vote) prefer to live on large lots in economically segregated communities with good schools.  Moreover, living in a city is prohibitively expensive for many that wish to do so (why not consider the affordable housing problem in the same article?).  This idea that you can force density in a city without a historical rapid transit network by just making it more difficult for people to drive seems to make logical sense in everyone's head ("Ah, if it took two hours to get from The Woodlands to downtown, then they'd have to take the train!"), but it is 100% unproven--and I'd say it makes no sense on its face.  I'd say it's equally logically sensical in a city like Houston that the central core of the city would de-densify with businesses moving out of the core and into the plentiful and cheap land on what used to be called "edge cities," only that these new edge cities won't be on 610 or even Beltway 8--they'll be on the Grand Parkway.  So how does that solve the (apparently) stated problem?  

Invest in transit, you say.  Well, the way it stands in this state, at least, Houston would be pretty much on its own with meaningful assistance from the federal government (and this pie is very limited).  A meaningful system (commuter rail joined to a transit system with comprehensive coverage and attractive headways) under this scenario is nowhere near financially feasible, and that assumes the voters would actually approve it to begin with.  (And, I hate to bring this up as I know all of the Stop IH-45 people's #1 concern was keeping low income neighbohoods intact, but try to build a truly useful system without displacing a lot of people.  I know, I know, in this case you will find some way to say "it's A-OK because it's for the greater good" (which really means, "It's A-OK for what I think is the greater good."--need I remind you you are in the minority.)  

The level of thought that people give to such complex issues is absolutely laughable.  There is this sense that one can have one's cake and eat it too with no acknowledgment that once the system changes, you can't keep what you assume you could control under control.

@editor says "Blame the messenger" with all the cited facts, etc., etc.  I'm not disputing the facts as presented, but what's their prescription to really change how American cities develop?  I think if you spend much time musing on it, you'll realize it's all but impossible.  As long as there is land to sale on the periphery, it will be purchased and with the expectation that it will be developed in due course.  There is no mechanism for development cordons in the State of Texas, and even if there miraculously were, I doubt they would hold up in this Supreme Court.  The long and the short of it is that people are going to continue to vote with their feet and pocketbooks until the system changes.  To me, this article doesn't say anything about the real problems, it just summarizes symptoms, and, as such, the academic consensus keeps on tilting at windmills.  BLAME THE MESSENGER, I guess.

6 hours ago, Skyboxdweller said:

The underlying dynamic is that the extra lanes fill up with cars because the additional capacity makes land on the periphery within commuting distance  for workers heading into the core and  for those in the core who are employed  in warehouses and manufacturing operations that need large facilities on cheap land  built on the edge off the sprawl. . The road system is the necessary framework that supports our particular type of urban development : suburban sprawl , so that Houston now covers 650 plus square miles of relatively low density development.  As the prairies, swamps, farmland and forests get paved over they lose their capacity to retain and detain storm water. The costs of flooding are shifted to areas down gradient. .  Finally, it commits us to a built environment  in which individuals are  dependent for almost every task : work, school, shopping , entertainment , on auto transport, which for the next decade at least is powered by gasoline,. and makes mass transit and densification in the future not feasible. 

This is 100% accurate.

17 hours ago, samagon said:

I haven't seen anything to demonstrate this is a party line driven issue.

do you have any meaningful data as a source for your claims?

🤣 This would be laughable pretty much anywhere, but given Houston's history with transit and Congressmen putting riders into federal bills specifically to prevent transit in a single county, it is especially laughable.

[s3mh]

The problem with adding freeway lanes as a way to reduce traffic is that there is no perfect way to do it.  You cannot take a highway and split the earth open to uniformly add lanes on new land that appears out of nowhere and then have every exit automatically increase capacity all along the way.  You will always have bottlenecks that cause congestion despite the increased carrying capacity.  That is what happened on the Katy freeway.  EB at 610 is always a mess because the 610 exit was not expanded enough to be able to handle the increased load from the Katy Freeway.  Then, there are numerous instances where exits and merges create bottlenecks.  Washington Ave and I-10 EB is also a mess because 610 NB traffic is merging while at the same time there are exit only lanes for Washington Ave.  Merging and exiting traffic around Dairy Ashford and I-10 EB always makes a bottleneck even off of rush hour because there isn't enough room to get traffic to merge onto the highway before people trying to exit get in the way.  And the merge WB before the grand parkway when the tollway lane drops out is also a bottleneck (EB I-10 merge with grand parkway NB traffic is also a mess because the merge is too close to exiting traffic).  Finally, the number of lanes doesn't matter when there is a wreck.  Urban highways are just too complicated of a system to be able to add lanes without having any blowback due to design flaws.

Highway widening is the go to traffic congestion remedy because the real estate developer, construction and engineering lobbyists know how to do their jobs and there really is no opposing force that can go toe to toe with them on behalf of public transportation.  It just took one house rep (Culberson) to kill off any chance at federally funded commuter rail from the west part of Houston.  

To its credit, the Houston area has been making adaptations by moving employment centers out into the suburbs.  I used to work with a guy who would commute in from the Woodlands every day to downtown.  It would take him a solid hour unless he left for work before 7 am.  He got a job in the Woodlands and cut his commute time down to 15 minutes.  But that was 20 years ago.  Now, it can take him twice as long due to all the traffic in the Woodlands during rush hour.  My boss lives in Kingwood at the far end of Kingwood Dr.  It takes him longer to get to 59 than it does to go from 59 to downtown.  

So, we are basically screwed in Houston.  We have reached capacity on most of the major arteries and even people who do the right thing and live close to work have to fight through traffic.  We will not see any meaningful alternatives for public transportation in our lifetimes in Houston.  Traffic will just get worse and worse and worse.

 

[BeerNut]

One of my issues with adding more lanes is future liabilities.  EV ownership and gas mileage increases present funding challenges for continued maintenance if funding is tied to gas tax .  Increased weight will also wear down roads faster.  

At some point there should be a limit to how many lanes you cram down your core city.  

We should get rid of the zoning through parking minimums inside the loop to allow denser housing to be built.  Maybe with some affordability component that would allow more people to live closer in and we wouldn't need to keep increasing lanes.

[Montrose1100]

I'm all for highway improvements. Bury them below grade, improve the connections, reduce unnecessary mergers, and promote driver's education. Also, add 10 foot walls to the center.

However, I'm also for mass transit. The best way to reduce congestion on the highway is to give a percentage of drivers a better option. More mass transit = less drivers on the road. Anyone who drives (and would continue to, despite a commuter rail option), would certainly agree to funding it to get more vehicles off the road? That' what I've never understood about the nay-sayers. "I'd never use it". Then don't? Wouldn't your driving experience be more enjoyable with x-amount less vehicles around you?

45 needs improvement. It's a sh** design.

 

 

[004n063]

1 hour ago, Montrose1100 said:

The best way to reduce congestion on the highway is to give a percentage of drivers a better option. More mass transit = less drivers on the road. Anyone who drives (and would continue to, despite a commuter rail option), would certainly agree to funding it to get more vehicles off the road? That' what I've never understood about the nay-sayers. "I'd never use it". Then don't? Wouldn't your driving experience be more enjoyable with x-amount less vehicles around you?

One needn't even look at other cities to see this in action. 

The parts of this city most totally given over to car-dominance - Greenway and west, are unsurprisingly awful places to navigate on foot, bike, or bus (and of course, there are no trams or passenger rail systems out there). As a carless resident of Midtown who works on Westpark at Dunvale, I can assure you of this, and of the fact that it gets even worse the further out you go.

But I also used to drive, and while my afternoon commute was generally eastbound, I did occasionally go west for students' games, performances, etc., so I think my sense of the city's traffic patterns is pretty broad. And this is the part: the worst places for walking, biking, and transit are also the worst places for driving.

Transit helps everyone. Bikability helps everyone. Walkability helps everyone. 

But also, and for very similar reasons, the abundance of housing options on the west side of the city also helps everyone. (Arguably hurts everyone too, since geographic dispersion of a limited supply of funding leads to lesser public provision), but personally, there's certainly no way that I could afford to live where I do if it the yuppy competition weren't so heavily reduced by the regional glut of housing options.

Edited January 11, 2023 by 004n063

[Ross]

1 hour ago, BeerNut said:

One of my issues with adding more lanes is future liabilities.  EV ownership and gas mileage increases present funding challenges for continued maintenance if funding is tied to gas tax .  Increased weight will also wear down roads faster.  

At some point there should be a limit to how many lanes you cram down your core city.  

We should get rid of the zoning through parking minimums inside the loop to allow denser housing to be built.  Maybe with some affordability component that would allow more people to live closer in and we wouldn't need to keep increasing lanes.

The areas without deed restrictions inside the loop have not had any issues with getting denser housing. The NW quadrant West of Shepherd and excluding Timbergrove/Lazybrook is far denser than it was in the past. Nextdoor discussions on the 11th Street road diet and the construction on Shepherd and Durham that includes lane reductions are replete with complaints about all of the new apartment complexes generating thousands of cars per day(which isn't really true).

That's also happening along Hardy Street in the 5th Ward, where townhomes are popping up, although not in the huge quantities we see in the NW.

We could increase density by eliminating deed restrictions and getting rid of the Heights Historic Districts that serve in place of deed restrictions. The Heights was well on its way to densification before the historic district event occurred and stopped townhome development there. My snarky side says, though, that while the residents of the Heights, Norhill, Woodland Heights, etc preach densification and better mass transit, they will not give up their largish single family homes on good sized lots to participate in that process.

I think it's pretty safe to say that Houston is not going to give up the current land use control schemes that are in place and allow formal zoning. That's just not how we roll here. In the unincorporated areas outside Houston, the city's control of sales tax revenue through special purpose annexation and a distrust of cities means that there will never be any further incorporated cities outside the Houston City limits. That means that the large 1500 acre MPCs will continue to sprout, creating further demand for roads and freeways. The good news is that I don't think we will see any attempts to build new freeways to get suburban residents into Downtown more quickly, like was proposed in the past.

As for the MPCs in the unincorporated areas, the people that buy there love where they live, and couldn't imagine living in the City, even with the commutes. They are also not fans of rail, with many of them thinking rail is a commie plot to extract money from them to serve the great unwashed poor population. In their minds rail is expensive, and freeways are free, hence the name "freeway", built with magic money from the money well.

Well, that turned out to be a rambling mess, didn't it.

[mattyt36]

5 minutes ago, Ross said:

As for the MPCs in the unincorporated areas, the people that buy there love where they live, and couldn't imagine living in the City, even with the commutes. They are also not fans of rail, with many of them thinking rail is a commie plot to extract money from them to serve the great unwashed poor population. In their minds rail is expensive, and freeways are free, hence the name "freeway", built with magic money from the money well.

Well, in fairness, a couple of things:

(1) Under the current system, freeways are largely "self-funding" through the gas tax.  Transit and commuter rail are not anywhere near directly so, at least not in a way that is easily digestible for voters to understand.  Ergo it's not a real leap or illogical to consider it expensive for what it is.

(2) There are cities like LA and Dallas that have built commuter rail systems (and I think these serve as the best example of what would happen if Houston built similar--note LA and Dallas are as known for traffic as we are), and they aren't exactly the most useful.  With few exceptions, Metra in Chicago isn't even all that great.

(3) METRO rail isn't exactly the greatest advertisement against the "great unwashed poor population" bias.

 

[editor]

38 minutes ago, mattyt36 said:

With few exceptions, Metra in Chicago isn't even all that great.

As someone who used Metra regularly for ten years, I can say that Metra actually is pretty great. 

38 minutes ago, mattyt36 said:

(3) METRO rail isn't exactly the greatest advertisement against the "great unwashed poor population" bias.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.  Are you pointing out that all classes of people use Metro?  So, no different than the highways or sidewalks or any other public transportation amenity.  If you're trying to say that there are a lot of undesirable people on Metro, then you have to do to things: Define the sort of person you think should be disallowed from using Metro and why, even though they are Houston citizens with the same rights and voting power as you; and ride the Metro red line during rush hours when it's packed with Medical Center workers. 

[editor]

41 minutes ago, mattyt36 said:

Under the current system, freeways are largely "self-funding" through the gas tax.

I think this requires a citation, as all of the urban planners I've spoken with have said the opposite.  A quick Google came up with this document, which supports that.

As for transit systems paying for themselves, you are correct — very few do.  But that's not the purpose of a mass transit system.  I once asked an Orca driver why he let someone on for free while I had to pay $2.25 to ride.  He explained that the purpose of a transportation agency is to move people around, not to make a profit. 

Parks aren't self-funding.  Street sweepers aren't self-funding.  Homeless shelters aren't self-funding.  Lots of government services are not self-funding.  Why do we expect that transit should?

[editor]

3 hours ago, BeerNut said:

We should get rid of the zoning through parking minimums inside the loop to allow denser housing to be built.

I'm not clear what you are trying to say here.  Are you suggesting that developers should be required to have more parking in order to bring more people into dense areas, or just the opposite?

Every developer I've worked with tries to minimize parking in their buildings because it's basically non-revenue space.  In Chicago, developers flock to areas near train stations because they are allowed to have less parking, which means more revenue-generating office and residential space.  It's even codified in city ordinance as "Transit-oriented development."