<i>No, you&#x27;re simply wrong. Road construction and maintenance is heavily subsidized by taxes other than the gas tax (which of course works more like a user fee).</i><p>You&#x27;re missing the distinction I&#x27;m drawing: If all funding for all transportation schemes was entirely user-derived, roads would survive (as you admit in your other comment they do in Europe at much higher rates). Very few public transportation systems would.<p>If your definition for &quot;subsidized&quot; is &quot;receives some amount of funding from general revenue, or forbearance for hard-to-capture externality&quot;, then just about every commercial aspect of our lives is &quot;subsidized&quot; in one way or another and the term fails to have much meaning.