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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33828 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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A Live Fire Experiment in UBI

This is a link to the 2026 Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) Budget.

Note: I'll make number page references to it throughout this post. This means when I say "p. 6" I mean the page that has "6" in its lower left or right hand corner, not the page number in your browser's PDF viewer.

1. WMATA is not self sustaining.

WMATA annually serves 268 million riders and makes approximately $2.03 in revenue per rider. Their revenue is ~$545 million, which is 1/10th of their budget. (p.1) By comparison, New York's MTA makes up about 35% of its operating budget via fares and tolls. 23% is from fares alone. (Note: I'm pretty sure I'm doing a mostly apples-to-apples comparison here. I'd be thankful if anyone finds that I am not and can point out any error.)

Public transit in the US is always a money losing operation. Everywhere, it is existentially dependent on taxes for basic operational support, let alone capital improvements or system expansion. The idea, however, is that providing a low cost transportation system "pays for itself" (indirectly) by providing more economic dynamism and potential for growth in a given area. Therefore, at best, and most charitably, public transportation is a public good in the textbook economic theory sense.

There are, however, economists who would debate the ROI of public transportation and more still who would question the efficiency with which the tax dollars that fund public transportation are spent. This leads us to;

2. WMATA cannot pay its own employees

ALL of WMATA's revenue can only pay for about 31% of personnel costs (p.6). Total personnel costs for FY2026 is forecast at $1.746 bn (compared to a forecast revenue of approx $545 mm). This personnel cost is separate from "services", materials, fuels, utilities, casualties and liability, leases, and miscellaneous. It is, by far, the single largest expense. "Personnel" is 6.6x the size of the second place "services less paratransit." Combining the two different "services" line items, Personnel is still 4.16x the size. Personnel expenses represent almost 70% of operating expenses for WMATA, whereas NY's MTA (link above) pegs theirs at 58% of operating expenses.

Grim, to say the least. To keep this post focused, I'm not going to go into a detailed analysis of WMATA's performance. Suffice it to say, however, that it is notorious for being late, delayed, always running incomplete or rerouted service due to maintenance and repair issues, and highly vulnerable to fair evasion. For a while over the past 5 - 10 years, WMATA stations were notorious for often catching on fire.

3. WMATA's tax based funding is pure redistributionism

Page 10 shows the operating subsidy for the key areas that support WMATA:

  • Whole of DC.
  • Maryland. Two counties; Montgomery and Prince George's
  • Virginia. Six municipalities; City of Alexandria, City of Fairfax, City of Falls Church, Fairfax County, Arlington County, and Loudoun county.

For some context, with the exception of Prince George's county, all of these municipalities have median household incomes well over $100,000. The Virginia counties (not cities) rank in the top 10 of income for the entire country nearly every year.

The net operating contribution of all of these subsidies is about $1.996bn, about 14% more than the $1.746bn necessary to meet the "Personnel" operating budget.

Looking at the contributions by municipality, and without digging into service levels (i.e. number of trains and buses) versus population and/or tax base in each one, it doesn't look like anyone is getting "hosed." The only thing that sticks out to me is that metroBUS subsidy in Prince George's County seems meaningfully higher than elsewhere.

Staying focused on personnel, however, it is remarkable how close the local area subsidy is to that personnel budget figure.

** 4. Analysis and Opinion **

I think WMATA can best be thought of as a jobs program that redistributes tax money from several local jurisdictions to its 13,646 employees (p.19). That's an average "personnel" cost per employee of about $127, 949.58.

Then, using a combination of federal grants, about $800 mn of debt issuance, and its modest $545mn of revenue, it then actually finances, you know, running the trains and buses on time. Except that service, as stated before, is notoriously sub-par.

As an interesting comparative, the DC localized Federal Gov't Pay Scale link here would put $127,000 towards the lower steps of the GS-13 level. For anyone who has had exposure to Federal Contracting in the Northern VA, Southern MD, DC area, a GS-13 is pretty much where a white collar professional with anywhere from 5 - 10+ years of experience ends up depending on technical skill, advanced degrees, security clearance level, etc. It isn't a particularly special pay grade. GS-14 is where the "adults" live and GS-15 is meaningful (it's the equivalent to a colonel in the U.S. army in terms of seniority alone).

Now, to be fair, the $127k cost for WMATA employees is almost certainly salary plus benefits, whereas the GS scale is straight salary. Also, I will note that my $127k calculation is an average instead of a median. A WMATA bus driver isn't going to be anywhere near $127k. Still, I think the rough comparison is still informative.

WMATA is a jobs program for 13,000 people. It sinks tax dollars from some of the most wealthy parts of the country - and Prince George's county - into a workforce that fails to perform the basics. Its operating model - I hesitate to call it a business model - is so poor that it can only generate 1/10th of the revenue needed to keep itself afloat. The positive externalities it generates for the DC area economy are questionable because most of the local economy is inextricably tied into Federal dollars already - mostly through direct federal contracting. For the outer suburbs - Northern Montgomery County, Fairfax County, Loudoun County, Falls Church, western Alexandria City - Metro stations and bus stops are so spread out and so infrequently serviced that people living there will definitely have a car. Traffic on 495, 66, 270, and 50 are testament to this.

Thinking ahead to discussions about UBI, I think that the WMATA example is a far more accurate preview of what a UBI program would actually look like; horribly inefficient government allocation of capital for do nothing jobs but at a level of "basic income" that is actually quite high.

A simple plan like "government check for $1k shows up in your bank account every month" is still a very shaky proposition. The quick math there is something like 220 million working age adults x $1k per month x 12 months = $2.2 trillion per year. This is about 1/3rd of the total federal budget. And this is assuming incredibly minimal overhead. Would that be the case, or would the "Department of American Income" be staffed with, oh, let's say about 13,000 "administrators" who each make between $100k - $125k? The IRS has about 90,000 employees, for reference

Furthermore, the WMATA example is also an example of the PMC-Bureucratic machine carrying out its mission perfectly. That is to say invisibly. Who really cares about a $5bn budget of a regional transit system besides turbo autists on internet forums? Ho-hum. Boring. But then you dig in and see that this is $129k/employee being siphoned away from the tax payers in suburban areas. It's wealth redistribution in exchange for political patronage and non-productive labor activity. It's a serfdom of laziness and fealty at the ballot box. And that' the end state for UBI in the American political-economy.

What are you talking about, WMATA is a great program! One of the best metro transportation systems in the United States, and it works pretty well. The trains are always on time, the stations are relatively clean and safe, service is reliable.

WMATA specifically is bounded by a few unique concerns that make it a poor fit for UBI (which I'll get back to):

  • WMATA serves Washington DC, the nation's capital. It was never designed to run a profit. Nobody cares if it runs a profit. WMATA is entirely designed to serve the needs of a few hundred thousand government employees. Out of the resources of the entire nation. This is like complaining that the Washington Monument runs at a loss. There's no limit to what the government is willing to spend. Ok, maybe there is a limit, but it's way higher than what the free marker, or the resources of a less important city, would allocate.

  • WMATA doesn't have a dedicated funding stream. The DC metro in general is split between DC, Maryland, and Virginia, who all jealously fight for every scrap of infrastructure spending, on top of which the federal government sits. You can't build anything in the DMV without everyone keeping score and making sure they get their cut. To get around this, WMATA is not funded with a direct tax or other revenue source. DC, Maryland, and Virginia simply agree to allocate so much money to the system, which is never enough, and then every year WMATA threatens to cut services until the states cough up more dough or the federal government steps in.

  • WMATA isn't even designed for the convenience of the DC Metro. It's designed for the convenience of federal workers. The original WMATA grid plans (rather famously actually) didn't build stations where population density was greatest. It was deliberately designed to change the landscape of the DMV. An example of this is that WMATA lines extend way, way far out into suburbs no other urban metro line would ever serve, past any sort of free-market calculus. The silver line out to Dulles, for example, added ten miles through mostly empty-suburbs just to connect to Dulles Airport. But it was felt that the nation's capital needed a metro connection to its second major airport, and that this was more important than all other considerations and constraints.

This is not a program that could have been modest but was blown out by patronage graft. WMATA is not expensive because it funds generous sinecure do-nothing jobs. WMATA is expensive because it is throwing the resources of the entire federal government at a strictly local program, with no care for constraints. This is not like UBI at all. The guys who maintain the nuclear button probably also gets a lot of sloppy wealth redistribution, but nobody cares when it's considered important enough.

Besides all that, the metro is fairly well-run. WMATA GM Randy Clarke has been expanding service and WMATA has recovered the best from Covid of any American metro outside New York.

The traffic during rush hour in the DC area is already bad enough. The whole area would come to a standstill without the metro. So whole premise of your argument is flawed. And $127k cost of employee is something like $95k base salary + benefits.

I think that there are plenty of beneficial services which are not self-sustaining. Primary and secondary education. Police (whom we generally prefer to do more useful stuff than running speed traps to increase city revenue). Perhaps sanitation. Maintenance of toll-free roads.

Public transportation is just another one in that list. The real reason we have fares is not because it pays for the service, but simply to keep the homeless out.

Some things are just natural monopolies, and it makes sense for the government to run them. Having three different competing highways or sets of train tracks between SF and LA is obviously not going to happen.

Looking at a city's public transport system in isolation and seeing that it is running at a loss does not tell you anything useful. Public transportation is great for moving people around in dense urban areas. Get rid of it, and people will overwhelm the roads with their cars. You can then either increase tolls until half of them can no longer afford to drive to the city, or simply let people waste hours per day in traffic jams. Either will have big repercussions: rents downtown will rise, rents in the suburbs will go down as they become infeasible for city jobs.

Of course, a city could price public transportation to provide services at cost, at least as long as it was also willing to raise tolls for cars by a similar margin, surge pricing and all. This would likely also rise the prices of coffee (because you need to pay more to staff to cover the increased costs of commuting). Or you might even experiment with leasing particular bus or train lines to competing companies (as long as you avoid the failure mode of a monopoly raising prices as high as the market will bear).

Nothing I said is suggesting that the WMATA is run particularly well. Often taxpayer-funded services are not. If you can't have the market, you can at least have audits. How full are their busses. What is their administrative overhead? (Before or after you established auditing requirements, though?)

Just to be sure, I checked the balance of my Italian, and famous for being always disfunctional, for at least 30 years, public/private public transportation company that administer my city metro system and bus system. It has a positive sheet, and has been the same for the past few years. Is true that new trains and tunnels and infrastructure are payed by the central state/region/city/EU, but the company can absolutely pay for herself both the personnel costs, the training and fixed expenses.

EDIT: I read that this WMATA has a police force (!!!) of 550 people. This is insane

Every agency in DC has an absurdly large police force. It's unclear how much of this is standard bloat and how much of this is cover for secret capital protection schemes.

A simple plan like "government check for $1k shows up in your bank account every month" is still a very shaky proposition. The quick math there is something like 220 million working age adults x $1k per month x 12 months = $2.2 trillion per year. This is about 1/3rd of the total federal budget. And this is assuming incredibly minimal overhead. Would that be the case, or would the "Department of American Income" be staffed with, oh, let's say about 13,000 "administrators" who each make between $100k - $125k?

I think one of the main advantages of UBI is that there is far fewer qualifications to check. For most government benefits, you have long, messy, expensive processes to prove that you are actually eligible. UBI would thus cut down on a lot of caseworker load for social security for able-bodied persons. (We would still want extra programs for severely handicapped people, because telling a blind paraplegic to live on the same budget as a healthy person is cruel. But outside of Somali-Americans (among whom the incidence of autism in kids is shockingly high, IIRC), the fraction of people who require additional benefits beyond UBI should be small.)

I get that you are skeptical if it will play out in practice like this. I do not think the caseworkers for unemployment benefits would be very receptive to receiving UBI themselves instead. And between department bosses, the number of employees is often how they measure their dick size, so whoever is in charge of them would also have plenty of incentive to find a point why it is essential to keep every one (or hire even more).

1k per month is just like...nothing? The average welfare recipient is getting about that much from one program alone, often more if they are in subsidized housing, have subsidized pre-k, etc. The selling point of a UBI is you get to get rid of all the hoops and ladders and qualifications and bureaucrats that traditional welfare needs. But the only way for a UBI to replace those things is for it to replace them. And, if you set UBI at a level where an unemployed single mother of 2 can live and support the family, or be employed and buy childcare, well we are talking in the 40k+ range. My understanding is that many families legitimately receive over 80k in benefits yearly. Converting that into UBI is obviously impossible mathematically. And if you dont, you cant get rid of the rest of welfare without there being a lot of crying "hungry" children being paraded in front of the news.

$1k per month is roughly what I got when I lost my job in 2020 because of Covid. It wasn't exactly riches, but it certainly wasn't "nothing." It was... an interesting experience, getting checks in the mail from the government for doing absolutely nothing, while public figures told me to stay inside for public health. I was glad that it helped me keep my life going and not become homeless, but it also encouraged me to be lazy so... I don't know. It's a hard question.

But could you have gone 20 years with that amount of income and maintained a level of humanity that doesnt seem sympathetic to a media person?

Probably not. Even 1 year was enough for me to develop some bad habits. 20 years of that lifestyle would be insane.

If you set UBI at a level where an unemployed single mother of 2 can live and support the family, or be employed and buy childcare—well, we are talking in the 40k+ range.

Source (38 k$/a for a consumer unit of three people)

38kx200million also doesnt work.

38k is for a family of three. There aren't 200 million of those in America.

This is a bizarre blindspot of UBI proponents. The groups who need a UBI most are children and seniors (who effectively already have one), because we don't expect them to work. Various UBI-for-kids schemes are easy to imagine (in the US, the most obvious is the fully-refundable child tax credit) but only Matt Breunig and about three other pro-natalist Berniebros seem to be strongly in favour of them. But the culture that produces Anglosphere wonks (including left, pro-establishment right, and libertarian wonks) sees children as consumption goods and not human beings, so it keeps coming up with adults-only UBI, or thinking in ways which assume a single-parent family of three should get the same UBI as a single childless adult.

Thats not really a UBI, its Social Security plus Welfare for Kids.

For most government benefits, you have long, messy, expensive processes to prove that you are actually eligible. UBI would thus cut down on a lot of caseworker load for social security for able-bodied persons.

I'm not sure I believe this. I am skeptical that you can replace the vast majority of the current welfare system with UBI if people find ways to burn through their UBI and have starving kids, etc. If anything has been learned in the past decade or so it is that crying children and women (especially the non-white variety) lead to infinite think pieces and action by NGOs, media apparatuses, etc. to ensure they can receive as much as possible from the government coffers or legal changes.

Simple enough to square. Every four years you get to decide if you want to receive UBI or be eligible to vote in four years.

That just means that UBI is incompatible with ochlocracy, not that it's impossible to implement.

One can simply disconnect political power from the people who would vote themselves more largesse from the treasury, through cens or some other mechanism, and vast amounts of good governance suddenly becomes very possible.

All that's required is a system sane enough to recognize that dependents are not the equals of providers. The historical norm, really.

One can simply disconnect political power from the people who would vote themselves more largesse from the treasury, through cens or some other mechanism, and vast amounts of good governance suddenly becomes very possible.

While we're at it, can we get angels in the form of kings to govern us?

Certainly an aristocracy of benevolent and competent people could do this. These aristocracies are rare in history and fleeting at best.

Hot take: if a parent is unable to spend a child's UBI on the child's needs, we have a fix for that. It is CPS. Anyone who can not be trusted with cash but only food stamps lest their kids starve is patently unqualified to raise kids.

CPS does not have room to accommodate these children. Foster care is generally terrible and overcrowded, the orphanages have mostly been dismantled.

It’s better for thé society we live in if kids stay with kinda sucky parents who have guardrails than stuffing them in the alternatives which mostly exist for kids exposed to actual danger- and which often can’t be spun up easily.

I have come around to this thinking: "My UBI isn't enough to afford rent and food" is an evergreen opinion article, and can paper over your gambling and drug habits pretty easily. "I can't afford rent and food" in the current system (discrete section 8, SNAP) is a lot easier to counter with "you got $1000 for rent and $200 for food this month."

The only question when it comes to redistribution is whether you are getting some of it. No country has ever substantially reduced welfare in relative terms. In the event of an extreme fiscal crisis (like in Greece) it might be reduced in absolute terms - long after everyone of working age has already started to suffer - but the share of the shrinking pie stays the same or grows. You may as well try to get as much as you can.

It's wealth redistribution in exchange for political patronage and non-productive labor activity.

Yes, and?

I think even the proponents of UBI will admit that this is indeed the point. They might phrase it a little more positively - “We have broken the wheel of history and finally given each person the means to live unconditionally, no longer demanding their supplication to Capitalist Alienation. Of course the souls thus saved will vote eternally to maintain this utopia, and rightfully so” - but that is absolutely the point of the exercise, sure.

They might reasonably ask Y U Mad about it? Why wouldn’t / shouldn’t people vote to get something for nothing? This failure mode of democracy has been known all the way back since Plato.

As many others have said, this isn't UBI, this is run of the mill fraud and corruption in government programs. Nothing new.

Frankly I think this is fine as government fraud goes, as we've seen with the Somali daycares and other egregious projects like California high speed rail, at the very least this provides a service, even if it's a shitty and inconsistent one. I don't understand why you're acting like this is a smoking gun of government waste - there is so much worse out there!

But it's not even fraud and corruption! WMATA is a good service operating under very unusual political constraints. Fraud and corruption would be government employees stealing money under false pretenses; WMATA is a program designed to satisfy totally contradictory urban transit goals, at any cost.

UBI would likely be handled by the government so I don’t see the point. If distributions of this type cannot be handled without the corruption, then I see no reason to assume that the next government distribution schemes will do better.

As many others have pointed out, the major factor here is that UBI does not require a job or even a certain social status (i.e. poverty level) in order to trigger. Having a job and providing a service is different.

I do agree that UBI in actuality would likely be a mess, sadly.

The main argument is that the simplicity of UBI (are you a citizen? do you have a pulse? congrats, here's your check!) compared to the complex mesh of benefits that make current safety nets makes for a flatter administrative landscape that leaves less cover for corruption and grift to hide in.

Not that it makes much of a difference when government is indifferent to it, as can be attested with how brazen the examples of Somali fraud we've seen recently were. But at least, if the government cares, in the case of UBI avoiding corruption and grift would be easier, as there's really only three ways one could abuse it: claim to be a citizen if they aren't, claim someone is alive when they aren't, claim they haven't recieved the money when they have.

My suspicion is that the issue is less about how an actual, well-constructed UBI would be corrupted/abused (as you say, it's difficult), but in that most actual "UBI" programs wouldn't be an actual, well-constructed UBI. In practice, it wouldn't be rolled out universally (even if universality was a genuine aspiration), and that would allow for politicians to pick and choose the constituencies that benefit. And so you get the government creating a "UBI" targeting black pregnant trans artists.

I don’t think that changes things too much simply because politicians and those running the program have a great opportunity to create the grift. Maybe requiring proof of citizenship every X years, or rather than mail the checks or direct deposit require people to go to the office to pick up the checks all of which will require staffing. Maybe they will require proof that you are an upstanding citizen (required drug testing, proof you aren’t a felon, etc.) all of which provides ample room for graft. Maybe this can be kept low enough to be less than current day welfare and make-work projects, but I suspect it will end up being as bad.

One thing that makes it a bit worse than regular make work corruption: public transit is useful in a place like DC. WMATA's existence makes it so a more reliable, cleaner, effective replacement can't take its place. Just handing out bags of cash to favored groups would in some ways be better, because at least private companies could run the existing profitable routes.

Further a substantial portion of their fare revenue is federal government transit benefits. It's standard for federal agencies to reimburse transit costs.

Does this show the weakness of UBI or weakness of American administrative capacity? California can't do HSR but HSR is still possible. In many countries public transport is perfectly usable, respectable, junkie-free...

Also if we're talking about UBI how hard can it be to get a robot to drive the buses and trains and cut down labour costs? I agree that UBI in the current American political system would be a giant mess. But that's not so much about UBI but about the American system.

Does this show the weakness of UBI or weakness of American administrative capacity? California can't do HSR but HSR is still possible.

For a slightly-slower speed of "high-speed", the privately-owned Brightline HSR in Florida opened a few years ago and connects Miami to Orlando. American administrative capacity does suffer from analysis paralysis in general, but California is probably the worst offender in that regard, and things do "just get built" elsewhere sometimes.

On the other hand, the bright line is responsible for many deaths that I can imagine California would never allo. This of course drives up the cost as well as prevents any progress from ever being made.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/10/brightline-train-florida/684624/

Your article is paywalled. Regardless, far more important than dead morons at grade crossings is the fact that Brightline is not making a profit.

California can’t do HSR- it’s one of those statements which is kinda sort a true. California can’t stick to a plan is why they can’t build HSR.

Also if we're talking about UBI how hard can it be to get a robot to drive the buses and trains and cut down labour costs?

Ummm.... we've literally got private companies sinking billions of dollars into the much easier problem of self driving cars. (Buses are much harder to control than cars, there's much less training data available, and the driver does a lot of things besides drive like monitor fares and kick off druggies.) And while I like the self driving progress, it's still obviously not ready for production yet.

Self-driving trains seem like an easier problem to solve than self-driving cars, especially for a metro system like D.C.’s. They more or less just need to know when to stop and go, plus maybe have a sensor to make sure they don’t run over a pedestrian who fell on the tracks but didn’t get immediately electrocuted.

DC has self-driving trains. We always did, but there was a fatal accident a decade ago that spooked everyone into turning them off. Supposedly that accident didn't even involve the self-driving ATO system at all, but it was still disabled anyways. (One wonders why.) However, recently, WMATA started a trial program to restore self-driving service on the Red Line, which was fairly successful and it appears it's been restored on all lines now.

I like the implication that if a pedestrian dies from falling on the tracks, it's fine for the robot train to run over the body. Pure nerd approach!

Is the stopping distance on a subway train such that an attentive human driver can stop it in time? I know for freight trains stopping distance is measured in miles and it's a solid "no". Access control seems like an easier investment for subways, but not a panacea for human stupidity.

I'd bet modern automotive-derived sensors could do nearly as well as human eyeballs watching the tracks ahead given some effort.

Self-driving trains seem like an easier problem to solve than self-driving cars, especially for a metro system like D.C.’s.

They already exist in some locales, mostly outside the US. IIRC Singapore has a fully-automated metro system. But from what I understand, the unions (I've at least heard this about the NY metro several times) effectively prevent trying to implement these upgrades because a transit strike would cripple the city. But driverless trains and platform screen doors are things that exist elsewhere, so they can be done.

One of the weird things about American politics is that "public transit advocates" have a hate-on for autonomous vehicles. This is despite the fact that AVs would allow running far more bus routes, more cheaply, than today.

I can't decide if this is because public transit advocacy today is mostly about an aesthetic aversion to cars and roads, or if it's because coalitional politics demands that public transit advocacy simultaneously look to protect make work union jobs.

Tactically autonomous vehicles are a big problem for public transit advocates because cars are much more labor-intensive, and yet still overwhelmingly preferred. Eliminate the need for drivers and instead of cheap bus routes, you will end up with a bunch of low-cost Uber Pools outcompeting the public transit system by doing point-to-point trips more quickly and in a safer, more comfortable environment.

So for anyone who is a public transit activist for environmental or aesthetic reasons, this is a disaster because they lose their best arguments for convincing moderates (cost and efficiency).

"public transit advocates" have a hate-on for autonomous vehicles

Citation needed for inflammatory claim. But see also this article on how unions are preventing two-person train/subway crews in the US from being decreased to just a single person (which is the norm in other countries).

Citation needed for inflammatory claim

Sure.

https://sftransitriders.org/on-mayor-luries-plan-to-allow-waymo-on-market-street/

One of the weird things about American politics is that "public transit advocates" have a hate-on for autonomous vehicles. This is despite the fact that AVs would allow running far more bus routes, more cheaply, than today.

Because public transit is a jobs and patronage program first and foremost.

One can also be very skeptical of the claims made. I won't claim to have dug in detail but iirc the big claims usually rely on streets being basically clear of non AVs and those AVs all being networked together so they can use the roads incredibly densely.

Something like 2/3 of operating costs of public transit in the USA is labor costs. If you can replace most of those with AVs, you can get more bus routes, without any radical assumptions or requirements for the broader transit system.

Fair enough. I was unconsciously blending in the claims I'd heard made for cars.

Though I do think thta @Butlerian is right that the up-front costs may be high enough that it makes less difference than you think, unless we truly perfect visual-SLAM. Velodyne LIDARs are expensive.

Yeah, it's not realistic to think labor costs would literally go to zero. Did some research and public transit labor and associated costs in the US are likely around 50B annually; for comparison, Alphabet's workforce is around 100B (though of course the vast majority aren't working on AVs).

LIDARs are expensive, but probably a lower proportion of the cost of the vehicle for a bus than for a regular car (even if buses require more sensors).

Something like 2/3 of operating costs of public transit in the USA is labor costs. If you can replace most of those with AVs, you can…

…shift the beneficiaries of those labour costs from blue collar bus drivers to white collar robotics engineers and AI devs. Which will probably increase the labour costs overall but that’s good because now I might be the one getting paid.

Does this show the weakness of UBI or weakness of American administrative capacity? California can't do HSR but HSR is still possible. In many countries public transport is perfectly usable, respectable, junkie-free...

I don't think there is any well-run city where the transit system as a whole covers 100% of operating costs at the farebox. Hong Kong covers 100% of operating costs using a combination of farebox revenue and station-adjacent retail, and I think Tokyo does as well. There are definitely routes which do, and there are a few cities where the metro/light rail/equivalent as a whole has a farebox operating surplus (the London Underground is an example) which subsidises low-ridership bus routes and paratransit. But every city runs lifeline services to auto-oriented outer suburbs that lose money hand-over-fist, and almost every city runs paratransit that loses even more money.

This isn't particularly surprising - some of the benefit of collectively-provided transport flows to riders (and can be captured through fares) but some is captured by landlords near the route (and has to be captured through property taxes). This logic applies to roads for cars too, which is why local streets are paid for out of property taxes and not gas taxes in almost every city in America. The exceptions (HK and Tokyo) are where the transit network is the landlord.

The state provides lots of public services that aren't supposed to be revenue-neutral though. Public libraries for instance or parks.

I think a razor focus on revenue and cost is besides the point. Public transport should be more systemically efficient (1 engine for 40 rather than 40 engines for 40: economies of scale), produce less pollution than cars, take up less space... The problem in Washington isn't just that it's expensive but that it's unsafe (catching on fire for instance), not transporting good numbers of people. Probably epic amounts of corruption going on too.

Cost is important, it shouldn't be excessively expensive, but taxes are a thing for a reason. If all government services were expected to recoup their costs why would we have taxes?

Public transport should be more systemically efficient (1 engine for 40 rather than 40 engines for 40: economies of scale)

It isn't, though. Because it turns out average number of riders on a bus is not 40 but 9.

The reason isn't a failure of public transport but a failure of Americans. Get rid of the lowlifes shooting up in train stations or pushing random people onto the tracks and then you can have an efficient public transport system. Normal people don't want to be around these net-negatives and will move out to the suburbs, segregate themselves away in cars because they, quite reasonably, don't trust others.

"Teens menace boy with machete and pepper spray on Queens bus" https://youtube.com/watch?v=qalXSOLvEAU

Why would you want to take a bus if this is what you might get?

Americans don't like to live in anthills where public transit can theoretically be efficient. That's not a failing of Americans.

"Americans" are not a homogenous group with uniform preferences about urban living - some like it, others don't. A lot more Americans want to live in places that resemble European or first-world Asian cities than are currently able to - we know this because such places (or even simulacra of them like New Urbanist suburbs) carry a price premium.

Americans living in suburbia is not a revealed preference because urbanism is mostly illegal - both in the sense that it is literally illegal to build at density in most of the US, and also in the sense that the system will not allow you to do the things you need to police somewhere built at urban densities - and I think we all agree that crime is a good and sufficient reason why nobody with options will live in the typical American inner city. If you ask Americans on this board why they don't like cities, most (not all - people who genuinely prefer more rural-like lifestyles exist) of the responses are about crime.

Empirically, where the system is able to put up low-diversity low-crime urbanism the way America puts up Pulte Homes tackyboxes with two-car garages (parts of Spain, South Korea, Japan), everywhere else depopulates. Even high-diversity medium-crime urbanism (NYC, London, Paris) is a build-it-and-they-will-come phenomenon.

"Americans" are not a homogenous group with uniform preferences about urban living

If RandomRanger can generalize, so can I.

Americans living in suburbia is not a revealed preference because urbanism is mostly illegal - both in the sense that it is literally illegal to build at density in most of the US, and also in the sense that the system will not allow you to do the things you need to police somewhere built at urban densities

For the past few decades the anti-sprawl people have been encouraging density and eliminating new suburban growth. And certainly density was not banned when the post-WWII suburbs were being built.

And yes, the system will not allow the kind of authoritarian policing that Japan has to maintain civility with that sort of density. That's not making urbanism illegal. That's just showing that Americans aren't yet comfortable with such authoritarianism.

No, Americans do like to live in cities like all settled peoples. Americans invented the skyscraper!

Until recently the US had dense and highly developed urban centres. Americans failing to defend and preserve their city centres is a serious failure.

No, Americans do like to live in cities like all settled peoples. Americans invented the skyscraper!

They're supposed to be offices, not residences.

Source for inflammatory claim

Average occupancies have declined as ridership has fallen faster than agencies have reduced service. In 1991, the average transit motor bus carried 11.0 people; by 2019, buses were no smaller yet they averaged just 8.0 riders. Trolley buses do a little better because they tend to serve mainly dense inner cities, but their average occupancies still dropped from 14.8 in 1991 to 12.8 in 2019.

The differences between cities are much larger than the changes over time. Honolulu, New York, and San Francisco motor buses carry an average of 17 riders. At the other end of the scale, Ft. Worth transit buses carry less than 4 riders, and buses in Columbus, Dallas, Indianapolis, and Salt Lake City average just 5. Honolulu, New York, and San Francisco are denser cities, of course, but the real problem is that transit agencies want to collect tax revenue from as many suburbs as possible and therefore become obligated to serve those suburbs even though most of the residents have two or three cars in every driveway.

With such low ridership, the promised emissions reductions from mass transit are pretty questionable, no? A city bus (<4mpg) with 5 riders is effectively 20 passenger-miles per gallon. A hybrid gets around 30mpg, even assuming a solo driver. Even the average 2020 model exceeds 20mpg! Maybe there are worthwhile access and congestion arguments otherwise, but it sounds like the Ft. Worth and Indianapolis buses may be a net emissions negative.

The article addresses this.

In 2017, the most recent year for which data are available, the average car consumed less than 2,900 British thermal units (BTUs) per passenger-mile while the average light truck used less than 3,400 (and both were almost certainly less in 2019). That’s far better than the national average of transit buses, as both motor buses and trolley buses used more than 4,600 BTUs per passenger-mile.

Only two of the transit agencies considered here—San Francisco Muni and Honolulu—used significantly less energy than cars in their motor bus operations. Dayton’s trolley buses did as well, though as discussed below that number may be questionable. Motor buses operated by another dozen agencies, including New Jersey Transit and Denver’s RTD, used a little less energy than light trucks but more than cars.

The remaining agencies all used more energy per passenger-mile than automobiles. The worst cases were buses in Bakersfield and Sacramento, which used more than 9,000 BTUs per passenger-mile, and buses in Phoenix, Kansas City, Orange County, and a few smaller areas, which used more than 8,000. Albuquerque, Dallas, Nashville, Phoenix, Raleigh, and Reno are among those above 7,000, while Indianapolis, New Orleans, San Diego, and San Mateo County are above 6,000.

And that's without accounting for circuity -- that is, a bus takes a lot more miles to get a given passenger from point A to point B than a car does.

You're confusing UBI with "Bullshit Jobs" both of which are actually quite different. In bullshit jobs the workers still need to show up to the office and pretend to work in order to collect a check, while in UBI people can go out and party and still collect their check.

With regards to cost, having a metro train is a special case, but you can compare wmata's cost per revenue mile to what it would cost to outsource it to some contract operator like veolia or whatever. I wouldn't be surprised if they are horrifically incompetent but I'd imagine the numbers are not as bad as you think.

In terms of profit, buses aren't meant to make a profit, for better or for worse. We don't live in ancapistan so we have to accept some government services given away at below market rates, such as buses, running water, streetlights, roads, etc.

WMATA isn't run on UBI or Bullshit Jobs. For every lazy inspector photo-copying old measurements there are construction workers, maintenance patrols, janitors, cops, lawyers, managers. White-collar jobs like "managers" might sound like a bad joke but it's not a do-nothing job in a system that is constantly aging and wearing out, where every metro stop needs to be serviced, every service causes chaos throughout the entire network, and there's not even a reliable operating budget out of which to make decisions. These are all hands-on jobs and the existence of sloppy workers just collecting a paycheck is not unusual by any historical example. (Even big Silicon Valley companies pay some of their employees just to sit around all day because they prefer that to having them working for a competitor.)

You're confusing UBI with "Bullshit Jobs" both of which are actually quite different. In bullshit jobs the workers still need to show up to the office and pretend to work in order to collect a check, while in UBI people can go out and party and still collect their check.

As a side note, society might be much better off if the UBI laws required that people had to do some kind of busy work in order to collect their check.

For example, suppose one way you could get your UBI was by playing Fortnight for 6 hours a day. The requirement would arguably give people a much greater feeling of meaning in their lives (even if the work is ultimately meaningless) and it would also keep them off the streets.

This only makes sense if the required busywork can be done at little additional cost and doesn't come at the expense of useful activities you might otherwise employ.

For example, if you need to drive into work every day, then you waste a lot of energy/money burning fossil fuels, wearing out your car, wearing out the road, etc. for no economic benefit.

If you have children that you put in daycare (often also subsidized) then perhaps it would be better for society if you took care of them yourself instead of working a bullshit job of little economic value.

The philosophy behind UBI is that while giving people a guaranteed income may decrease economic activity, it would improve society in other ways: people have more time for exercise and cooking from scratch so they become healthier, they will have more time for reading so they will become better informed, they will create art, they become more active in the community, e.g. volunteering to maintain parks, pick up litter, caring for the elderly, and so on.

I'm a little skeptical about the extent to which these things would actually happen, but a clear prerequisite is that people actually have the free time and energy to do those things. That means you cannot put UBI recipients to work on useless activities, or you have all the downsides and none of the upsides.

Yeah, but most people will just scroll TikTok and eat slop. When they get bored they will do crime. There are plenty of countries with mass unemployment and it does not appear to cause some great blossoming of culture and spiritual living. A UBI future looks like the crime levels of South Africa, a populace that rapidly forgets what little republican virtue remains, and a resentful productive class that flees abroad or sullenly stops investing.

Yeah, but most people will just scroll TikTok and eat slop. When they get bored they will do crime.

I see you've met my clients. The copybook heading that seems more and more true as I get older is "idle hands are the devil's workshop."

The philosophy behind UBI is that while giving people a guaranteed income may decrease economic activity, it would improve society in other ways: people, above all the unproductive ones, have more time for politics

I don't think that would improve society at all.

That means you cannot put UBI recipients to work on useless activities, or you have all the downsides and none of the upsides.

Sure, but given what the above would result in (and how limited applications of this in free societies have all generated this problem), UBI is incompatible with a society built on equal rights- the golden geese generating the productivity will not survive.

At least the Communists (and socialists more broadly) are honest about this (as are the "you will own nothing and be happy" WEF-ers).

We don't live in ancapistan so we have to accept some government services given away at below market rates

A fun thought experiment is analyzing everything concretely done in an economic sector and redoing the cluster analysis. Existing clusters (companies) should be profitable and do many unprofitable things along the way (which they might argue ultimately help the bottom line) but you can reslice in different ways to share some services or remove things which merely compete without value add (e.g. advertising to counter the competition's ads). It's a bit difficult to determine what's ultimately accreative economic activity, just looking at the current clustering.

In a different world, with better policing/less crime making public transit more user friendly and with some union busting, to allow low hanging cost savings like train automation, the relative subsidies could fall while the social benefit grows - and the overall economy would waste less on transportation: roads are one thing, but car's depreciate quickly. Just imagine where we'd be with 7 decades of compounded investments instead!

A fun thought experiment is analyzing everything concretely done in an economic sector

Beware. If you do such analysis thoroughly with full historical perspective, if you follow all tracks and climb through all rabbit holes, you find out that not only our current system has nothing in common with "free market", that corporations and state institutions are just different tentacles of the same monster, and it has was always that been that way in all recorded history.

Persevere enough, and you will see yourself swiftly moving from right bottom corner to left bottom corner of political compass, you will be throwing away black-gold flags and portraits of Ayn Rand and replacing them black-red banners and pictures of more imposing Russians

Persevere enough, and you will see yourself swiftly moving from right bottom corner to left bottom corner of political compass, you will be throwing away black-gold flags and portraits of Ayn Rand and replacing them black-red banners and pictures of more imposing Russians

Except then you'll know you screwed up massively somewhere along the way, because empirically Communism fucks up everything it touches. And regardless of the economic system, Russia is always fucked up.

Bottom left corner is anarcho-communism, not Lenin and Stalin, but Bakunin and Kropotkin. You can truthfully object that no viable example of autonomous self governing classless, stateless and moneyless worker community ever existed, but this is even more true about hard core anarcho capitalism.

It might not be truly autonomous and stateless, but you can join a commune today and get 80% of the way there. Many people have... and almost all them gave it up when it proved unworkable and dumb, and not because of the compromises they had to make to exist within a capitalist society. I have no issue with voluntary communities living in (just about) any way they please, and I'm happy for the people who can find happiness there... but the evidence is that it just doesn't work for the vast majority of people even after self-selecting for the people who want to make it work the most.

(The community that's similarly 80% of the way to anarcho-capitalism is... pre-Civil War America, I think? Not no public spending or government action, but much, much less. Though it looks so good in comparison I'm afraid I've put my thumb on the scale somehow.)

Yes, typical anarcho communist community ends as bizarre sex cult in peace time or just another bandit gang in war zone, while anarcho capitalist community ends in massive scam and rug pull (AFAIK no one yet attempted to build anarcho capitalist paradise during some shithole country civil war).

I think the Frontier is at least a part of what's putting a thumb on your scale. Both the fact that it was there, and the fact that technologies of transportation and communication didn't allow for any meaningful control over it.

Anarcho-capitalism-lite looks way better when anyone who doesn't like your society can go five miles down the road or get on the railway and find a parcel of beautiful, fertile land upon which the sweat of a man's brow is enough to give him a decent life. It breaks down when it is no longer possible to Exit from a situation you find intolerable and therefore you have to Voice your complaints and coerce people to fix them, and live with the attempts of others to do likewise.

Ah, that is part of what makes it appealing, for sure. But communes have strong Exit rights too, so I don't think it's obviously biasing the comparison. Is the argument that Exit is more important for anarcho-capitalism-lite given reduced Voice? I'm not actually sure Voice is reduced in ancap societies -- you have all the tools of persuasion and politics to get your way and you can pay to get it too, whereas in ancom you only have the former.

This might seem superficially counterintuitive: Sure, in ancom you don't have money, but you also don't have to work for money. Doesn't it cancel out? But in fact theory predicts this result: You are rewarded for your service to the interests of others with influence over others' actions in turn. This has the natural effect of maximizing total utility, as each individual makes money doing what most efficiently enables them to help others and spends money on the help they most want. In other terms, trade is positive sum: both parties are better off for it, both get more value out than they put in. So forbidding (or failing to adequately facilitate) trade reduces total utility.

The communist ethos may be 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,' but getting one's needs (and wants) satisfied is the whole incentive for providing one's ability. If you remove that incentive, people just aren't going to try as hard. Auth-left can force them (which is just slavery, and is inefficient and destabilizing in the same ways, but isn't completely unworkable), but lib-left can't, really. So the only way it can ever really work is if people want it to.

More comments

Doesn’t anarchocapitalism have a tiny number of historical examples? Notably medieval Iceland.

If you want to call medieval Iceland (society rather unpleasant by modern standards, but so were all contemporary societies) an example of thriving anarcho-capitalism, then numerous egalitarian tribal societies where land was held in common are examples of successful anarcho-communism.

Anyway, none of these societies were viable when organized state showed up in the neighborhood. This is the hard problem of anarchy of all kinds, unsolved for 5000 years.

There are different kinds of not making a profit. If the expenses are reasonable, but the government wants to give it away at below expense, that's one kind. If the expenses are unreasonable, though, that's a "not making a profit" which should be unacceptable even for government services. Paying people to do nothing useful is in the latter category.

There are different kinds of not making a profit.

I wish my accountant would see it like this.

Why? I am not talking about a financial distinction, which your accountant would care about, but a policy distinction.

For a while over the past 5 - 10 years, WMATA stations were notorious for often catching on fire.

That link technically doesn't claim anything was on fire even once (although the headline says a smoke scare) and certainly not twice (it says that an earlier "possible fire" was reported but that no fire was actually found.

You can actually check https://ismetroburning.com/ to see if it's currently on fire. Looks like no fires today!

Comparing this to UBI seems weird to me. My understanding is the point of UBI is that it's approximately unconditional. You get the money whatever your income or whether you have a job. By contrast, according to your budget link, the WMATA provided something like 268 million trips for its budget. Maybe you think the $19 or so per trip that works out to is not a good use of money, but it seems pretty far from the "nothing" the government gets in return for UBI! Maybe a better comparison would be some kind of guaranteed job program? No idea what the economic efficiency of programs like that work out to.

The thing you have to understand is the WMATA jobs aren't real jobs. They are UBI. Nobody there actually works. There was a major accident maybe 10 years ago. When they went over the inspection logs, they discovered that the same log had been photocopied for decades. I don't think they even updated the dates on the forms. It was shameless, haphazard, and nobody caught it, nobody cared, even after there was an accident and people died, nothing changed. A few people immediately responsible got fired. But then, bafflingly, they sued and got their jobs back.

If The System Is What It Does, WMATA is UBI with a rotting piece of infrastructure from the 70's attached as a hostage.

Well, I suppose it also lets criminals from DC spread throughout the countryside and victimize more people.

I mean, some of them presumably do their jobs. If I go to a WMATA operated stop a bus or train will come. With an operator who is a WMATA employee.

Based on reading your two links I don't think this characterizes the situation accurately? According to the second link:

1. Not updating measurements when the new measurement was within 1/8 of an inch was standard practice going all the way back to the 1970's.

Yet the panel found Metro had never rooted out a practice begun as official policy when the system opened in the 1970s that had inspectors only update measurements on monthly switch inspection forms if the new measurements were at least 1/8 inch different. If not, the same numbers were simply carried over from month to month and year to year.

“It’s understood by everyone that that’s how we do things. Otherwise, we would have gotten accused of falsification prior to this,” Bell told the arbitration panel. “It was understood that each inspector’s eyes are different, and 1/8 of an inch is negligible.”

2. The issue that ultimately lead to the train derailment was flagged by inspectors and had been for years.

In Metro management’s initial response to the derailment, they noted 12-14 buttery ties that had allowed tracks to slip too far apart — right where the inspection reports had reported 15 defective ties month after month, year after year.

Bell’s termination letter acknowledged the problem had been reported over and over.

“The records reflect there was a recorded defect on the Defect Database that was at the ‘Point of Derailment’ and another entry that was allowed to remain on the database since 2012,” the letter said.

3. They did change their training and practices after the derailment to improve them.

After the summer 2016 derailment, Metro changed inspection procedures to no longer provide the previous measurements pre-typed in on switch inspection forms, and retrained track inspectors to record the actual measurements they took.

I applaud your deep reading of the article, because it shows how bureaucratic thinking can infiltrate any job.

Notice the language of Bell - "everyone did it this way", "I was just doing what I had been told" - It's the "I followed orders and The Process" defense. I'd be much happier if a technician or supervisory one at that actually had a technician's mindset and pride in his/her work that would lead them to think "You know, if these rails are always a little off, that's probably a bad thing, even if 1/8th of an inch isn't Big Bad on its own." No, instead, there's citing of reports and approvals and procedure.

This is your brain on PMC+Bureaucracy. This is how they want you to think because then capital-C Compliance is the way to a "respectable" job.

Even if that job is making sure everyone is in alphabetical order before going into the culling machine.

I am not an expert on railway safety but presumably there is some tolerance for these gaps, below which changes are not concerning. I am not sure 1/8 of an inch is the correct number but there is some correct number. It makes sense to me that the process for inspection incorporates these tolerances. In this specific context Bell is contesting his being fired. In which case whether he was doing the thing he was trained to do is relevant. "I was following the procedure my employer trained me to do" is, to my mind, a pretty good defense against "this employee acted negligently in their role." Or, at least, it shifts any negligence off the employee to the employer.

"You know, if these rails are always a little off, that's probably a bad thing, even if 1/8th of an inch isn't Big Bad on its own."

Is it a bad thing, though? How much are these gaps expected to change naturally? What is the inter-inspector accuracy? I do not have the domain knowledge to answer these questions but it seems plausible to me the mentioned 1/8 inch is a tolerance below which variation is not worth worrying about.

Relevantly, 1/8 inch is the threshold below which it becomes very difficult to measure without specialized equipment. If these guys are measuring stuff with tape measures ordinary human error would make a ridiculous number of changes to the logs.

I am not an expert on railway safety but presumably there is some tolerance for these gaps, below which changes are not concerning.

Changes are essentially summed vectors. 1/8" or less of a change from month to month is almost never going to be a problem. 10 of those negligible movements in a row, in the same direction, is a massive problem! But if you didn't update the documented measurement, because each time you checked, it had changed 1/8" or less, you would never even know that your position had drifted by an entire inch from your documentation. The only non-negligent way I can think of to track the sum of many small vectors is to record the actual measurement every time.

But ten of those movements would be noted, because they weren't updating the logs when it moved 1/16 inch.

I am making some assumptions about the procedure I suppose. I'm imagining they measure a gap of some size, 1" say, and that's what they record. Then, on subsequent inspections, if the gap measures less than 1-1/8" they just leave the measurement at 1". So not updating the measurement over months and years implies a net change less than 1/8". If they reset the baseline they are measuring the gap against on subsequent measurements then I agree that is a huge problem.

If the measurement is supposed to be 56 1/2", and you measure it and it turns out to be 56 17/32", and then the next time you measure it it's 56 19/32", and then 56 21/32", then you'll now note that 56 21/32" is more than 1/8" from the nominal 56 1/2", and you'll record that. It's only if

  1. You DO record the measurement each time and

  2. You compare against the previous measurement, not the nominal correct value

that creep will get you.

True - I was assuming for some reason they were only recording deltas but it's hard to imagine there wouldn't be some measurement against a baseline. ETA: I guess if that's the case, then I don't understand how it would be possible to disregard measurements under the "less than 1/8 inch" policy and have them end up moving to the point of failure, unless through complete dereliction.

What makes you think the procedure was bad?

(And no, "obviously the technicians should care about 1/8 inch" is not enough to show that the procedure is bad. Especially since the problem had in fact been repeatedly reported! That's a management problem; the technicians were just being used as patsies for the management problem.)

had a technician's mindset and pride in his/her work that would lead them to think "You know, if these rails are always a little off, that's probably a bad thing, even if 1/8th of an inch isn't Big Bad on its own."

Technicians are all about tolerances and making things work. That’s bureaucrats demanding measurements.

Better phrasing than mine, for sure.

Maybe it's more the tyranny of metrics as product. If the point of measurements, and tolerances is to "make things work" that's fine. It seems to me that, in this case, the point of measurements was to point at the measurements.

The measurements were almost certainly intended to make sure that technicians caught stuff proactively rather than reactively; that technicians just photocopied it for decades because eh good enough is what the bureaucrats were trying to prevent.

This seems more a human factors problem than a technical one: "within tolerance from install time" is probably fine from an engineering perspective: many complex systems manage by just painting alignment marks on bolts to spot movement. That lazy technicians might just photocopy it is a QA issue: even if they had to write it, they could just rewrite the values without actually taking measurements.

Setting up systems like this is its own art. There are plenty of watch clock systems to make sure your security guards actually patrol your facility and don't just nap at the desk and sign the forms. Otherwise "establish a high trust culture" doesn't seem scalable, but maybe works in a few life-critical industries (airplane mechanics). There are probably some modern computer-driven solutions (see electronic charts in medicine?), but even then those are pretty modern takes on a process they've been doing for decades.

But then, bafflingly, they sued and got their jobs back.

If you read your link it explains that measurements did not have to be updated if they were within 1/8 inch, so copying the old measurements is permissible.

That's their side of it.

What actually happened was a railroad tie was ignored until it was completely rotted out, and then a train derailed and people died.

"Within 1/8 inch" my ass. Just because that's the preposterous excuse they offer doesn't mean you have to believe it. Too much charity.

UBI is definitionally giving income to people without conditions. Requiring them to work an (even fake) job is a very different thing, proponents of which (a "Job Guarantee") have a long history of feuding with UBI advocates. You might as well say any form of redistribution is a UBI.

You might as well say any form of redistribution is a UBI.

I explicitly said that in my original post.

I think a fake job that you never work and are entitled to no matter what and UBI are the same thing. What possible difference can you point to? They are both entitled to your money, do no work, and the right can seemingly never be revoked. The only difference is that one is a fiction to trick you into it, and the other is just straight forward. But since nobody can agree to UBI, the liars version gets rolled out instead.

A couple of major socially relevant features of a UBI are that it gives people time to pursue their own ends (for good or ill) and lets them decide where to live independently of work opportunities.

A fake job doesn't allow for these unless it's so fake that you can never show up, move halfway across the country, and keep getting your checks. My guess is these WMATA jobs aren't quite that fake; they're more like 'sit in an office slowly plodding through useless paperwork' or 'stand around on a job site with your six buddies watching the one new guy work.'

That sound more like a standard Communist job than a UBI

"We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us".

The "U" in "UBI" is Universal. Not everyone can become a no-show WMATA employee.

Then there can never be a test or a pilot for an UBI, because it was only tested in this small city or during this timeframe so no true UBI. This is just nitpicking. The OP is right, the situation he describes is at least on par with pilot version of UBI when it comes to actual results.

Yes. The "U" part of UBI is load-bearing. It is at the least extremely difficult to test it validly. Fake WMATA jobs, however, do not even come close.

Then there can never be a true UBI. In the end it will always be subject to political whim and so it can be cancelled overnight. UBI is not a natural law, so it can never truly be universal. Right?

You're right. WMATA jobs are actually reparations for the permanent underclass of Washington DC.

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