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Notes -
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?)
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