This argument has to face up to the fact that all of the best systems have high farebox recovery and all the American systems have low recovery except for NY (which is still lower than the good ones). Essentially, if it’s so great to have low farebox recovery why does the Tube, HK MTR, and Taipei MRT have high farebox recovery?
Theorycrafting is all well and good but if you claim that some metric X (farebox recovery) is negatively correlated with some outcome Y (frequent good transit) then you do have to explain why all the good outcome Ys actually have high X. Reality has to meet the theory.
Theorycrafting is all well and good but if you claim that some metric X (farebox recovery) is negatively correlated with some outcome Y (frequent good transit) then you do have to explain why all the good outcome Ys actually have high X. Reality has to meet the theory.