> charge fares, subsidize low-income riders, and fund the basic system with taxes.

Car traffic is also expensive. Highways, parking, and maintenance are massively subsidized through taxes, and they consume far more space per traveler making cities more congested and polluted.

Cities with good public transport also tend to be more walkable, which has health benefits and could provide significant impact to healthcare costs.

According to this article, every $1 invested in public transit generates about $5 in economic returns:

https://govfacts.org/housing-infrastructure/transportation/p...

I think you’re viewing the issue from an office worker’s perspective. For us, downtime might just mean heading to the coffee machine and taking a break.

But if a restaurant loses access to its POS system (which has happened), or you’re unable to purchase a train ticket, the consequences are very real. Outages like these have tangible impacts on everyday life. That’s why there’s definitely room for competitors who can offer reliable backup strategies to keep services running.

Those are examples where they shouldn't be using public cloud in the first place. Should build those services to be local-first.

Using a different, smaller cloud provider doesn't improve reliability (likely makes it worse) if the architecture itself wrong.

It makes credit card transactions risky (offline)

Talking more about some unrelated function taking down the whole system, not advocating for "offline" credit card transactions (is this even a thing these days?). Ex: If the transaction needs to be logged somewhere, it can be built to sync whenever possible rather than blocking all transactions if the central service is down.

Payment processor being down is payment processor being down.

Cash exists, physical tickets exists.

those things shouldn't be fully tied to the internet/intranet anyways.