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Even five dollars a ride would be twice the price. It's just not comparable.
How many tax dollars go into subsidizing a public transit ride? Varies from place to place but it's not insignificant.
https://trimet.org/budget/pdf/2026-adopted-budget.pdf

Tax revenue was $555mm

https://trimet.org/about/pdf/trimetridership.pdf

~122,300,000 rides (originating + boarding)

So about $4.53 per ride.

The Portland metro is ~2.5mm people, so about $222/resident/yr.

Portland metro area residents pay on average about sixty cents per day to subsidize TriMet.

Roughly 1/43rd the average cost of ownership for a new car in Oregon.

https://info.oregon.aaa.com/how-much-does-it-really-cost-to-...

Assuming an average fare of 2.47$ per to make the math even, that's 6.00$/ride total cost.

When a company / government gets the cost per mile to run a fleet of autonomous EV's down to ~60cents/mile or so, which is a plausible enough number, then a lot of those transit rides are going to look real silly from a cost effectiveness POV.

Yes. If the government were able to provide transit more cheaply in the future by using new vehicles then the transit that the government provides would be cheaper than it is today.
And the meaning of the truism you so adoitly picked up on is that at reasonable projections trimet and similar public transit will be uncompetitive in price (and service) relative to self driving EVs. Ergo it is correct to deprioritize their funding.

This of course is in refutation to the various points made up the thread that self driving EVs are not cost competitive and glorified taxis -- not viable public transit for the masses.

To put your point another way, “If you make transit unusable or get rid of it entirely, then the robot cars could get better than the system you eliminated or intentionally broke”

Like you admit that Waymo can’t compete with transit unless you hobble transit.

Waymo raised $16 billon in February. If they really need $500mm to build a transit competitor in Portland, the only reason why they would reach into the taxpayer’s pocket instead of their own would be to undermine a genuinely more useful and capable system that they don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of competing with.

how many tax dollars go to roads and bridges just for cars?
Too many, but at least some are directly on vehicles. Transit (in the USA, on the West coast) is funded >90% by taxes on income, property, vehicle registration, fuel, etc not by the people using it.
I cannot speak for every state ever, but I remember that roads in WA were mostly funded by gas/diesel taxes + vehicle registration fees.

Which is also why WA state has been charging an additional significant car registration fee on EVs (on top of the usual annual registration costs), since EVs don't contribute to this normally through gas/diesel taxes.

Varies from place to place but it's not insignificant
Everyone uses the roads. You have to reach for very obscure examples to find commerce that doesn't utilize roads. Every bit of concrete and steel to build transit was at some point transported over roads.
Or rail and ships.