Note that generally public transportation funding is already <25% covered by fares and so to the extent that you think "paid for by taxpayers" is positive or negative, this doesn't actually have that much impact on that aspect.
I think it’s great! I’m happy for my tax dollars to go to transit! The net positive of keeping drunk drivers off the road, increased access to work for people and increased access to workers for businesses is great!
Not a big fan of fares though, as somebody that’s dropped my wallet in the dark in the middle of the night in a sketchy part of town.
I feel like your comment is rather disingenuous, given that almost everything there that covers the U.S. is actually well below my generous "25%" and (even beyond the sort of U.S. being the default for HN discussions the topic we are discussing is specifically a U.S. case). The biggest case from your link above that threshold would generally not even be considered "public transportation" (Amtrak, that is). Given how overwhelmingly your source supports my position for the topic at hand, it's hard to assume good intent.
Amtrak also includes State subsidies as 'revenue'. They also don't count depreciation. They then want 45Bn or some such enormous figure for maintenance from the Feds.
I would absolutely take Caltrain more often than ~never if it were cost competitive with driving. But it isn't, so I actually take it low single digit times per year under special circumstances.
Caltrain is definitely cheaper than driving for one person. As an example, Palo Alto to San Francisco caltrain is $7.70 for a 32 mile ride. That's 24 cents per mile. The IRS mileage rate is 62 cents per mile. Even if you add $5.50 for parking at the station, it's 41 cents per mile.
I drive a cheap EV which I charge for free. A marginal mile costs me about 18 cents. On top of that I'm usually traveling to SF to visit friends with my wife. Hard to justify taking the train.
I don't know of any tolls that would be relevant in the provided SF <-> Palo Alto example, and car insurance is static. Tickets are also easy enough to avoid. Wear and tear is really the main concern.
How do you figure 18 cents? a $30k EV amortized across 200k miles is 15 cents alone. Add any maintenance on top of that and you're easily over 18 cents of marginal cost per mile before electricity or any other amortizable costs (risk of accident, tolls, parking, etc).
Don't buy new (and best do it during the early pandemic crash) and don't pay for electricity. Running costs are primarily insurance, registration, and tires. Have a long commute so you strongly amortize those first two.
> people who didn't take the buss before are not going to now all of a sudden.
I suspect a lot would. Some public transit systems are shockingly expensive. And even price-insensitive people would benefit from increased ridership of price-sensitive people if it also led to improved service.
> There are pros and cons to this of course but overall: people who didn't take the buss before are not going to now all of a sudden.
I'm sure there are people who would benefit from this, like those carpooling and relying on rides from friends and family, to those who wouldn't be able to afford to work in places that would otherwise require a car to commute to that they don't have, etc.
Making transit free really misses the point. The money is much better spent on actually improving the transit options, such as buying more buses to improve frequency, building new tram or rail lines, or general maintenance (cleaning) that make using the transit more appealing for all but the most desperate. Look at all the cities in Asia and Europe where normal people use transit. Very few of them are free, though they may be cheaper than in North America. The key is making it convenient and comfortable when compared against other options, especially driving.
DC area has spent bazonga-bucks OMG amounts of money to keep doing these kinds of expansion projects.
The silver line snakes way out through Virginia, for a pretty (very) small fraction of riders every day & a handful of people going to IAD (Dulles) airport. The Purple Line has started snaking around the beltway, at least for the northern MD parts that were still willing to fund & try, but has dragged on, slated originally to open last year & still at least 4 years out & crazy over cost. It seems unlikely to make a sea change difference, but perhaps!! We want to believe, maybe after a lot of time. DC started building a new streetcar network, and seemingly gave up after realizing fixed infrastructure like this was insanely expensive and prone to constant blockage.
Most American cities highly subsidize transit. Going to fully subsidized is not really a major hurt. It's a kind of easy action we can just do, for little real pain. Much less pain than many of the expansive would be micro-mega-projects, that probably in most cases will be massive budget items with decades of debt, with only very very very long term development benefits. In DC, few of our transit systems have capacity problems. Our citywide network is quite good, very well connnected whatever direction you want in most places.
The proposal that we add more busses, that we build new lines: it feels wildly out of touch, like it's prescribing someone elses solution, that doesn't make sense here. This is a good sensible next step for DC, to make what we have work much better for many, especially those who can most benefit.
There seems to be a lot more crazy and mentally ill people in major US cities than major Asian cities. It was extremely rare for me to encounter them in Asia but I encountered so many in the US that I just started driving. It kept my sanity.
Free transit is stupid. When surveyed, the huge majority (98%) of weekday transit riders say they want increased service over decreased prices. Everyone wants 10 minute or less headways. People will pay 3 dollars for a bus ride if the line has 10 minute headways or less and signal priority, but they won't take the bus if its stuck in traffic and has 30 minute headways. The reality is that transit funding for free transit is zero sum, and the riders of the system would prefer if the money was spent on improved service instead of free fares.
What percentage wanted increased service and decreased price? Was the question phrased “Pick one (1) of the following two things”? I would love to see the data on “What would improve your experience using public transit?”
At some point, means testing for a $1.50 bus ride is going to cost more than it saves and can become a barrier to the ridership that it's intended to encourage.
Your issue seems to be with funding. Fares are usually quite a small component of transit system’s budgets. We don’t require users of city streets to pay fares to use that transportation infrastructure, with exception of the occasional toll-funded highway/bridge/tunnel, and we spend many many billions of tax dollars more on those than we do on public transit. If free transit is a bad idea so are free city streets.
The current fuel tax (in the USA) not enough. Federal fuel taxes have not been raised in 30 years and not adjusted for inflation/cost of living. I’m sure it would be a political death wish to try to raise it again.
Fuel tax is complicated by the fact that poorer families tend to live further away from work and thus drive more, both because housing is cheaper the further away from a city you get, but also because non-skilled labor doesn't aggregate along transit corridors the same way it does for office workers. So a low fuel tax is in effect a subsidy to the poor, notwithstanding that it also benefits corporations which maintain the infrastructure. You can see this in every part of the world--cheap fuel is the easiest way to placate the working class.
Public transit can be a remedy, but outside Manhattan I don't think any locale in the U.S. has remotely the density to make it truly viable at scale for the poor and working classes. Obviously public transit is critical for some poorer subgroups, but those groups tend to be the ones trapped in ghettos. To truly bridge the gap so public transit is a substitute for fuel subsidies would require an order of magnitude increase in the size and reach of our public transit networks, plus a dramatic shift in zoning to reduce the costs of housing in urbanized areas, plus a dramatic shift in geographical demographics. Note that poor and working classes will hold onto the white picket fence ideal for much longer than the middle classes. So you're dealing with very strong counter-veiling pressures when it comes to the groups you're attempting to help the most.
> Public transit can be a remedy, but outside Manhattan I don't think any locale in the U.S. has remotely the density to make it truly viable at scale for the poor and working classes.
Chicken and egg. Density is built along transit because transit supports dense houses. Build transit, get density. Fail to build transit, get sprawl.
Building transit does not guarantee you get density. There are regulatory hurdles at play. In California, for example, cities will often be forced to up-zone the immediate couple of blocks around a station, but then everything else beyond that remains zoned for single-family housing, or at least zoned for far less density than the market could support.
Moreover, there's a time gap between when housing is built and when it becomes economically accessible lower down the income ladder. New housing is expensive, even absent regulatory hurdles, and affordability mandates can't magically change financial viability. New housing can have immediate effects on housing costs, but indirectly on the costs of older housing; and on a regional scale it takes awhile to incentivize people at the periphery to move inward.
Long-story short, to get from the current equilibrium to a more optimal equilibrium requires careful, coordinated policy management across decades. We could and should start, but we live in an age where if people don't see results in 6 weeks, they complain; and even when there are results, they still complain. They complain, vote people out, and vote in new people that promise more immediate results, but invariably can't deliver meaningful results.[1] I mean, this is how democracy has always worked, but the public reactions are far more compressed, while the necessary time spans for effective change are no shorter than they were before.
[1] Case in point: rather than improving public transit, the popular panacea du jure is free fares. Free fares will not improve public transit in any way shape or form; if anything, they'll hasten its degradation. They'll make it cheaper for some, but for the most part not those at the bottom of the ladder, who already enjoy free transit. These gimmicks are popular because they're immediate.
Thanks! I’ll note that that’s still a far cry from half, but it’s certainly more favorable than 24%.
(NY’s 54% number is probably because of mixing of different fareboxes: recovery is much higher on the LIRR and MNRR than it is on the city buses and subways.)
That 39% is for all transit Bus is 19.7% Nationally and 13.6% for WMATA.
Nationally in millions, Bus: (Fare Revenues 3,778) / (Operating expenses 16,110.4 + Use of capital funds 3,0444.7) = 19.7%. They also break out Bus Rapid Transit which is much worse 16.1 / (166.1 + 51.7) = 7.4% as is Commuter Bus 57.9 / (597.7 + 170.7) = 7.5%
Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, Bus: $124,011,141 / ( $731,946,008 + $182,850,687 ) = 13.6%
So for WMATA forgoing Bus revenue wouldn’t move the needle very much.
PS: And that’s ignoring the overhead of collecting fairs. Not only are some operating expenses devoted to collecting fairs, busses can move faster if people aren’t stopping and fiddling with payment.
The driver or buss still needs to verify your ticket.
Compare a line of 20 people all try to get on and swipe a metro card vs a line of 20 people all trying to get on. Even collage busses where all people need to do is show school ID you still get people in line who suddenly can’t find their ID.
A public transport bus usually has several entrances, you can have a machine inside the bus at each entrance. Not everyone will play nice and pay if the bus driver doesn't check the ticket, but you could have random controls on the bus from time to time. In practice you of course have to weigh the costs of these different approaches.
fwiw, Caltrain's farebox recovery rate going into COVID was among the highest in the US at around 73%. Bart around 72%. WMATA was about 33%. Muni is among the lowest at 23%. [1]
I agree farebox recovery rate is not something to optimize for. Public services don't lose money, they cost money. Nobody talks about how much the army loses.
However. The choice was between (a) eliminating the $666M farebox recovery and taking it out of the municipal budget vs. adding $666M more funding without eliminating the farebox take. I strongly suspect the municipality would be far better served by the latter.
The former plan doesn't address what people actually want. They want shorter headways. Instead they got the same headways, but cheaper.
People aren't avoiding transit because it's too expensive. They're avoiding transit because it doesn't come often enough, it doesn't go where they need and stops running too early. It doesn't meet their needs. The average American spends $11,000 on a new car per year [2], or almost a half million dollars lifetime. If service was better, they wouldn't have to. This plan doesn't make service better. So, they still need their real cost center: their car.
The average spend on a new car per year is not the same thing as what the 'average American' actually buys. Lots of people keep the same car for many years, or buy used, or even don't have a car.
Used cars cost roughly what new cars cost still, interest rates are higher than ever - insurance, gas, maintenance, car payments, parking, tickets, tolls, registration, license, etc, etc, it adds up really fast. Since it's so diffuse people aren't as sensitive. Not to mention with a used car w/o warranty you're on the hook for the whole cost if something goes wrong.
Of course there will be outliers, but owning a car is a massive money sinkhole and a disproportionate burden on the poor.
The average car insurance payment alone is $136 (and significantly more for those with 'bad credit' - i.e. the poor). Gas is another $150-200 per month. That's almost $4000 per year right there.
The average monthly transit pass in the US is $83. [1, 2]
And yet people happily use it, even in parts of London where it's feasible to go by car. One of the biggest reasons is probably that the tube has high frequency on all lines, much higher than most other cities.
Not quite true… A few years ago, the district of Columbia decriminalized fare evasion. So many people stopped paying the subway fare that the gap in the budget became very significant on the order of millions of dollars.
What you see as a small component of transit systems budgets, they seem to see as a quite significant part of their budget.
I think this is going to lead to worst outcomes, and a worse funded system.
"Metro estimates it lost $40 million due to fair evasion in the 2022 fiscal year."
I don’t trust those “lost revenue” figures. What are they based on? My city used to not have fare gates. They made up insane estimates for how much adding fare gates would increase revenue - when the gates went in it ended up costing far more per year than it earned in increased revenue.
And 40 million is not a small number for a person, but for a city with a budget of about 20 billion it’s not a very large number at all - especially when viewed in comparison with spending on roads and bridges. You don’t have to spend billions on another road bridge if everyone is taking the train
I can't really do your research for you, but I guess if you looked at the budgets which are publicly available for the Washington metro area, transportation authority, you might find out.
I'm not sure that it's just funding. Collecting fares also creates capitalist incentives which is ultimately good for an end user, since the transit system is incentivized to do things (increase frequencies during rush hour, create more reliable systems) in order to collect additional fare revenue.
You could argue that it's all "just funding," but fares can help to prioritize work which will help collect the most future fares, creating the largest positive impact for end users.
Isn't public transportation already heavily subsidized? Surveyed people might not understand that to increase spending 2x without any increase in subsidies, fares might need to 5x or 10x.
It is, and at least the cases I'm familiar with, fares are sometimes nominal fees. Commuters wouldn't be able to afford the real cost of public transportation if it needed to be solvent and funded by fares alone.
I went to umass amherst which had a free bus system which I used regularly. It was pretty great, you didn’t have to think about it. Also without having to make sure fairs paid up people could get on from the middle of the bus instead of just the front door which seemed to speed the boarding process.
I work in the longwood area of Boston. There are private bus routes that make up for the lack of good public transit for the area. It’s also free with Id.
Worth noting that university transit systems are very much not free. The fees are just included in your tuition. For Amherst specifically, this is covered by undergrad students' tuition and graduate students' service fees.
For context the grad student service fee is around 300-700USD per semester depending on how many credits you take.
So by no means is it free. I do agree with you though that universal access to transit makes it a lot more pleasant and speeds up boarding quite substantially.
Umass was interesting. The fees were how they kept money at the school as tuition went to the states general fund. Sports were always covered by those fees which was free basketball tickets (though it was a lottery when I left, but I worked at the paper and would take pictues..)
It was a while ago that I was there (last century..)
Also without having to make sure fairs paid up people could get on from the middle of the bus instead of just the front door which seemed to speed the boarding process
This is just a rule they've made: You can have both fares and boarding at any door in the bus. I know this because this is how the busses in Trondheim, Norway are. You can't always pay on the bus, so everyone has their ticket before they get on. They have spot checks by folks that aren't bus drivers. Does it cause some folks to risk not buying a ticket? Yes, but it is obviously not worth doing more checks.
> The reality is that transit funding for free transit is zero sum
Except it doesn't have to be zero-sum. A government can simply decide it wants to prioritize public transportation. The funding isn't inherently zero-sum.
the reason to do free buses is that making people pay slows the bus down. it's not a major slowdown, but 1s per rider adds up. Also decreasing price does increase demand which helps justify increased service.
Are the fees there to actually provide a meaningful portion of the funding, or just to make rich people who don’t use public transit feel like it’s more fair because the poor people don’t get to ride for free? I’d be surprised if the fees are meaningful on many transit systems, especially if you also throw out the costs of selling the tickets and enforcement.
>”Are the fees there to actually provide a meaningful portion of the funding, or just to make rich people who don’t use public transit feel like it’s more fair because the poor people don’t get to ride for free?”
It is entirely the first reason - mass transit is not cheap and fares help alleviate the burden of the subsidy.
Recovery rates are almost all under 20% in the US, and these numbers don’t even incorporate the cost of selling tickets and ticket enforcement or the costs of the initial builds and expansions (which are almost entirely paid for by the taxpayer).
That’s still a significant amount of money, even though it’s under 20% of the total operating cost. For most of the entries in that article it covers tens of millions of dollars.
I don’t think the cost of issuing tickets and enforcement is that significant compared to how much money collecting fares brings in. It certainly doesn’t seem like something that is done at a loss or something that barely breaks even.
It's not nothing, but if the goal is to turn a profit it's nowhere close. On the other hand, if the goal is to get more people riding public transit, I'd want to look into how removing fees might help that goal.
> I’d be surprised if the fees are meaningful on many transit systems, especially if you also throw out the costs of selling the tickets and enforcement.
Almost no public transit system has a farebox recovery rate even close to 100%. For municipal service (ie, excluding specialty transit), even 50% is almost unheard-of in the US, and only a few systems in Europe exceed 50% as well. In the US, the better transit systems have a farebox recovery ratio of 25% or less. In other words, over 75% is already funded by taxes, not by point-of-service.
Enforcement is a huge cost. In fact, in NY, the government has decided to spend increasing amounts of money over the last five years on police presence to combat "fare evasion", even though their own numbers show that the amount of money they are "losing" to fare evasion is less than the amount they have decided to spend on the additional police dedicated specifically to fare evasion.
So yes, it's a political, choice, not a fiscally rational one.
> Almost no _Western_ public transit system, that is. High farebox recovery rates (>100%) aren't all that uncommon in Asia.
Sort of, not exactly. Asian countries typically report their metrics differently, so they look much higher, but it's because they have non-fare sources of revenue that provide a massive source of income which they combine with their fare revenue for reporting purposes. So it's not an apples to apples comparison.
This is in conflict with public transit in many European cities, which is (1) free or nominally priced, (2) has favorable headways compared to nearly every US city, and (3) is more sustainably funded than public transit in the US.
I frankly wouldn’t mind paying more for public transit, but making it the crux feels roughly analogous to corporate ”greenwashing”: push the responsibility onto individuals and we can conveniently ignore the structural changes needed to make public transit systems grow and thrive.
There’s no intrinsic ordering here: making a public transit system better requires justification through ridership numbers, and making your system free is a fantastic way to improve those numbers.
Why do you believe that? American transit experts are saying things like, “I’ve heard people describe the free fare movement as being a movement for free, terrible service, and that’s how the trade-off ends up working if you expect this to happen inside the budget of an impoverished American transit agency" and "if a transit agency had to choose between devoting funds to reducing fares or to maintaining or improving service, most riders would prefer the latter. It also suggests that the notion of making transit “free”—though politically appealing —would provide less utility to the public than if the equivalence in foregone revenue were spent improving service and continuing to charge a fare."
The Paris metro is €1.90 (from a quick online search), which I’d argue is pretty close to nominal: it’s substantially below even the cheap public transit systems in the US like the NYC subway.
Single fares in Switzerland are indeed extortionate, but there are a wide variety of passes that cut costs considerably, including one that gives you free travel throughout the entire country.
Tallinn is the most famous free one, I think. In terms of nominal pricing, I was thinking of Grenoble, where it was around $2 USD equivalent when I was there there.
Edit: Another example is Prague, which is around $1.
Okay, but do an in-kind comparison: can I take a public tram for ~$2 in similarly sized US cities?
I can’t think of many; the first that comes to mind is Portland’s MAX, which is $2.50, has a smaller network with longer headways, and services a much larger metropolitan area as justification for its existence.
Not sure how the headway and network size compare, but Los Angeles light rail is $1.75. Good deal when you compare the cost of living to most of Europe!
> This is in conflict with public transit in many European cities, which is (1) free or nominally priced, (2) has favorable headways compared to nearly every US city, and (3) is more sustainably funded than public transit in the US.
In which European capital cities bus fairs are free?
That's usually the political calculation for free fares (aside from the virtue signaling aspect) - free fares = more riders = more political support for increased public funding.
The potential peril is that compared to the counterfactual of spending this money on improved service, free fares may attract few new riders or fail to generate additional political capital, or even lead to reduced funding if transit starts to be seen as a welfare expenditure rather than a system for everyone that pays for itself to some degree.
It's been free in my city since 2011 and it's great from this smaller town's perspective. Perhaps "stupid" applies to big cities or certain demographics, but to smaller towns and low income people it's a proverbial godsend for transportation to work, school, etc.
To you all complaining about free transit, I invite you to actually look the next time you take the bus or metro at the amount of infrastructure dedicated to ticketing, validation and enforcement. I invite you to think about the amount of money spent on it.
I invite you to think about the amount of time wasted by people on ticketing. The queues at ticket booths, people spending time researching what pass they want. Seniors spending time asking for their special card so they can get it cheaper or for free.
The amounts spent on advertising to reduce gate jumpers, or to tell people about the latest formula or whatever.
The massive amounts spent on RND of new techniques to make going through the gates quicker because it’s an annoying experience. The bad deals made with payments companies to be able to take card payments directly at the gate.
Really it’s insane. When you start believing that public transit should be free because it’s infrastructure (there’s a lot of reasons why it should be free), you start actually seeing just how much money and time would be saved. Then it clicks.
SFMTA's fare box recovery ratio is 17%. Were for driving it's 50% but the sums are vastly higher. While back read a fair argument that when you consider the alternative is a person driving the the proper fare price for mass transit is negative.
As you can see, subsidies represent 54 percent of the STIB's revenue: Subsidies of almost 400M EUR. The figure you want is "traffic revenue": 225M EUR.
So now, the calculation is: Is ticketing and enforcement worth 225M EUR / year in Brussels? The answer on paper is yes, because we're not taking into account the costs I outlined above. Breaking them down by line item is impossible because the figures are not public, but going by related figures, it's not looking good for proponents of ticketing.
Let's just go with sibling comment's ticket gate price: 250MM EUR. They are replaced every 8 years roughly. So, 31MM / year. Now down to under half of the subsidies.
Externalities: Ticket littering + cleanup costs, inefficient purchases by customers (bought the wrong tickets/too many)
Time costs: Validation time, gate bottlenecking (especially at peak time), reduced opportunities for those who can't afford tickets...
----
Okay, so let's say you do all those calculations, and you end up finding out they're all zero (they won't be, but w/e), and actually you're still making decent tax revenue from public transit (0.2bn eur). What is the lesson here?
The lesson, is that all these are insignificant compared to the investment that same city wants to make into public transport: 5.2 bn EUR. (ref. https://www.stib-mivb.be/article.html?l=en&_guid=0035aa30-f3...). Or compared to the costs of road maintenance (50-100bn EUR / year in BE). Or, or ...
Make no mistake, removing costs would increase ridership which would increase costs. But it would also increase national productivity output which increases tax revenue. This is not a simple calculation to run, and my girlfriend is using my parallel universe simulator right now so I can't check. Public transit should be free (AS IN PAID BY TAXES), because it's the right thing to do, when the roads are financed the same way.
Recently a train opened up that connects downtown to where I live, not free, but ticketing isn't really enforced. There had previously been bus service, and of course, roads. Now the place is populated with bums, the nearby Starbucks removed indoor seating, the supermarket, once open 24 hours and a place for van-dwelling homeless to use computers, now has gates up to inhibit shoplifting, and what was once a safe area at night, with some safe homeless people, now has crazy lunatics walking around.
Could be correlation not causation without knowing more about the time period and geographic area you’re discussing. Homeless rates have been skyrocketing everywhere.
It happened basically as a phase change over the first month it was open. Far beyond the previous rise in local homelessness, which had happened a bit here and there, but you were never stepping over people.
Oh stop. No, this isn't the "cost of free public transit" - first of all, it's not even "free public transit". It's the cost of your local administration not dealing with the homeless population correctly. It's the cost of a terrible social net.
Over here in Japan, the transit systems are profitable, and there's no trouble with fare collection despite having more ridership than anywhere on the planet thanks to the IC cards normally used for storing money. It doesn't take any time at all to go through the gates with these; even during rush-hour they're not a problem, and it's been this way for many years now.
Complaints like yours ring hollow when solutions have already been devised and in use for a long time. If other places don't use these solutions because of NIH or whatever, that doesn't mean these complaints are valid.
Things working / not working in one outlier city is not grounds for "complaints like yours ring hollow".
You know Tokyo is the most populated city in the world, right. The solutions in place there will HAVE to be different to anywhere else on the planet.
It's like a Google engineer talking about how some random SaaS's complaints about Heroku or whatever are "hollow, because here at Google we use solution X and it works fine and we have more traffic than anywhere on the planet so obviously solution X is best".
Not saying whatever solution it is you're using isn't good, or couldn't fit in another city. But Japanese customs, payment systems, administrations, densities, and incomes are vastly different to the rest of the world's. The numbers to justify free transit will be very different for you.
>You know Tokyo is the most populated city in the world, right. The solutions in place there will HAVE to be different to anywhere else on the planet.
Wrong. The laws of physics are not different in other places. The complaint was that it takes too long to collect fares. This is factually untrue, and Japan's system (it uses the same system nationwide) proves this. It's a solved problem. In other places, it can be even better because it's less populated (crowded) than here.
>It's like a Google engineer talking about how some random SaaS's complaints
No, it's really not. It's like someone complaining that encoding WAVs into Oggs is too big a problem, and someone else saying, "no, all you have to do is download libogg and libvorbis and oggtools and use it." The solution is right there, you just need to use it.
>But Japanese customs, payment systems,
The custom of swiping a card to go through a turnstile is too foreign to you?
The card is a stored-value card. You put money on the card, and spend it as you go through the turnstiles. You don't even need a payment system: I charge mine with cash.
Edit: just to add to this, there are other transit systems that use this same technology, such as in China.
You missed the point by far enough that it’s not even worth arguing with you. Believe whatever you want, it’s not you I need to convince in order to get more free public transit in the world anyway…
The farebox recovery ratio in many western nations are not enough to ever fully fund public transport. In many cases, the systems to collect fares end up costing hundreds of millions of dollars. These costs are never made back. It makes sense to make it free.
> The farebox recovery ratio in many western nations are not enough to ever fully fund public transport.
True, with emphasis on fully.
> In many cases, the systems to collect fares end up costing hundreds of millions of dollars.
That figure seems extremely high for "many cases," but the exact figure isn't really material.
> These costs are never made back. It makes sense to make it free.
No, that's just not true.
My local metro spent $17 million on fare collection to net $167 million in revenue (2019). It would have to cut $150 million in other service to go to free fares.
The calculation is not that simple, though. One expected effect is less car rides, which would require less car infrastructure and maintenance. That would also result in significant savings, car infrastructure is expensive.
Maybe in some holistic view of spending, but that isn't the reality of transit agency budgets. If transit saves DOT $50M, it doesn't go into transit's budget.
As a DC local, this essentially just formalises what has become the status quo.
Fair evasion is rampant here, both on the metro and buses. At least people won't have to bother with even the theatre of pretending to care about it on the buses now.
I knew a woman in DC who was late for work because a guy tried to get on the bus, was denied entry because he couldnt/wouldn't pay, and so he pulled out a gun and shot the bus driver dead. She wasn't even phased. This was about 15 years ago.
Proof of fare is better than having transit employees be the enforcers. Free is even better, theoretically.
But be wary, transit in DC may turn into moving homeless encampment as there is no real way to tell someone they can't stay on the bus all day
They tried that in places like New York, and it hasn't worked out well. The problems are much deeper than people just not having a place to live, for many of them.
Then perhaps they need a house and a job, and mental and physical healthcare. And perhaps that needs to be provided for a few decades to reverse the generational trauma caused by involuntary unemployment and poverty.
The people causing the problems people complain about can't hold down a job, and will trash any house they're given. What they need is to be put in a mental institution, but that became unfashionable during the 80s for some reason. With proper help, some of them probably could be returned to society. And of course there are many who are just victims of circumstance; those really should be helped with housing and jobs, though it's arguable that being homeless for too long has caused some of these people to turn into those needing acute mental care, so there is that.
Sure thing. My brother needed to go to a psychiatric hospital, and of course it's very difficult to be involuntarily committed.
We got him there in the end, mostly due to the enduring support of his partner.
My lesson from that was that, with the right support, and a bit of patience, people can get the help they need.
Takes a bit of time though. I think in the vast majority of cases if we offer a job to anyone who wants one at a socially inclusive minimum wage doing work in their community, in addition to stable housing, within a few years they'll be doing better, and within a generation the negative impacts of involuntary unemployment and homelessness will be a relic of the past.
There are very very few incidents of bus drivers dying in DC. I would highly recommend not taking this fear-instilling anecdote as a real sign of what is.
I'm not saying to disregard this account, give it the benefit of a doubt, but it also is very new, and has had a pretty contentious first steps. I too am pretty contentious here & there my years, and I'm not at all saying to disregard one another. But this kind of high-brand FUD rather frustates me, & I feel like should set us on guard: it goes deeply to an emotional vulnerability we all have, quickly, rapidly. I genuinely want to believe this event here is not a complete fabrication. But the only bus driver gun-death I can find is linked to the 2002 DC sniper attacks. That this new account demonstrates a particular bias, from what I have seen, adds to my hestiancy to take this as real. Again, I very very much do not want to say to disregard, I do not want to attack the person, but this claim seems fundamentally suspect, & the history seems at least a bit murky, and I'd say this comment deserves caution & question, rather than acceptance.
We have some fairly notorious bus lines in DC. But like, overall, the actual scary shit nearly never ever happens. Oh look, some loud people are drinking on the 7X's or the X2 again. Generally it's not really a real problem & we kind of ignore it & eventually they get off, or, if they start causing a scene, the bus driver asks them to leave, and after a couple dozen seconds they get the point that this is not really winnable & wander off. I've seen some people get mad at each other, but someone gets off & the drama dissipates. The notoriety is more about characters & ridiculousness, thank heavens, and rarely about real actual in fact for real problems. Those, from what I have heard in my many years in DC, have been pretty few.
I'm saying there are thusfar zero cases in DC that we have any real evidence of, so this "FAR more common" is trying to compare a 0% vs 0% empirical chance.
I'm not opposed to gun control & the general idea here, not at all. And I'm more than willing to accept evidence that guns really are a bit of a menace & problem with some real & regular reocurrence on this transit system I use. Certainly there are problems beyond people getting killed, but so far my attempts to dig up real data to show meaningful problems has surfaced nothing (and no one else has pointed to verifiable problems either). So far it feels- to me- that this is barking up the wrong tree. That there isn't strong data portraying a real transit-gun problem; there isn't evidence, and there isn't actually a problem here, and that this is an imposition of concerns that have an incredibly miniscule factor in the reality of this system. I really want to support the questioning of guns, which I broadly disagree with, but right now I really don't see the data nor hear the anecdotes for this being a real/regular concern. These emotions being projected read to me like anti-urban heresay, which I want to believe/take as real, but am not finding evidence of.
Also note so far our metro/subway system has a gun ban. Penalties for fucking with DC metro or DC busses in any moderately significant way is pretty severe, and the city will spend pretty significant effort to track shit down if stuff does go bad, it feels like, from the every couple years drama that makes our local digital rags.
Worth noting of course that the bans & commensurate penalties/enforcement are under semi-regular legal threat, like a recent challenge here (https://dcist.com/story/23/01/04/judge-tosses-out-lawsuit-se...). It feels like it's all gotten especially wild since the latest Supreme Court took the activist position of overturning New York's requirement to have a license to conceal carry. But so far, a number of rulings have kept various DC laws & protections intact.
There have been several people shot on the DC metro system in the past few years: by off-duty cops. Somehow, they're allowed to carry guns on the trains despite the ban.
If you want transportation free of sleepers and walking dead, there must be fares and gates. Otherwise you’ll end up with the horrors of the LA Metro… meth heads smoking up, stairs dripping with blood, etc.
Many European cities have low flat fares and no gates. And yet, they don't encounter the problems LA has. Maybe it's a problem of society and not public transport.
Even if it's due to society, what are you going to do? Burn LA/CA to the ground and rebuild its society and culture to your tastes? The fact is that in the context of LA, fares and gates are needed.
It's funny how every time these things get brought up, some body will always write "well, there wouldn't be crackheads on the bus if our society was perfect. Let's make society better first, then we can solve crackheads on busses".
By enforcing a "user pays" model on public transport, we are requiring that the most disadvantaged support their own transport system, which they use to get around to go to jobs to support the wealthy.
Meanwhile, the richest people, who are benefitting from the availability and mobility of labour, can afford to move around in luxury vehicles (sometimes driven by others).
This is a negative feedback loop which renders public transportation increasingly dangerous and decreasingly effective.
If you want to "fund" public transport, you should do it through increased taxation on cars (especially luxury cars) and air travel (in particular private aviation), but ultimately public money doesn't necessarily need to be entirely offset through taxation if it's federally supplied.
There would be a lot to be said for a federal infrastructure spending bill that targeted uniformly effective and free public transport.
In my state there are both moral and legal roadblocks preventing that - except in extreme cases you can't force someone into treatment. You can write tickets for people who urinate or smoke on the trains but if someone has no assets there's really no point.
I love this idea in theory, but recognize that you are moving the discussion from providing effective, safe, and equitable transportation towards solving homelessness.
Both issues are important, but in the context of this article one must ask, "what is best for the majority of public transit users?". It's certainly possible that a $2 rate improves quality or security meaningful ways.
The problem of "sketchy homeless and mentally ill people" is large enough that I personally prefer cycling over public transport when possible.
> I love this idea in theory, but recognize that you are moving the discussion from providing effective, safe, and equitable transportation towards solving homelessness.
Sure, but if the objection to "public transport should be free" is "then there will be a bunch of scary homeless people there" shouldn't be "let's charge enough so they can't ride the bus" it should be "hey let's fix that too!"
You would think, but obviously not happening. This quarter measure (enacted before prerequisites) makes it worse for the working poor. And anyone who is in favor of transit, tourists too, who are important for the economy.
Oh, no, poor people might share the bus with me. Wouldn't want poor or mentally ill folks to do things like get to a doctors appointment, buy food, or visit family if they can't get there invisibly. /s.
Now is when I'd like to remind you that you share spaces with mentally ill folks every single day and you don't notice a thing: A lot of destitute folks are disable and being destitute shouldn't mean that you have to have a lonely and hard life. And I'd also like to mention that you can both be destitute and have a job. You can be mentally ill and have a job.
I think the parent comment is referring the homeless population which is violent or too public in their drug use/paraphernalia.
Pick the right bus line in Vancouver. You will notice mentally ill, violent people, and it certainly discourages the public from using public transit. Now, will waiving a $2 fee change this meaningfully? Hard to day. But it's not helpful to ignore the problem.
DC has a lot of dangerous homeless lunatics and criminals. Poor and mentally ill are euphemisms that also include many people who don’t fall into those categories
1. Of course I'm not going to reference a TV show. They aren't exactly known for realism. I've seen how they think poor people live, after all.
2. One line, a city, or a few riders isn't an issue with busses, be they with or without fares. That's society not taking care of folks. Plus, it would be ridiculous to think that it would be like this everywhere.. because it isn't like this everywhere now.
How are they supposed to get to treatment if there isn't a transit system to help them with that?
And of course folks should have housing and treatment. The reason we have issues in some areas is because they aren't doing that. It doesn't meant that we shouldn't provide public transport to everyone that wants it, though. It is quite possible to do more than one thing at the same time.
No, some things are prerequisites to others. See project management.
They are not going to inpatient treatment and housing voluntarily on the bus. Is the guy screaming obscenities at the air even aware of all his treatment options? They often need to be coerced, so trained individuals need to bring them there humanely.
If they are just having bad luck, they will mostly likely need their belongings brought with them. Both these things point to van transportation with trained drivers. Not the city bus.
You might spend some time thinking through the problem rather than casting aspersions. But one of those is easier, isn't it?
> If you want to "fund" public transport, you should do it through increased taxation on cars (especially luxury cars) and air travel (in particular private aviation), but ultimately public money doesn't necessarily need to be entirely offset through taxation if it's federally supplied.
I don't think public transport should be entirely free just from both an economic but also ecological POV: despite how much more efficient public transport is on a per-user basis, it's still not free (both environmentally and economically).
There's a recent report by a large public transportation company in Germany which illustrates some of the problems: During the pandemic Germany introduced the "€9-ticket", a ticket that, as the name suggests, costs only €9 and gave you public transportation for ~3 Months (Let's call that free for the sake of argument).
After the end of that program there was a report by (I think) the state Hesse that looked at how public transportation usage and car usage behaved.
The result was that there was massively increased public transportation usage, but not a massive reduction in car usage.
In effect (and from personal, anecdotal experience) free public transport lead to an increase in "fun drives" (e.g. to vacation destinations), but not a decrease in work related transportation.
One of the reasons might be that public transport usage is often fundamentally misunderstood. A significant number of people use a car, not because they want to, but because it is their only option: People living in cities already use public transport, while rural areas (and I count everything with <25k citizens as "rural") often don't have sufficient public transport.
You could start expanding public transport in those rural areas to match the one in cities, but that by itself would be an environmental catastrophe: Public transport is good in high density scenarios, where, even in the dead of night, buses or subways are relatively well filled.
However, increasing public transport in low density areas will always have "dead times" in which few people transit.
The issue is that you still need to send e.g. buses in those low utilization timezones since otherwise people still need a car as they cannot rely on public transport to fulfill their needs.
If you want people to be able to rely on getting from A to B without a car, this problem is uncircumventable: You need a high density population that fills your public transport for it to be sensible.
For example, despite living in Germany (which overall has good public transportation) I couldn't travel from the close city (~20min drive) home on any weekday past 10:00PM.
That is despite the fact I still live in a town of ~20k people.
I don't even fault the people that made the decision not to drive busses here: If I drive in that 10:00PM bus, it's consistently half empty (or worse: I've also been in that bus with only 2-3 others, including the driver)!
The solution isn't to tax cars to high heavens, as that decreases the likelihood of people moving outside of cities. Too many people inside cities yields its own share of well-known problems, like high rent prices due to high demand for a, by definition, limited amount of space (density = people/area).
I think the solution for this is much simpler: Specifically subsidize work related transportation by giving people money proportional to the maximal transportation costs (which usually will be a car). This prevents subsidizing "fun drives", while also encouraging people to use public transport when available. This money can be clawed back from employers, which also encourages them to offer e.g. work-from-home (which from both an environmental and congestion POV trumps even public transport).
Since transportation is now well supported via taxes, we can use the saved money to increase public transport where it is logical: people living outside of high density areas _should_ use a car because building a...
As someone who has ridden the DC bus before (mostly when the Metro broke), "free" meets the mark on the only price I'd pay to use it again.
Aside from the other stuff you can probably picture, it's slow AF and takes longer to move between popular spots than drudging through traffic in a car or Uber.
Now making the Metro free... that would pique people's interest.
It really depends. I biked a lot too but my commute north to Silver Spring was quite speedy, and it was more pleasant riding in this lovely city aboveground than underneath, for less money & significantly shorter travel time. Alas enforcement is not good, but DC has also made a signicant number of bus lanes that also do sometimes help.
There's a good number of limited-stop bus routes that span some pretty long routes that would require much more cross-city metro riding, and serving many places the metro doesnt conveniently service at all. My feeling is generally the opposite of yours- actual urbanites are good at & love the buses, know some real handy convenient routes, and people further afield tend to only know & try the much simpler & more limited metrorail. DC just isnt that big; a handful of stops if you're going 2-4 miles is not really a concern.
What gets me about the comments is that some of you who are the most negative are in big cities. Us little town folks with free bus service? We just don't have those negatives and we don't necessarily have the same negative opinions of it.
At least if you are going to call it bad, preface your opinion with what your reality is, and acknowledge your reality isn't necessarily universal.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 345 ms ] threadI know of places where pensioners (over 65yr olds) get it free but not universal.
There are pros and cons to this of course but overall: people who didn't take the buss before are not going to now all of a sudden.
Not a big fan of fares though, as somebody that’s dropped my wallet in the dark in the middle of the night in a sketchy part of town.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio
https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?4,2183214
I suspect a lot would. Some public transit systems are shockingly expensive. And even price-insensitive people would benefit from increased ridership of price-sensitive people if it also led to improved service.
I'm sure there are people who would benefit from this, like those carpooling and relying on rides from friends and family, to those who wouldn't be able to afford to work in places that would otherwise require a car to commute to that they don't have, etc.
The silver line snakes way out through Virginia, for a pretty (very) small fraction of riders every day & a handful of people going to IAD (Dulles) airport. The Purple Line has started snaking around the beltway, at least for the northern MD parts that were still willing to fund & try, but has dragged on, slated originally to open last year & still at least 4 years out & crazy over cost. It seems unlikely to make a sea change difference, but perhaps!! We want to believe, maybe after a lot of time. DC started building a new streetcar network, and seemingly gave up after realizing fixed infrastructure like this was insanely expensive and prone to constant blockage.
Most American cities highly subsidize transit. Going to fully subsidized is not really a major hurt. It's a kind of easy action we can just do, for little real pain. Much less pain than many of the expansive would be micro-mega-projects, that probably in most cases will be massive budget items with decades of debt, with only very very very long term development benefits. In DC, few of our transit systems have capacity problems. Our citywide network is quite good, very well connnected whatever direction you want in most places.
The proposal that we add more busses, that we build new lines: it feels wildly out of touch, like it's prescribing someone elses solution, that doesn't make sense here. This is a good sensible next step for DC, to make what we have work much better for many, especially those who can most benefit.
Setting that aside, this legislation also includes $10m/year in funding to further enhance bus service:
- Creating new routes
- Extending hours (all night service on key routes)
- Shortening headways between buses
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_Sta...
Public transit can be a remedy, but outside Manhattan I don't think any locale in the U.S. has remotely the density to make it truly viable at scale for the poor and working classes. Obviously public transit is critical for some poorer subgroups, but those groups tend to be the ones trapped in ghettos. To truly bridge the gap so public transit is a substitute for fuel subsidies would require an order of magnitude increase in the size and reach of our public transit networks, plus a dramatic shift in zoning to reduce the costs of housing in urbanized areas, plus a dramatic shift in geographical demographics. Note that poor and working classes will hold onto the white picket fence ideal for much longer than the middle classes. So you're dealing with very strong counter-veiling pressures when it comes to the groups you're attempting to help the most.
Chicken and egg. Density is built along transit because transit supports dense houses. Build transit, get density. Fail to build transit, get sprawl.
Building transit does not guarantee you get density. There are regulatory hurdles at play. In California, for example, cities will often be forced to up-zone the immediate couple of blocks around a station, but then everything else beyond that remains zoned for single-family housing, or at least zoned for far less density than the market could support.
Moreover, there's a time gap between when housing is built and when it becomes economically accessible lower down the income ladder. New housing is expensive, even absent regulatory hurdles, and affordability mandates can't magically change financial viability. New housing can have immediate effects on housing costs, but indirectly on the costs of older housing; and on a regional scale it takes awhile to incentivize people at the periphery to move inward.
Long-story short, to get from the current equilibrium to a more optimal equilibrium requires careful, coordinated policy management across decades. We could and should start, but we live in an age where if people don't see results in 6 weeks, they complain; and even when there are results, they still complain. They complain, vote people out, and vote in new people that promise more immediate results, but invariably can't deliver meaningful results.[1] I mean, this is how democracy has always worked, but the public reactions are far more compressed, while the necessary time spans for effective change are no shorter than they were before.
[1] Case in point: rather than improving public transit, the popular panacea du jure is free fares. Free fares will not improve public transit in any way shape or form; if anything, they'll hasten its degradation. They'll make it cheaper for some, but for the most part not those at the bottom of the ladder, who already enjoy free transit. These gimmicks are popular because they're immediate.
https://electrek.co/2022/04/28/denvers-electric-bike-rebates...
https://electrek.co/2022/05/03/vermont-launches-the-first-st...
https://electrek.co/2022/11/29/another-us-state-adds-electri...
https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/home/showpublisheddocumen...
https://www.peninsulacleanenergy.com/ebikes/
https://www.alamedamp.com/407/Rebates-and-Incentives
Edit: And from a quick look, that’s high for the US. The average seems closer to 10-15%.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio
https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/2020-11/...
(NY’s 54% number is probably because of mixing of different fareboxes: recovery is much higher on the LIRR and MNRR than it is on the city buses and subways.)
- MTA heavy rail was 70%.
- Commuter rail was 55%.
- Commuter bus was 32%.
- BRT and Bus was 30%.
[1] https://www.enotrans.org/article/the-mass-transit-fiscal-cli...
Nationally in millions, Bus: (Fare Revenues 3,778) / (Operating expenses 16,110.4 + Use of capital funds 3,0444.7) = 19.7%. They also break out Bus Rapid Transit which is much worse 16.1 / (166.1 + 51.7) = 7.4% as is Commuter Bus 57.9 / (597.7 + 170.7) = 7.5%
Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, Bus: $124,011,141 / ( $731,946,008 + $182,850,687 ) = 13.6%
So for WMATA forgoing Bus revenue wouldn’t move the needle very much.
PS: And that’s ignoring the overhead of collecting fairs. Not only are some operating expenses devoted to collecting fairs, busses can move faster if people aren’t stopping and fiddling with payment.
Compare a line of 20 people all try to get on and swipe a metro card vs a line of 20 people all trying to get on. Even collage busses where all people need to do is show school ID you still get people in line who suddenly can’t find their ID.
I agree farebox recovery rate is not something to optimize for. Public services don't lose money, they cost money. Nobody talks about how much the army loses.
However. The choice was between (a) eliminating the $666M farebox recovery and taking it out of the municipal budget vs. adding $666M more funding without eliminating the farebox take. I strongly suspect the municipality would be far better served by the latter.
The former plan doesn't address what people actually want. They want shorter headways. Instead they got the same headways, but cheaper.
People aren't avoiding transit because it's too expensive. They're avoiding transit because it doesn't come often enough, it doesn't go where they need and stops running too early. It doesn't meet their needs. The average American spends $11,000 on a new car per year [2], or almost a half million dollars lifetime. If service was better, they wouldn't have to. This plan doesn't make service better. So, they still need their real cost center: their car.
[1] https://www.enotrans.org/article/the-mass-transit-fiscal-cli...
[2] https://newsroom.aaa.com/2022/08/annual-cost-of-new-car-owne...
I mean, I do. But that boils mostly down to me perceiving more value in a robust public transit network than in a bloated MIC.
Of course there will be outliers, but owning a car is a massive money sinkhole and a disproportionate burden on the poor.
The average car insurance payment alone is $136 (and significantly more for those with 'bad credit' - i.e. the poor). Gas is another $150-200 per month. That's almost $4000 per year right there.
The average monthly transit pass in the US is $83. [1, 2]
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/990891/us-average-monthl...
[2] https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/insurance/how-much-is-car...
What you see as a small component of transit systems budgets, they seem to see as a quite significant part of their budget.
I think this is going to lead to worst outcomes, and a worse funded system.
"Metro estimates it lost $40 million due to fair evasion in the 2022 fiscal year."
$40 million is not "quite small"
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/transportation/metr...
And 40 million is not a small number for a person, but for a city with a budget of about 20 billion it’s not a very large number at all - especially when viewed in comparison with spending on roads and bridges. You don’t have to spend billions on another road bridge if everyone is taking the train
Also, WMATA's budget is separate from the city...
You could argue that it's all "just funding," but fares can help to prioritize work which will help collect the most future fares, creating the largest positive impact for end users.
I work in the longwood area of Boston. There are private bus routes that make up for the lack of good public transit for the area. It’s also free with Id.
https://www.longwoodcollective.org/lma-shuttles/shuttle-rout...
For context the grad student service fee is around 300-700USD per semester depending on how many credits you take.
So by no means is it free. I do agree with you though that universal access to transit makes it a lot more pleasant and speeds up boarding quite substantially.
https://www.umass.edu/bursar/fee-explanation
Apparently they do charge some routes, but the ones operated by umass now are free to students.
They’d actually train students to drive the buses. ( still do apparently) an interesting skill to leave university with. https://www.umass.edu/transportation/now-hiring)
Umass was interesting. The fees were how they kept money at the school as tuition went to the states general fund. Sports were always covered by those fees which was free basketball tickets (though it was a lottery when I left, but I worked at the paper and would take pictues..)
It was a while ago that I was there (last century..)
https://www.pvta.com/
This is just a rule they've made: You can have both fares and boarding at any door in the bus. I know this because this is how the busses in Trondheim, Norway are. You can't always pay on the bus, so everyone has their ticket before they get on. They have spot checks by folks that aren't bus drivers. Does it cause some folks to risk not buying a ticket? Yes, but it is obviously not worth doing more checks.
Except it doesn't have to be zero-sum. A government can simply decide it wants to prioritize public transportation. The funding isn't inherently zero-sum.
It is entirely the first reason - mass transit is not cheap and fares help alleviate the burden of the subsidy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio
I don’t think the cost of issuing tickets and enforcement is that significant compared to how much money collecting fares brings in. It certainly doesn’t seem like something that is done at a loss or something that barely breaks even.
Almost no public transit system has a farebox recovery rate even close to 100%. For municipal service (ie, excluding specialty transit), even 50% is almost unheard-of in the US, and only a few systems in Europe exceed 50% as well. In the US, the better transit systems have a farebox recovery ratio of 25% or less. In other words, over 75% is already funded by taxes, not by point-of-service.
Enforcement is a huge cost. In fact, in NY, the government has decided to spend increasing amounts of money over the last five years on police presence to combat "fare evasion", even though their own numbers show that the amount of money they are "losing" to fare evasion is less than the amount they have decided to spend on the additional police dedicated specifically to fare evasion.
So yes, it's a political, choice, not a fiscally rational one.
Sort of, not exactly. Asian countries typically report their metrics differently, so they look much higher, but it's because they have non-fare sources of revenue that provide a massive source of income which they combine with their fare revenue for reporting purposes. So it's not an apples to apples comparison.
I frankly wouldn’t mind paying more for public transit, but making it the crux feels roughly analogous to corporate ”greenwashing”: push the responsibility onto individuals and we can conveniently ignore the structural changes needed to make public transit systems grow and thrive.
Sources: https://slate.com/business/2021/06/free-transit-is-not-a-gre... https://transitcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/TC_Whos...
https://www.sbb.ch/en/travelcards-and-tickets/railpasses/ga....
Edit: Another example is Prague, which is around $1.
I can’t think of many; the first that comes to mind is Portland’s MAX, which is $2.50, has a smaller network with longer headways, and services a much larger metropolitan area as justification for its existence.
I live in Helsinki and spent a lot of time last year in Tallinn - the ‘transit is free in Europe’ thing is very much an exception rather than a rule.
I think there's also free public travel for tourists with cars if they park their car (in certain places or under certain circumstances).
In which European capital cities bus fairs are free?
Haven't heard of any others, though.
This is not necessarily true. If reducing fares increases ridership it may allow a strong case to be made for increasing the system funding.
The potential peril is that compared to the counterfactual of spending this money on improved service, free fares may attract few new riders or fail to generate additional political capital, or even lead to reduced funding if transit starts to be seen as a welfare expenditure rather than a system for everyone that pays for itself to some degree.
Very few people commute via bus in DC. I rarely did it because often traffic would make it take a long time even though I lived in the district.
I invite you to think about the amount of time wasted by people on ticketing. The queues at ticket booths, people spending time researching what pass they want. Seniors spending time asking for their special card so they can get it cheaper or for free.
The amounts spent on advertising to reduce gate jumpers, or to tell people about the latest formula or whatever.
The massive amounts spent on RND of new techniques to make going through the gates quicker because it’s an annoying experience. The bad deals made with payments companies to be able to take card payments directly at the gate.
Really it’s insane. When you start believing that public transit should be free because it’s infrastructure (there’s a lot of reasons why it should be free), you start actually seeing just how much money and time would be saved. Then it clicks.
Looking at 2020 ratios in isolation doesn't give a very complete picture.
https://2019.stib-activityreports.brussels/en/a-high-perform...
The STIB is the Brussels metro & bus company.
As you can see, subsidies represent 54 percent of the STIB's revenue: Subsidies of almost 400M EUR. The figure you want is "traffic revenue": 225M EUR.
So now, the calculation is: Is ticketing and enforcement worth 225M EUR / year in Brussels? The answer on paper is yes, because we're not taking into account the costs I outlined above. Breaking them down by line item is impossible because the figures are not public, but going by related figures, it's not looking good for proponents of ticketing.
Let's just go with sibling comment's ticket gate price: 250MM EUR. They are replaced every 8 years roughly. So, 31MM / year. Now down to under half of the subsidies.
Direct costs: Ticket enforcement staff + equipment, gate maintenance, automated sales booths + maintenance + software, in-person sales booths + maintenance, payment processing fees, contract costs
Externalities: Ticket littering + cleanup costs, inefficient purchases by customers (bought the wrong tickets/too many)
Time costs: Validation time, gate bottlenecking (especially at peak time), reduced opportunities for those who can't afford tickets...
----
Okay, so let's say you do all those calculations, and you end up finding out they're all zero (they won't be, but w/e), and actually you're still making decent tax revenue from public transit (0.2bn eur). What is the lesson here?
The lesson, is that all these are insignificant compared to the investment that same city wants to make into public transport: 5.2 bn EUR. (ref. https://www.stib-mivb.be/article.html?l=en&_guid=0035aa30-f3...). Or compared to the costs of road maintenance (50-100bn EUR / year in BE). Or, or ...
Make no mistake, removing costs would increase ridership which would increase costs. But it would also increase national productivity output which increases tax revenue. This is not a simple calculation to run, and my girlfriend is using my parallel universe simulator right now so I can't check. Public transit should be free (AS IN PAID BY TAXES), because it's the right thing to do, when the roads are financed the same way.
This is the cost of free public transit.
Complaints like yours ring hollow when solutions have already been devised and in use for a long time. If other places don't use these solutions because of NIH or whatever, that doesn't mean these complaints are valid.
You know Tokyo is the most populated city in the world, right. The solutions in place there will HAVE to be different to anywhere else on the planet.
It's like a Google engineer talking about how some random SaaS's complaints about Heroku or whatever are "hollow, because here at Google we use solution X and it works fine and we have more traffic than anywhere on the planet so obviously solution X is best".
Not saying whatever solution it is you're using isn't good, or couldn't fit in another city. But Japanese customs, payment systems, administrations, densities, and incomes are vastly different to the rest of the world's. The numbers to justify free transit will be very different for you.
Wrong. The laws of physics are not different in other places. The complaint was that it takes too long to collect fares. This is factually untrue, and Japan's system (it uses the same system nationwide) proves this. It's a solved problem. In other places, it can be even better because it's less populated (crowded) than here.
>It's like a Google engineer talking about how some random SaaS's complaints
No, it's really not. It's like someone complaining that encoding WAVs into Oggs is too big a problem, and someone else saying, "no, all you have to do is download libogg and libvorbis and oggtools and use it." The solution is right there, you just need to use it.
>But Japanese customs, payment systems,
The custom of swiping a card to go through a turnstile is too foreign to you?
The card is a stored-value card. You put money on the card, and spend it as you go through the turnstiles. You don't even need a payment system: I charge mine with cash.
Edit: just to add to this, there are other transit systems that use this same technology, such as in China.
True, with emphasis on fully.
> In many cases, the systems to collect fares end up costing hundreds of millions of dollars.
That figure seems extremely high for "many cases," but the exact figure isn't really material.
> These costs are never made back. It makes sense to make it free.
No, that's just not true.
My local metro spent $17 million on fare collection to net $167 million in revenue (2019). It would have to cut $150 million in other service to go to free fares.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio
In many parts of the developed world the ratio is 30% plus which can be an enormous amount of money. In Boston fare revenue is 500M .
Making things free would cause big issues for many of them as you say.
Fair evasion is rampant here, both on the metro and buses. At least people won't have to bother with even the theatre of pretending to care about it on the buses now.
There are 2 smaller services that do enforce fares, and unsurprisingly they don’t have nearly as many problems.
Proof of fare is better than having transit employees be the enforcers. Free is even better, theoretically.
But be wary, transit in DC may turn into moving homeless encampment as there is no real way to tell someone they can't stay on the bus all day
We got him there in the end, mostly due to the enduring support of his partner.
My lesson from that was that, with the right support, and a bit of patience, people can get the help they need.
Takes a bit of time though. I think in the vast majority of cases if we offer a job to anyone who wants one at a socially inclusive minimum wage doing work in their community, in addition to stable housing, within a few years they'll be doing better, and within a generation the negative impacts of involuntary unemployment and homelessness will be a relic of the past.
http://google.com/search?q=dc+bus+driver+death
There are very very few incidents of bus drivers dying in DC. I would highly recommend not taking this fear-instilling anecdote as a real sign of what is.
I'm not saying to disregard this account, give it the benefit of a doubt, but it also is very new, and has had a pretty contentious first steps. I too am pretty contentious here & there my years, and I'm not at all saying to disregard one another. But this kind of high-brand FUD rather frustates me, & I feel like should set us on guard: it goes deeply to an emotional vulnerability we all have, quickly, rapidly. I genuinely want to believe this event here is not a complete fabrication. But the only bus driver gun-death I can find is linked to the 2002 DC sniper attacks. That this new account demonstrates a particular bias, from what I have seen, adds to my hestiancy to take this as real. Again, I very very much do not want to say to disregard, I do not want to attack the person, but this claim seems fundamentally suspect, & the history seems at least a bit murky, and I'd say this comment deserves caution & question, rather than acceptance.
We have some fairly notorious bus lines in DC. But like, overall, the actual scary shit nearly never ever happens. Oh look, some loud people are drinking on the 7X's or the X2 again. Generally it's not really a real problem & we kind of ignore it & eventually they get off, or, if they start causing a scene, the bus driver asks them to leave, and after a couple dozen seconds they get the point that this is not really winnable & wander off. I've seen some people get mad at each other, but someone gets off & the drama dissipates. The notoriety is more about characters & ridiculousness, thank heavens, and rarely about real actual in fact for real problems. Those, from what I have heard in my many years in DC, have been pretty few.
I'm not opposed to gun control & the general idea here, not at all. And I'm more than willing to accept evidence that guns really are a bit of a menace & problem with some real & regular reocurrence on this transit system I use. Certainly there are problems beyond people getting killed, but so far my attempts to dig up real data to show meaningful problems has surfaced nothing (and no one else has pointed to verifiable problems either). So far it feels- to me- that this is barking up the wrong tree. That there isn't strong data portraying a real transit-gun problem; there isn't evidence, and there isn't actually a problem here, and that this is an imposition of concerns that have an incredibly miniscule factor in the reality of this system. I really want to support the questioning of guns, which I broadly disagree with, but right now I really don't see the data nor hear the anecdotes for this being a real/regular concern. These emotions being projected read to me like anti-urban heresay, which I want to believe/take as real, but am not finding evidence of.
Also note so far our metro/subway system has a gun ban. Penalties for fucking with DC metro or DC busses in any moderately significant way is pretty severe, and the city will spend pretty significant effort to track shit down if stuff does go bad, it feels like, from the every couple years drama that makes our local digital rags.
Worth noting of course that the bans & commensurate penalties/enforcement are under semi-regular legal threat, like a recent challenge here (https://dcist.com/story/23/01/04/judge-tosses-out-lawsuit-se...). It feels like it's all gotten especially wild since the latest Supreme Court took the activist position of overturning New York's requirement to have a license to conceal carry. But so far, a number of rulings have kept various DC laws & protections intact.
My wife refuses to take any kind of public transportation alone.
Meanwhile, the richest people, who are benefitting from the availability and mobility of labour, can afford to move around in luxury vehicles (sometimes driven by others).
This is a negative feedback loop which renders public transportation increasingly dangerous and decreasingly effective.
If you want to "fund" public transport, you should do it through increased taxation on cars (especially luxury cars) and air travel (in particular private aviation), but ultimately public money doesn't necessarily need to be entirely offset through taxation if it's federally supplied.
There would be a lot to be said for a federal infrastructure spending bill that targeted uniformly effective and free public transport.
1) Not allowing anyone to be destitute and;
2) Also providing free and comprehensive mental health care
Both issues are important, but in the context of this article one must ask, "what is best for the majority of public transit users?". It's certainly possible that a $2 rate improves quality or security meaningful ways.
The problem of "sketchy homeless and mentally ill people" is large enough that I personally prefer cycling over public transport when possible.
Sure, but if the objection to "public transport should be free" is "then there will be a bunch of scary homeless people there" shouldn't be "let's charge enough so they can't ride the bus" it should be "hey let's fix that too!"
We can fix two things. More even!
Now is when I'd like to remind you that you share spaces with mentally ill folks every single day and you don't notice a thing: A lot of destitute folks are disable and being destitute shouldn't mean that you have to have a lonely and hard life. And I'd also like to mention that you can both be destitute and have a job. You can be mentally ill and have a job.
Pick the right bus line in Vancouver. You will notice mentally ill, violent people, and it certainly discourages the public from using public transit. Now, will waiving a $2 fee change this meaningfully? Hard to day. But it's not helpful to ignore the problem.
2. One line, a city, or a few riders isn't an issue with busses, be they with or without fares. That's society not taking care of folks. Plus, it would be ridiculous to think that it would be like this everywhere.. because it isn't like this everywhere now.
And of course folks should have housing and treatment. The reason we have issues in some areas is because they aren't doing that. It doesn't meant that we shouldn't provide public transport to everyone that wants it, though. It is quite possible to do more than one thing at the same time.
They are not going to inpatient treatment and housing voluntarily on the bus. Is the guy screaming obscenities at the air even aware of all his treatment options? They often need to be coerced, so trained individuals need to bring them there humanely.
If they are just having bad luck, they will mostly likely need their belongings brought with them. Both these things point to van transportation with trained drivers. Not the city bus.
You might spend some time thinking through the problem rather than casting aspersions. But one of those is easier, isn't it?
I don't think public transport should be entirely free just from both an economic but also ecological POV: despite how much more efficient public transport is on a per-user basis, it's still not free (both environmentally and economically). There's a recent report by a large public transportation company in Germany which illustrates some of the problems: During the pandemic Germany introduced the "€9-ticket", a ticket that, as the name suggests, costs only €9 and gave you public transportation for ~3 Months (Let's call that free for the sake of argument). After the end of that program there was a report by (I think) the state Hesse that looked at how public transportation usage and car usage behaved. The result was that there was massively increased public transportation usage, but not a massive reduction in car usage. In effect (and from personal, anecdotal experience) free public transport lead to an increase in "fun drives" (e.g. to vacation destinations), but not a decrease in work related transportation.
One of the reasons might be that public transport usage is often fundamentally misunderstood. A significant number of people use a car, not because they want to, but because it is their only option: People living in cities already use public transport, while rural areas (and I count everything with <25k citizens as "rural") often don't have sufficient public transport. You could start expanding public transport in those rural areas to match the one in cities, but that by itself would be an environmental catastrophe: Public transport is good in high density scenarios, where, even in the dead of night, buses or subways are relatively well filled. However, increasing public transport in low density areas will always have "dead times" in which few people transit. The issue is that you still need to send e.g. buses in those low utilization timezones since otherwise people still need a car as they cannot rely on public transport to fulfill their needs. If you want people to be able to rely on getting from A to B without a car, this problem is uncircumventable: You need a high density population that fills your public transport for it to be sensible.
For example, despite living in Germany (which overall has good public transportation) I couldn't travel from the close city (~20min drive) home on any weekday past 10:00PM. That is despite the fact I still live in a town of ~20k people. I don't even fault the people that made the decision not to drive busses here: If I drive in that 10:00PM bus, it's consistently half empty (or worse: I've also been in that bus with only 2-3 others, including the driver)!
The solution isn't to tax cars to high heavens, as that decreases the likelihood of people moving outside of cities. Too many people inside cities yields its own share of well-known problems, like high rent prices due to high demand for a, by definition, limited amount of space (density = people/area).
I think the solution for this is much simpler: Specifically subsidize work related transportation by giving people money proportional to the maximal transportation costs (which usually will be a car). This prevents subsidizing "fun drives", while also encouraging people to use public transport when available. This money can be clawed back from employers, which also encourages them to offer e.g. work-from-home (which from both an environmental and congestion POV trumps even public transport). Since transportation is now well supported via taxes, we can use the saved money to increase public transport where it is logical: people living outside of high density areas _should_ use a car because building a...
Aside from the other stuff you can probably picture, it's slow AF and takes longer to move between popular spots than drudging through traffic in a car or Uber.
Now making the Metro free... that would pique people's interest.
There's a good number of limited-stop bus routes that span some pretty long routes that would require much more cross-city metro riding, and serving many places the metro doesnt conveniently service at all. My feeling is generally the opposite of yours- actual urbanites are good at & love the buses, know some real handy convenient routes, and people further afield tend to only know & try the much simpler & more limited metrorail. DC just isnt that big; a handful of stops if you're going 2-4 miles is not really a concern.
At least if you are going to call it bad, preface your opinion with what your reality is, and acknowledge your reality isn't necessarily universal.
The same can't be said about big city transit. Just look at the demographics of where homeless people flock to.