In a high-trust world, free transit is just the way to do it. It reduces friction and simplifies everything.
In a low-trust world, it removes a useful excuse for enforcers to kick troublemakers off the line.
A middle ground could be tried (and I think some cities have) where they keep fares and such (and soak the tourists, of course) but then give free passes to all residents in the city.
There is the argument that somebody who is paying is going to value the service a bit more.
There’s also the argument, elaborated in that article, that the main reason people (low income or not) don’t take the bus is not that they find the fare expensive but because of the quality of the service, especially frequency.
I take the bus to work maybe 80% of the time from a rural area, I work 9-5 so it works OK, but if I miss the one bus home I am in a world of hurt because I have to wait two hours for the next bus. If the bus ran every ten minutes that would be quite transformative. For instance if you miss the bus or the bus was only 90% reliable it would be no big deal.
People will say that the population is too dispersed in my area and that it couldn’t support more frequent service, but there are several population concentrations on the route and the bus is frequently close to 50% full (when they replace the full size bus with a mini-bus, they sometimes have to leave passengers on the curb). If buses ran more frequently there would certainly be some “induced demand” as more people decide buses will meet their needs.
It’s possible that more people would take transit if the service was more expensive but better quality.
There are places like the Central Valley of California where you can drive a mile and it is all the same farm. There are places like Montana. I'm a mile from a state forest and own about 65 acres, and I'm about 2 miles from the bus stop which is at this (relatively) high density development
there are also two small towns on the route, a subsidized housing project, and route 79 has a stretch of single family houses stacked two deep (roughly every other driveway goes to a house behind the house in front!)
It helps that Tompkins County has one dominant employer (Cornell University) that pays for a bus pass for all faculty, staff and students. Bus service on a triangle between the downtown, Cornell and the mall is absolutely excellent. (15 minutes) If you work 9-5 at Cornell it is easy to get to outlying towns like Dryden, Trumansburg, Groton, Newfield, Danby, etc. There is also bus service to nearby state parks.
Santa Cruz, CA has this. If you are a K-12 student, a child under a certain height, or a downtown worker, the bus pass is free. Everyone else pays the fare or buys a pass. The pass is also available in their app, so no extra card needed in your wallet.
That said, SCMTD bus drivers are allowed to kick anyone off that is being disruptive or a safety hazard. I have also seen them refuse to allow someone entry due to a pattern of belligerence.
The biggest obstacle at this point is the lack of drivers. With housing more and more unaffordable, many non-tech or non-boutique jobs are getting harder and harder to fill. This leaves unexpected gaps in service that can annoyingly delay your travels.
I grew up in a large city without a car. Public transport was my primary form of transportation until I got a car in my late 20s. I can't remember a time wherein the lack funds for a fare was used as a pretense to kick 'troublemakers' off of public transportation.
The underlying 'trouble' that makes someone a 'troublemaker' (e.g. aggressive panhandling, disruptive behavior, public drunkenness, etc.) are still reasons to be kicked off public transportation irrespective of how much the fare is.
It's mostly the poor and middle-class that use public transportation, so ending fares for it is helpful to their finances.
Also, there are tremendous operating cost savings to a free at the point of use transit system. No ticket machines, turnstiles, the associated maintenance, ticketing staff, fare enforcement officers/police in places where there aren't turnstiles. Additionally, without turnstiles, people can enter and exit metro stations more quickly during peak service hours. On buses, the driver doesn't need to waste time dealing with payments.
It's cheaper to fund a public transportation system through taxation. Some may make the argument that why should people that don't use it have to pay for it? Well, since it's now included in your taxes, there's an incentive for you now to use it. For the wealthy that would never use it, I argue that they benefit from it. Their workers use the system to get to work, their customers use it to arrive at their businesses, students use it to get to school. These students use that education to become employees at those businesses.
Who then turn around and pass those costs along to renters as landlords. Or they take transit and get value. Or they drive and benefit from every vehicle not on the road since someone else took transit.
They are all more expensive compared to a free market private ones. Although in Europe thanks to the education standards and low corruption level, at least it is doing a good job. In US these are sink holes.
There are also further savings in not having to figure put, publish, and update fare systems. And if the change results in people taking public transit instead of cars, there are knock-on effects in the forms of less road congestion and fewer accidents. Accidents that cause costly policy work, hospitalizations, loss of work days, etc. These savings in other parts of the city finances are rarely figured in.
> It's mostly the poor and middle-class that use public transportation, so ending fares for it is helpful to their finances.
Its the poor class that uses public transit because it is substandard, and they dont have other choices.
Public transit is substandard because public transit has to fight on the regular roads, and not dedicated track/roads for transit. This means it is innately as slow or slower than driving. Because of this, it anyone who has a car WILL TAKE A CAR.
For example, it takes me 20 minutes to go from 1 side of the city to the other. Using the bus routes, its 2 hours. This is the predominant reason why people don't use public transit - 6 times longer.
> For example, it takes me 20 minutes to go from 1 side of the city to the other. Using the bus routes, its 2 hours
Compared to SEPTA (Philly's bus system) this seems way off base. Yes, it takes longer to take the bus than to drive yourself because the bus has to stop for passengers. But your own car will still have to stop at red lights, wait for pedestrians, etc., nearly as much as a bus. I can see 30-45 minutes for a bus ride comparable to a 20 minute direct drive, but any more than that points to some other problem with your city's roads.
Where I live the major employer is Cornell University and almost all of the buses stop there. A Cornell id will get you on any bus in Tompkins County and it is almost always a single-seat ride to Cornell and to the downtown area. Transfers in the downtown-Cornell-Mall triangle are also easy because you can always get a bus in 15 minutes or less.
Overall transit works great if most people are going to a few central points. It's much more difficult if the destinations are distributed. Frequent service could be a balm for that: if you had buses every ten minutes on all routes transfers would not be bad at all.
Concrete example for my city. Going from the east end to the west end took over 2 hours. And most of it was on the rail system - so not competing with traffic. But it involved one transfer for the train, and another for the bus near the end of my destination.
Frequent stops - by both the train and the bus, as well as the stops, made it take a lot longer. In my case a car would have done it in about 40 minutes.
I rarely took non-express busses when I lived in Seattle, but once took the bus into the international district for work and then had to get to 23rd & Jackson (about 20 blocks, straight shot). First I had to wait for a route that went straight down Jackson - 10-15 minutes. Then the bus ride - 30 minutes. Then the same thing on the way back. Nearly an hour and a half, not including having to walk a few blocks to get to my destination. In retrospect, walking would have been faster, and had I driven that day, round trip would have been around 20 minutes, with traffic including the pickup I needed to make.
It may be a problem with the city, but it’s still a problem.
Try visiting the Midwest. Its like my anecdote, but for every city. And the larger the city, the worse the times with public transit vs car.
I would LOVE nice public transit where I would call a taxi OR walk to the public transit station, then get to a hub, and then head to the east/west coast. That *used* to be possible, with even commuter train stations available at cities with 1000 people. No more.
I WfH, so I'm already reducing my vehicular load on the atmo. I mow perhaps 4 times a year. Again, less poison in atmo. But when I want to pop over to the nearest big city (You know, microcenter/electronics/hobby/etc) I have only 1 choice. Car.
Maybe in eastern seabed cities that actually built their cities with public transit, it just works for you, cause those cities weren't completely demolished for interstates (well, just the redlined/black population of cities; they were demolished). But past your east coast mentality, the rest of us have no real choices. And it sucks.
This is often true, but definitely not always, and significantly it doesn't account for the quality of the time spent. It would take me about 20 minutes to drive to work, and it takes me about 40 minutes by bus. I choose to spend 40 minutes reading a book on the bus instead of 20 minutes staring at someone else's bumper and getting road rage. The amount of times I hear people in the office whining about traffic & parking & other drivers always makes me feel weird because my commute in is so pleasant. While they're raging about other drivers, I was finishing up a library book.
> For example, it takes me 20 minutes to go from 1 side of the city to the other. Using the bus routes, its 2 hours. This is the predominant reason why people don't use public transit - 6 times longer.
That's a problem that cities solve by using dedicated bus lanes. We should work on making public transportation faster and car transportation slower to change which mode of transportation that people are incentivized to use. Car owners are heavily subsidized by monopolizing the roads for an extremely inefficient per person mode of transportation. Cities subsidize them for any parking that is free. We all pay for the externalities of air pollution, climate change, and city space wasted on street parking and public/private parking lots/garages.
So much of this. Public transit has to be a better alternative to driving a car. Time is the biggest factor to getting people to use it. I used to take the express bus into my office in the city. Since they had dedicated lanes it took me the same amount of time, all for $2.75. Driving is $10+ in tolls, $20 in parking, and fuel.
My coworkers thought I was crazy taking the bus thinking it was full of homeless. It was mostly lawyers, judges, jurists going to the federal court as well as medical staff at the nearby hospital. Based on the designer suits alone I can guarantee almost everyone had a European car or large body SUV sitting at home.
Free is a good start but if it still takes 2+ hours to get to a $15/hr job it's still a bad deal.
Except when public transit doesn't have to run on regular roads. Metro, trains, trams. Those win compared to cars a lot of the time.
Dedicated bus lanes don't run on regular roads, either.
Public standard is substandard when it's badly run, and not because it's public transit. People who have a car may still decide that the costs of running it are greater than the costs of using public transit.
While what you say is true in principle, in practice it would quickly translate into deteriorating service.
Public transit is and should of course always be mostly tax funded, but a small fare can add money in the system, it adds demands from users and a sense of responsibility for the suppliers.
The fare is always much cheaper than operating a car and its easy to have discount programs for those that need it.
Enforcement can be as easy as random checks, all the fancy infrastructure is not really needed although for underground systems its good to have a little barrier for entry.
I can afford a car just fine but I don’t want to spend my money on it just to get to work.
The real measure of the affluence and quality of life in a city is how large a portion of the wealthy take transit. The higher the better.
> its easy to have discount programs for those that need it.
Actually its not that easy. You need someone to check income threshold (how?), have a separate program to distribute that special fare, monitor for fraud, special fare system, etc. Tons of people that would benefit from cheaper fare end up not having access to it if the way to get that discount ends up being complicated (as many social programs are).
I agree transit should be cheaper, not free, but often cheaper helps everyone and encourage habits to change, even among the middle class.
Sure but don’t let perfection be the enemy of progress.
Cast a wide net, 50% discount for students, municipalities can hook people up with free or discounted passes depending on their municipal tax returns, it can all be automated even.
Some who don’t need discounts will get them and some who need them won’t but they will get better quality of service however. And if they don’t manage to get themselves a discount by any means, if the alternative is buying a car they’re saving anyway.
The absolute amount of money collected isn’t really the point, just that there is some of it and it is a non-negligible portion of the total.
>
The real measure of the affluence and quality of life in a city is how large a portion of the wealthy take transit. The higher the better.
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I don't think this will actually measure anything but gentrification and how few social services a city offers. Of the wealthy friends I have, the reasons they don't take public transit are always either time or the trash people. Of those categories, I know a few willing to deal with the wasted time to feel good but none willing to deal with the junkies, homeless, or hood crowd. If none of these groups are on your public transit it's either because you priced them out or the region is already hostile enough to keep them out.
There's nowhere to park in the center of Edinburgh. It's faster and cheaper to take the bus than it is to drive in and then look for a very expensive place to leave the car. And because nearly everyone takes the bus they don't just have awful people on them.
Is free transportation going to increase or decrease the number of junkies and homeless, not just on public transportation, but in general? It’s a boon for that crowd that can be piled on top of all the other programs that are argued to help, but have only entrenched that population.
Provide transit cards to those with low income budgeted through programs that are tasked with dealing with social welfare, homelessness, and rehabilitation. Let transit programs stick with transit.
I took public transit most work days using various methods in the Seattle metro area for years. The only one I didn’t frequently use (but did occasionally) were busses in the free ride zone outside of the bus tunnel.
As a user of free transit, i must disagree. It's great. The first poster isn't just correct in principle, but also practice. And it certainly doesn't deteriorate service. A sense of community ownership/responsibility grows from it not being pay walled.
Transit is actually never free, you either pay for it from fares, or from taxes, or a combination thereof.
Since mass transit access is something you can't badly overconsume in a sensible way, nor can you hoard and resell it in meaningful quantities, it does not noticeably suffer from the problems that plague free-to-take physical stuff. If keeping the access infrastructure is expensive, shutting it down and making access free may indeed save money. See how it works e.g. for public parks and city streets; both are toll-free.
Yeah I can see how that might work but it’s probably very location/culture dependent.
I have a distinct feeling that in my location there would quickly be loud voices talking about how much of a burden the cost is and the users are freeloading off the “hardworking people of our country” and they should just feel happy with whatever they’re served.
You see this class of argument often when it's pointed out that some issue is handled better in another part of the world; sometimes it seems like a posture of defeatism in the face of evidence that a better way is possible. See also: political polarization as a reason that nothing can ever get better.
Not saying that's how you mean it--I wonder, though, how we go about constructing a better culture? Are we merely victims of the culture we were given? Or are there efforts we can take to change the culture we have for the better? I'm curious what research shows about how cultural attitudes can be changed over time, either for better or worse.
Idk, every public transit system I've been on operated on barely above honor system for fares. Nearly every time someone gets on a bus where I live and their card doesn't work, the driver let's them on anyways and they just shrug. Seattle's monorail system doesn't have any apparent enforcement from what I could tell (I can't speak for their busses, haven't used them in quite awhile).
Most of the systems/employees you mention will be employed or paid for/installed anyways. Do you think that people go to jail or even get anywhere near the DAs desk for a parking ticket? Why would jumping a turnstile be treated different from the legal standpoint.
Points 1-3 are the real investments there and they don't just exist. The other points do indeed exists but with a different workload, which again you could do without. Now the only point forgotten in the other comments is that a small fee, regardless how small, is making the users more responsible - I think at coin-operated shopping carts. But again, you need a level of security anyway, so they could better focus now doing their job: to sort out the disrupters whatever they are - drunks, litterers, vandals.
But it is criminalizing the poor; Someone who isn't paying $2.50 may not have $50, unless they're doing it for the fun. At best you block them from the transit system which stops them from their job, a place to sleep; at worst, it's another fee when they get arrested for something else
But to give a free ticket, you still have to have the enforcement; you still have to use resources from the local government (to collect fines).
If you don't pay for enough enforcement (see NYC, Atlanta, Bart, etc that aren't free and have plenty of broken windows), then you still have a "broken window", only it has cost the system significantly more than your other opportunities, ie, armed security on the trains instead of staring at turnstiles; some positions may even be cheaper than your credit card fees on your profitable customers, less ridership (tourism, can't find card, uber competitor) because of fees and complexities reduces effectiveness of the system.
Some of them are toll roads but yes generally the roads are free.
But the difference there is that the roads are usually maintained for industry, commerce, defence or political pressure.
The people can then use them also but that’s almost an afterthought in the system, the roads will be maintained because of moneyed or political interests.
Public transit is just as important for cities but the powerful advocates are missing.
People that don't use it on a regular basis also benefit in other ways, like cleaner air, less traffic on the roads (leading to better road quality, better emergency response times, etc), and the opportunity to use transit on the occasions when they do need it.
all that's gonna happen is service will get worse, budget cuts will mean there's no way to make up shortfalls, and fewer staff around means more people abusing the system (e.g. defecating on seats, stairs, platforms, attacking other passengers, creating a generally unsafe environment).
I don't expect any of this to be surfaced in the many "experiments" that are now ongoing because of course as we know any inconvenient truths can just be dropped/ignored from the final report as "anomalies" or "non-representative" or "racist".
Fewer other cars on the road - fewer traffic jams, faster to get places, more pleasant drives!
Public transportation benefits even people who don't use it themselves /and also don't care about any of the ways it indirectly benefits them by benefitting others/.
Isn’t this the communist/socialist philosophy that ends up driving programs into mediocrity at best and awful at worst? If a program can’t pay for itself, what incentive does it have to be efficient and operate in the interest of riders? It’s now become a bureaucrat’s slush fund which will see an ever increasing budget divorced from the service it provides.
Others have mentioned public schools, and I would agree. For as expensive as many private schools are, the average cost per student is about 60% that of public schools.
Getting rid of turnstiles and other populating recording devices spreads the gap between ridership and funding even further. Minus fare evasion, there is a direct correlation between fares and riders. Programs to provide free transportation based on income are already available in many metro areas.
Everyone loves “free” stuff, but when it’s not really free, and the cost are just hidden in taxes, most people lose. Being cheaper to fund through taxes now has nothing to do with future costs that no longer correlate to ridership.
If you paid for the bus 100% with your fare it would be completely scalable. If transit demand doubled, revenue would double and they could run twice as many buses.
A fixed amount of public spending (typically 75% of expenses in many transit systems) is not scalable. You could double or triple bus ridership but service deteriorates because you don't get buses. The municipality, bus company, etc. have every incentive for transit promotion to fail because more people taking transit blows up their budget.
Note there is a good case for subsidization in that people riding the bus create benefits for others: 20 people riding the bus can take 20 cars off the road which makes life better for drivers, pedestrians, etc.
I am very much in favor of public transportation, especially light rail. The best systems I’ve used were Seoul and Tokyo. I rode King Metro most working days into Seattle for four years. When I lived near DC I’d rarely drive in because I preferred taking the metro trains.
The solution to congestion, imho, is making public transportation acceptable to the largest customer base by making it clean, convenient, and timely. That might not capture the poorest or the richest, but they still benefit from less congestion, noise, and air pollution.
Making it good would provide more benefits to most cities than making it free, imho.
No. This is about changing how something is paid for under capitalism, and is a very normal way of paying for things under this system.
> If a program can’t pay for itself, what incentive does it have to be efficient and operate in the interest of riders?
The main problem with making it profit-based is that skimming off the top is the basic operating principle; you have strong incentives to make it less safe, not do upgrades, abuse inelastic demand &c. One should hope that the people elected (or appointed by someone elected) would have an incentive to work in the public's interest because they won't be re-elected otherwise, though obviously this doesn't always work. But that's _already_ a problem that needs fixing, so why not two birds with one stone rather than switching over to a funding system absolutely filled to the brim with bad incentives that repeatedly fails us?
> Getting rid of turnstiles and other populating recording devices spreads the gap between ridership and funding even further.
I'm not really sure what you're arguing here.
> Everyone loves “free” stuff, but when it’s not really free, and the cost are just hidden in taxes, most people lose.
The costs are not hidden, they're in your taxes. I also strongly disagree that most people lose when you fund things through taxes. That seems completely ignorant of how a ton of infrastructure and much of society is run.
> Being cheaper to fund through taxes now has nothing to do with future costs that no longer correlate to ridership.
The argument was that funding it not through fares is already _better_ because it can be adjusted to those situations.
The problem is that the most valuable benefits of public transit, such as reduced congestion, reduced pollution, saved lives, etc., aren't priced in such a way that the transit system can charge the beneficiaries.
Instead, the way we run things, transit systems are stuck having to recover their operating expenses from the kind people who volunteer to ride them and thereby create all the real benefits.
In Switzerland we have no turn styles and no gates. You can hop on and off at any point. Rich or poor everyone uses it.
However public transport isn't even close to being free. I fact it is quite expensive in addition to being heavily tax supported.
This is the only way to offer the high quality of service we have from over 92.5% on time trains and 98.7% connections made [1]. It also allows to offer service at infrequent stops out nowhere.
You having a ticket is based on trust. There are random checks on short trip and more regular check on longer trips. It is estimated that around 10% don't have a valid ticket from wrong ticket to people who didn't get one on purpose. To get the percentage lower would cost more than what is lost in revenue and 100% is not something anyone can achieve.
> This is the only way to offer the high quality of service we have
The other way would be to make drivers pay for the advantages that public transportation provides them: Significantly less traffic congestion, etc. Per-km, per-kg charges for cars could be calibrated to completely cover the cost of transit, since many people are too snobbish to ever ride it no matter what the financial situation.
> However public transport isn't even close to being free. I fact it is quite expensive in addition to being heavily tax supported.
Oh boy is it expensive, in particular to the poor foreigners visiting without the half-price card. And for some reason if you're in the know, you can buy all-day whole country covering travel passes for 50 something chf. Something that the foreigners can never get without insider help.
There's absolutely no way it's ever going to be cheaper, the best one can hope is that the prices don't go up very fast. Still, it's cheaper than having a car somehow.
The prices can not go up too fast as their are price controls on how much it can go up (Preisüberwachung). However that doesn't protect against outside inflation which does make it even more expensive for tourists.
Anybody in NYC notice the large amount of people not paying for the bus or subway? It seems optional for a great number of people. I wonder how many people in the average MTA bus have actually paid.
It's good to simplify transit fares as a way to reduce friction, and make it easier to get a ticket. Pittsburgh Regional Transit has done a very good job with these recently.
I just think, from a realpolitik perspective, your average car user (who you definitely need to persuade in order to get their representative to support transit funding) already perceives transit as unprofitable (rightly, for basically anywhere other than NYC) and would therefore find it not just unfeasible, but deeply unfair.
If they're right, then it's a dead end. If not, then it's a persuasion problem, and I don't think people who have advocated for free transit have made the case very well.
> your average car user already perceives transit as unprofitable and would therefore find it not just unfeasible, but deeply unfair.
The average car user probably need to adjust their sentiments on this. Car users are being heavily invested in not only by the infrastructure they get, but also the opportunity costs of the land the roads occupy.
Even in Denmark where cars are taxed at an additional 150% (on top of a 25% VAT) I am quite sure that the regular tax payer subsidizes the car user.
I would love to see actual profitability analysis of these technologies. I am not ure the car users would benefit however.
Yup! And PA Turnpike drivers pay every day for buses in Philadelphia (or Pittsburgh, whichever is more distant to make the point) that they'll never ride.
But at least we have a status quo where both systems are subsidized, and both systems require you to buy in to use them. Why let one group go for free?
They do? The tolls on the pike don't even cover the maintenance on the road. It's the general tax fund, paid into as well by non-drivers, that makes up the difference.
Between 2007 and 2022 they had to pay $450 million a year to fund non-turnpike things, including transit. Between 2013 and 2022 all of that money went to transit. The obligation has since been reduced to $50 million.
In Arizona, 75% of transportation infrastructure comes from licensing, vehicle registration, gas taxes and other miscellaneous income directly related to road use. Does everyone not using those services derive ⅓ the benefit of those that do? You certainly travel on roads and/or use food and services that do?
I’d be completely fine if 100% of transportations budget came from fees directly related to use (increase gas or mileage taxes and decrease income or property taxes). For most people it would probably be net zero, and for those that save on taxes the increased cost to businesses would be passed on to customers in increased prices.
And you can't make the same broad benefit argument for public transit? Rip out the MTA or the El and see how state finances do when all that economic activity in the city center grinds to a halt.
Not to mention that there are more costs to driving than just the physical road - there's the opportunity cost of lost land, injuries, deaths, health effects from exposure to exhaust, climate change....
What about federal funding? USG covers a huge amount of costs in road maintenance.
State funding of roads doesn't nearly cover the overall costs of the freeways.
The $52.5 billion in apportioned funding for Fiscal Year 2022 represents an increase of more than 20% as compared to Fiscal Year 2021 for Federal-aid Highway Program
Looks like transit gets "$18 billion annually for public transportation programs from 2022 to 2026", good for 31% of its capital expenses and 8% of its operating expenses.
My point is that no transit (roads or mass transit) can be fully funded by fares as the function is too important. Also, intestate traffic/rail too important for the federal level.
So the idea that mass transit can go to fare-free and rely entirely on government funding via taxes is the logical conclusion.
Transit (like IT in a company) is an enabler/multiplier, not a product.
I think there could be success in making an argument like this, and pitching consumption taxes could help make that math more apparent without requiring any rhetoric.
> selling us car culture
I think this is a dead end, though. That's why I mentioned realpolitik - something like 92% of Americans have access to a car. A big chunk of these people like car culture, plenty don't particularly care but have built their lives around the status quo, and the ones who don't but participate anyways do so because they're priced out of communities that are walkable/have good transit.
You need ways to gradually make transit better and make people less dependent on cars. I'm an example; work from home allowed me to get rid of our family's second car five years ago.
You could argue that free transit can help with that. I don't; I'd rather see transit extract value from those who are able to pay and be more reliant on operating income, and I don't think "it's too expensive" is the primary reason why most people don't switch to transit. But regardless of what I think, if even 6 out of 10 of that 92% think it's unfair, then it's a political non-starter.
I didn't see any mention of the homeless. Buses and especially trains are sheltered from the outside, have AC and heating and reasonably comfortable seats. You better have a strategy for the homeless.
This is only a concern because of a failure to provide homes for homeless people, which is well known to be the cheapest and most effective policy but is not practiced in the USA because of weird puritan fetishism.
It's not really about transit. Kick them off transit and they'll be somewhere else. They are people, they take up space, they have to be somewhere.
If we have to solve the problem of homelessness before we can have decent public transit... we're going to be waiting a very long time for decent public transit.
The transit mentioned in Kansas City has caused retail business (restaurants, bars, etc.) in downtown Kansas City to just explode in popularity.
You would think that raising property taxes along the route would pay for the streetcar — and it has to be the case that that property is skyrocketing in value.
Someone just needs to add Prohibition-era-style jazz clubs and the area will become even hotter than it is now.
In Salt Lake City, Utah the trams are free in the downtown area. You only have to pay if you ride it outside of there. That seems like a nice way to do it. People who wouldn't normally ride it use it because it's free. And then maybe some of them end up using it more often when they see how nice it is.
Preamble: While I do live in a city mentioned in this article, I don't use the public transportation here.
I recently visited Tucson, Arizona for a company summit and was pleasantly surprised when taking the local trolly. I didn't have to think about where to buy a fare, how much I would need, which stops I would have to get off/on at, or the fear that I might accidentally get on/off at the wrong stop and be forced to repurchase a fare. I just walked on and off.
I'm happy that my tax dollars might go to something like this that would make the lives of tourists, or those who can't afford personal transportation, that much easier.
Here in NL, the public transport is often praised. It's also the second-most expensive public transport in the world [1].
Anecdotes are not data and correlation is not causations. That said, it's still useful to look at correlation between price and service all around the world, instead of making assumptions that might seem logical at first, but fail to consider the counterintuitive effects of a policy.
> But getting rid of them across an entire transit system also benefits higher-income people who are capable of paying fares and could provide much-needed revenue to agencies.
Oh no, non-poor people might be seeing a benefit from the tax dollars they pay! The horror!
My town built a north-south buss that has it's own street for most of the route. It ran every 10 min and was pretty useful and popular. During covid they quit charging fare and also changed to 20min frequency.
Now you may have to wait 40 min for a round trip depending on when you get to the station. This makes it hard to use the bus for a lunch errand where you need to be back in an hour.
I think the fare + high frequency system worked better.
In my city, the dominant user of the rail service ate homeless people getting out of the weather and into a climate controlled space other than the library.
Free fares will probably simply add more of those and add a few ticket checkers into the mix when they lose their jobs.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 47.6 ms ] threadIn a low-trust world, it removes a useful excuse for enforcers to kick troublemakers off the line.
A middle ground could be tried (and I think some cities have) where they keep fares and such (and soak the tourists, of course) but then give free passes to all residents in the city.
There’s also the argument, elaborated in that article, that the main reason people (low income or not) don’t take the bus is not that they find the fare expensive but because of the quality of the service, especially frequency.
I take the bus to work maybe 80% of the time from a rural area, I work 9-5 so it works OK, but if I miss the one bus home I am in a world of hurt because I have to wait two hours for the next bus. If the bus ran every ten minutes that would be quite transformative. For instance if you miss the bus or the bus was only 90% reliable it would be no big deal.
People will say that the population is too dispersed in my area and that it couldn’t support more frequent service, but there are several population concentrations on the route and the bus is frequently close to 50% full (when they replace the full size bus with a mini-bus, they sometimes have to leave passengers on the curb). If buses ran more frequently there would certainly be some “induced demand” as more people decide buses will meet their needs.
It’s possible that more people would take transit if the service was more expensive but better quality.
There are places like the Central Valley of California where you can drive a mile and it is all the same farm. There are places like Montana. I'm a mile from a state forest and own about 65 acres, and I'm about 2 miles from the bus stop which is at this (relatively) high density development
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Boiceville+Cottages/@42.38...
there are also two small towns on the route, a subsidized housing project, and route 79 has a stretch of single family houses stacked two deep (roughly every other driveway goes to a house behind the house in front!)
It helps that Tompkins County has one dominant employer (Cornell University) that pays for a bus pass for all faculty, staff and students. Bus service on a triangle between the downtown, Cornell and the mall is absolutely excellent. (15 minutes) If you work 9-5 at Cornell it is easy to get to outlying towns like Dryden, Trumansburg, Groton, Newfield, Danby, etc. There is also bus service to nearby state parks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRi2ACqZHCI there are even songs about it.
Often they stop at the small towns, so really rural people still have to walk to town, but from there they can get "to the big city".
That said, SCMTD bus drivers are allowed to kick anyone off that is being disruptive or a safety hazard. I have also seen them refuse to allow someone entry due to a pattern of belligerence.
The biggest obstacle at this point is the lack of drivers. With housing more and more unaffordable, many non-tech or non-boutique jobs are getting harder and harder to fill. This leaves unexpected gaps in service that can annoyingly delay your travels.
The underlying 'trouble' that makes someone a 'troublemaker' (e.g. aggressive panhandling, disruptive behavior, public drunkenness, etc.) are still reasons to be kicked off public transportation irrespective of how much the fare is.
Also, there are tremendous operating cost savings to a free at the point of use transit system. No ticket machines, turnstiles, the associated maintenance, ticketing staff, fare enforcement officers/police in places where there aren't turnstiles. Additionally, without turnstiles, people can enter and exit metro stations more quickly during peak service hours. On buses, the driver doesn't need to waste time dealing with payments.
It's cheaper to fund a public transportation system through taxation. Some may make the argument that why should people that don't use it have to pay for it? Well, since it's now included in your taxes, there's an incentive for you now to use it. For the wealthy that would never use it, I argue that they benefit from it. Their workers use the system to get to work, their customers use it to arrive at their businesses, students use it to get to school. These students use that education to become employees at those businesses.
The ironic part is, the poor and middle class may vote for it, but it's the local property owners that pay for it.
And the local property owners that benefit in increased real estate prices.
Taxation almost never makes anything cheaper here.
Its the poor class that uses public transit because it is substandard, and they dont have other choices.
Public transit is substandard because public transit has to fight on the regular roads, and not dedicated track/roads for transit. This means it is innately as slow or slower than driving. Because of this, it anyone who has a car WILL TAKE A CAR.
For example, it takes me 20 minutes to go from 1 side of the city to the other. Using the bus routes, its 2 hours. This is the predominant reason why people don't use public transit - 6 times longer.
Free is an essential start, though.
Compared to SEPTA (Philly's bus system) this seems way off base. Yes, it takes longer to take the bus than to drive yourself because the bus has to stop for passengers. But your own car will still have to stop at red lights, wait for pedestrians, etc., nearly as much as a bus. I can see 30-45 minutes for a bus ride comparable to a 20 minute direct drive, but any more than that points to some other problem with your city's roads.
Overall transit works great if most people are going to a few central points. It's much more difficult if the destinations are distributed. Frequent service could be a balm for that: if you had buses every ten minutes on all routes transfers would not be bad at all.
Concrete example for my city. Going from the east end to the west end took over 2 hours. And most of it was on the rail system - so not competing with traffic. But it involved one transfer for the train, and another for the bus near the end of my destination.
Frequent stops - by both the train and the bus, as well as the stops, made it take a lot longer. In my case a car would have done it in about 40 minutes.
It may be a problem with the city, but it’s still a problem.
I would LOVE nice public transit where I would call a taxi OR walk to the public transit station, then get to a hub, and then head to the east/west coast. That *used* to be possible, with even commuter train stations available at cities with 1000 people. No more.
I WfH, so I'm already reducing my vehicular load on the atmo. I mow perhaps 4 times a year. Again, less poison in atmo. But when I want to pop over to the nearest big city (You know, microcenter/electronics/hobby/etc) I have only 1 choice. Car.
Maybe in eastern seabed cities that actually built their cities with public transit, it just works for you, cause those cities weren't completely demolished for interstates (well, just the redlined/black population of cities; they were demolished). But past your east coast mentality, the rest of us have no real choices. And it sucks.
And also, major shoutout to "Not Just Bikes" yt channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/notjustbikes
That's a problem that cities solve by using dedicated bus lanes. We should work on making public transportation faster and car transportation slower to change which mode of transportation that people are incentivized to use. Car owners are heavily subsidized by monopolizing the roads for an extremely inefficient per person mode of transportation. Cities subsidize them for any parking that is free. We all pay for the externalities of air pollution, climate change, and city space wasted on street parking and public/private parking lots/garages.
My coworkers thought I was crazy taking the bus thinking it was full of homeless. It was mostly lawyers, judges, jurists going to the federal court as well as medical staff at the nearby hospital. Based on the designer suits alone I can guarantee almost everyone had a European car or large body SUV sitting at home.
Free is a good start but if it still takes 2+ hours to get to a $15/hr job it's still a bad deal.
Dedicated bus lanes don't run on regular roads, either.
Public standard is substandard when it's badly run, and not because it's public transit. People who have a car may still decide that the costs of running it are greater than the costs of using public transit.
While what you say is true in principle, in practice it would quickly translate into deteriorating service.
Public transit is and should of course always be mostly tax funded, but a small fare can add money in the system, it adds demands from users and a sense of responsibility for the suppliers.
The fare is always much cheaper than operating a car and its easy to have discount programs for those that need it.
Enforcement can be as easy as random checks, all the fancy infrastructure is not really needed although for underground systems its good to have a little barrier for entry.
I can afford a car just fine but I don’t want to spend my money on it just to get to work.
The real measure of the affluence and quality of life in a city is how large a portion of the wealthy take transit. The higher the better.
Actually its not that easy. You need someone to check income threshold (how?), have a separate program to distribute that special fare, monitor for fraud, special fare system, etc. Tons of people that would benefit from cheaper fare end up not having access to it if the way to get that discount ends up being complicated (as many social programs are).
I agree transit should be cheaper, not free, but often cheaper helps everyone and encourage habits to change, even among the middle class.
Cast a wide net, 50% discount for students, municipalities can hook people up with free or discounted passes depending on their municipal tax returns, it can all be automated even.
Some who don’t need discounts will get them and some who need them won’t but they will get better quality of service however. And if they don’t manage to get themselves a discount by any means, if the alternative is buying a car they’re saving anyway.
The absolute amount of money collected isn’t really the point, just that there is some of it and it is a non-negligible portion of the total.
I don't think this will actually measure anything but gentrification and how few social services a city offers. Of the wealthy friends I have, the reasons they don't take public transit are always either time or the trash people. Of those categories, I know a few willing to deal with the wasted time to feel good but none willing to deal with the junkies, homeless, or hood crowd. If none of these groups are on your public transit it's either because you priced them out or the region is already hostile enough to keep them out.
Provide transit cards to those with low income budgeted through programs that are tasked with dealing with social welfare, homelessness, and rehabilitation. Let transit programs stick with transit.
I took public transit most work days using various methods in the Seattle metro area for years. The only one I didn’t frequently use (but did occasionally) were busses in the free ride zone outside of the bus tunnel.
Since mass transit access is something you can't badly overconsume in a sensible way, nor can you hoard and resell it in meaningful quantities, it does not noticeably suffer from the problems that plague free-to-take physical stuff. If keeping the access infrastructure is expensive, shutting it down and making access free may indeed save money. See how it works e.g. for public parks and city streets; both are toll-free.
I have a distinct feeling that in my location there would quickly be loud voices talking about how much of a burden the cost is and the users are freeloading off the “hardworking people of our country” and they should just feel happy with whatever they’re served.
You see this class of argument often when it's pointed out that some issue is handled better in another part of the world; sometimes it seems like a posture of defeatism in the face of evidence that a better way is possible. See also: political polarization as a reason that nothing can ever get better.
Not saying that's how you mean it--I wonder, though, how we go about constructing a better culture? Are we merely victims of the culture we were given? Or are there efforts we can take to change the culture we have for the better? I'm curious what research shows about how cultural attitudes can be changed over time, either for better or worse.
That's the above poster's point; A small fare can easily cost more for infrastructure and enforcement than it brings into the system.
To the extreme, consider fare/ turnstile jumping. Requires
1. Ticket Sales (requires cash management, or credit card fees; $0.25 is a significant amount of $2.50)
2. Video or Person watching from turnstyle booth
3. Turnstile (that must be ADA, emergency, traveling with a roller bag, traveling with children compatible)
4. An officer to identify and ticket the offender.
5. A District Attorney to pursue charges
6. A judge to hear a defense
7. a courthouse bursar
8. a warrant officer to arrest someone charged with a $2.50 fare jump
9. a jail cell.
The real cost though, is criminalization of the poor, in a high income inequality country.
Most of the systems/employees you mention will be employed or paid for/installed anyways. Do you think that people go to jail or even get anywhere near the DAs desk for a parking ticket? Why would jumping a turnstile be treated different from the legal standpoint.
A parking ticket has an identification system via a license plate (or VIN number); so they can be identified later.
Jumping a fare, you've not given any identifying information until detained.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fare_evasion#Civil_and_crimina...
But it is criminalizing the poor; Someone who isn't paying $2.50 may not have $50, unless they're doing it for the fun. At best you block them from the transit system which stops them from their job, a place to sleep; at worst, it's another fee when they get arrested for something else
The point is to avoid normalizing the turnstile jumps at stations, where everyone sees them. See broken windows theory.
If you don't pay for enough enforcement (see NYC, Atlanta, Bart, etc that aren't free and have plenty of broken windows), then you still have a "broken window", only it has cost the system significantly more than your other opportunities, ie, armed security on the trains instead of staring at turnstiles; some positions may even be cheaper than your credit card fees on your profitable customers, less ridership (tourism, can't find card, uber competitor) because of fees and complexities reduces effectiveness of the system.
But the difference there is that the roads are usually maintained for industry, commerce, defence or political pressure.
The people can then use them also but that’s almost an afterthought in the system, the roads will be maintained because of moneyed or political interests.
Public transit is just as important for cities but the powerful advocates are missing.
Agree with premise about free transit, or at-least certain free routes.
I don't expect any of this to be surfaced in the many "experiments" that are now ongoing because of course as we know any inconvenient truths can just be dropped/ignored from the final report as "anomalies" or "non-representative" or "racist".
Fewer other cars on the road - fewer traffic jams, faster to get places, more pleasant drives!
Public transportation benefits even people who don't use it themselves /and also don't care about any of the ways it indirectly benefits them by benefitting others/.
Others have mentioned public schools, and I would agree. For as expensive as many private schools are, the average cost per student is about 60% that of public schools.
Getting rid of turnstiles and other populating recording devices spreads the gap between ridership and funding even further. Minus fare evasion, there is a direct correlation between fares and riders. Programs to provide free transportation based on income are already available in many metro areas.
Everyone loves “free” stuff, but when it’s not really free, and the cost are just hidden in taxes, most people lose. Being cheaper to fund through taxes now has nothing to do with future costs that no longer correlate to ridership.
If you paid for the bus 100% with your fare it would be completely scalable. If transit demand doubled, revenue would double and they could run twice as many buses.
A fixed amount of public spending (typically 75% of expenses in many transit systems) is not scalable. You could double or triple bus ridership but service deteriorates because you don't get buses. The municipality, bus company, etc. have every incentive for transit promotion to fail because more people taking transit blows up their budget.
Note there is a good case for subsidization in that people riding the bus create benefits for others: 20 people riding the bus can take 20 cars off the road which makes life better for drivers, pedestrians, etc.
The solution to congestion, imho, is making public transportation acceptable to the largest customer base by making it clean, convenient, and timely. That might not capture the poorest or the richest, but they still benefit from less congestion, noise, and air pollution.
Making it good would provide more benefits to most cities than making it free, imho.
> Isn’t this the communist/socialist philosophy
No. This is about changing how something is paid for under capitalism, and is a very normal way of paying for things under this system.
> If a program can’t pay for itself, what incentive does it have to be efficient and operate in the interest of riders?
The main problem with making it profit-based is that skimming off the top is the basic operating principle; you have strong incentives to make it less safe, not do upgrades, abuse inelastic demand &c. One should hope that the people elected (or appointed by someone elected) would have an incentive to work in the public's interest because they won't be re-elected otherwise, though obviously this doesn't always work. But that's _already_ a problem that needs fixing, so why not two birds with one stone rather than switching over to a funding system absolutely filled to the brim with bad incentives that repeatedly fails us?
> Getting rid of turnstiles and other populating recording devices spreads the gap between ridership and funding even further.
I'm not really sure what you're arguing here.
> Everyone loves “free” stuff, but when it’s not really free, and the cost are just hidden in taxes, most people lose.
The costs are not hidden, they're in your taxes. I also strongly disagree that most people lose when you fund things through taxes. That seems completely ignorant of how a ton of infrastructure and much of society is run.
> Being cheaper to fund through taxes now has nothing to do with future costs that no longer correlate to ridership.
The argument was that funding it not through fares is already _better_ because it can be adjusted to those situations.
The problem is that the most valuable benefits of public transit, such as reduced congestion, reduced pollution, saved lives, etc., aren't priced in such a way that the transit system can charge the beneficiaries.
Instead, the way we run things, transit systems are stuck having to recover their operating expenses from the kind people who volunteer to ride them and thereby create all the real benefits.
However public transport isn't even close to being free. I fact it is quite expensive in addition to being heavily tax supported.
This is the only way to offer the high quality of service we have from over 92.5% on time trains and 98.7% connections made [1]. It also allows to offer service at infrequent stops out nowhere.
You having a ticket is based on trust. There are random checks on short trip and more regular check on longer trips. It is estimated that around 10% don't have a valid ticket from wrong ticket to people who didn't get one on purpose. To get the percentage lower would cost more than what is lost in revenue and 100% is not something anyone can achieve.
[1] https://news.sbb.ch/medien/artikel/115696/gute-puenktlichkei...
The other way would be to make drivers pay for the advantages that public transportation provides them: Significantly less traffic congestion, etc. Per-km, per-kg charges for cars could be calibrated to completely cover the cost of transit, since many people are too snobbish to ever ride it no matter what the financial situation.
Oh boy is it expensive, in particular to the poor foreigners visiting without the half-price card. And for some reason if you're in the know, you can buy all-day whole country covering travel passes for 50 something chf. Something that the foreigners can never get without insider help.
There's absolutely no way it's ever going to be cheaper, the best one can hope is that the prices don't go up very fast. Still, it's cheaper than having a car somehow.
I just think, from a realpolitik perspective, your average car user (who you definitely need to persuade in order to get their representative to support transit funding) already perceives transit as unprofitable (rightly, for basically anywhere other than NYC) and would therefore find it not just unfeasible, but deeply unfair.
If they're right, then it's a dead end. If not, then it's a persuasion problem, and I don't think people who have advocated for free transit have made the case very well.
The average car user probably need to adjust their sentiments on this. Car users are being heavily invested in not only by the infrastructure they get, but also the opportunity costs of the land the roads occupy.
Even in Denmark where cars are taxed at an additional 150% (on top of a 25% VAT) I am quite sure that the regular tax payer subsidizes the car user.
I would love to see actual profitability analysis of these technologies. I am not ure the car users would benefit however.
Sure, but they also have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to buy into the ecosystem, insure their vehicle, and keep it fueled and maintained.
Your normie car driver is gonna say "I have to pay $xxx a month to go anywhere, why should others get to go somewhere for free?"
To be clear, I'm all in favor of whatever policy encourages more mass transit. I'm just trying to be pragmatic here.
> The average car user probably need to adjust their sentiments on this
That's why I said what I said. If it's a persuasion problem, then a better case needs to be made.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbEuaCCV-zg
But at least we have a status quo where both systems are subsidized, and both systems require you to buy in to use them. Why let one group go for free?
They do? The tolls on the pike don't even cover the maintenance on the road. It's the general tax fund, paid into as well by non-drivers, that makes up the difference.
Between 2007 and 2022 they had to pay $450 million a year to fund non-turnpike things, including transit. Between 2013 and 2022 all of that money went to transit. The obligation has since been reduced to $50 million.
I’d be completely fine if 100% of transportations budget came from fees directly related to use (increase gas or mileage taxes and decrease income or property taxes). For most people it would probably be net zero, and for those that save on taxes the increased cost to businesses would be passed on to customers in increased prices.
Not to mention that there are more costs to driving than just the physical road - there's the opportunity cost of lost land, injuries, deaths, health effects from exposure to exhaust, climate change....
State funding of roads doesn't nearly cover the overall costs of the freeways. The $52.5 billion in apportioned funding for Fiscal Year 2022 represents an increase of more than 20% as compared to Fiscal Year 2021 for Federal-aid Highway Program
US Taxpayers cover this.
[1] https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/fhwa-delivers-l....
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57940
So it gets federal dollars too. And things like roads and bridges are also subsidizing transit because buses will use them too.
So the idea that mass transit can go to fare-free and rely entirely on government funding via taxes is the logical conclusion.
Transit (like IT in a company) is an enabler/multiplier, not a product.
The oil/car lobby has spent billions in advertising and popular media selling us car culture.
I think there could be success in making an argument like this, and pitching consumption taxes could help make that math more apparent without requiring any rhetoric.
> selling us car culture
I think this is a dead end, though. That's why I mentioned realpolitik - something like 92% of Americans have access to a car. A big chunk of these people like car culture, plenty don't particularly care but have built their lives around the status quo, and the ones who don't but participate anyways do so because they're priced out of communities that are walkable/have good transit.
You need ways to gradually make transit better and make people less dependent on cars. I'm an example; work from home allowed me to get rid of our family's second car five years ago.
You could argue that free transit can help with that. I don't; I'd rather see transit extract value from those who are able to pay and be more reliant on operating income, and I don't think "it's too expensive" is the primary reason why most people don't switch to transit. But regardless of what I think, if even 6 out of 10 of that 92% think it's unfair, then it's a political non-starter.
It's not really about transit. Kick them off transit and they'll be somewhere else. They are people, they take up space, they have to be somewhere.
You would think that raising property taxes along the route would pay for the streetcar — and it has to be the case that that property is skyrocketing in value.
Someone just needs to add Prohibition-era-style jazz clubs and the area will become even hotter than it is now.
I recently visited Tucson, Arizona for a company summit and was pleasantly surprised when taking the local trolly. I didn't have to think about where to buy a fare, how much I would need, which stops I would have to get off/on at, or the fear that I might accidentally get on/off at the wrong stop and be forced to repurchase a fare. I just walked on and off.
I'm happy that my tax dollars might go to something like this that would make the lives of tourists, or those who can't afford personal transportation, that much easier.
Anecdotes are not data and correlation is not causations. That said, it's still useful to look at correlation between price and service all around the world, instead of making assumptions that might seem logical at first, but fail to consider the counterintuitive effects of a policy.
[1] https://nltimes.nl/2023/07/13/netherlands-public-transport-2...
Oh no, non-poor people might be seeing a benefit from the tax dollars they pay! The horror!
Free fares will probably simply add more of those and add a few ticket checkers into the mix when they lose their jobs.