In Brisbane, Australia they run a 6-month trial to make all public transport trips to be 50c (that includes buses, metro, ferries). It was so successful and widely loved that it was a no-brainier for it to be extended indefinitely
This is just an anecdote, but I got the sense from living in North Liberty, near Iowa City, that the police didn't have much to do. That is, I was pulled over for minor things like going 5 over the speed limit and running a yellow light (when I could have conceivably stopped).
So when I see stories like this I compare it to people suggesting we adopt a Scandinavian public school policy, it worked for them why not us, proposal.
Whenever this is discussed where I live, drivers come out of the woodwork to oppose it. And of course they also complain endlessly about traffic. It amuses me to no end.
This is misleading. How far is your drive from home to your destination in SF? I bet the total cost of ownership per kilometer driven far exceeds the BART fare.
All public transport should be like $1. You need to charge something to keep the crackheads out, but it should not be enough that people think 'oh I better walk/cycle/drive instead to save money'
Fares end up being a trade off between service area and ridership. Eliminating fares tends to mean cuts to service for the same budget, so your service area would drop. Alternatively, having fares will allow for some more service, to cover more area but some people might not ride. Becomes dependent then on the goals of the transit system.
Models are typically smaller scale/scope... So a "real urban center" could probably easily provide service that smaller cities can't.
As to why Iowa City doesn't run on Sundays and Federal Holidays:
The University is about half the population of the city. The University runs a separate "Cambus" system[1] (that the community can also use) and after-hours routes for students[2].
We're also still in relatively early days of finding out how Iowa City residents use public transit when there's no barrier. For instance, they stopped running the downtown shuttle and reduced the number of stops downtown[3] because downtown is relatively dense, walkable, and student-heavy (i.e. mostly young, healthy, ambulatory people) and served by the University.
There's also a growing interest in adding service to nearby towns and adding Sunday service, even if it's in a limited capacity.
San Francisco's Muni (light rail + bus) system has a budget of about $1.2B and its ticket revenues are about $200M. That means, 5/6th of the budget is subsidized by the taxpayers of SF. There is no reason why Muni can't be free. Surely a city with a budget of $15B can find $200M (about 1.5% of budget) to make up for the shortfall?
It would directly help the taxpayers of the City. But obviously nobody wants that (sarcasm)!
Example: the City has been trying to get rid of the RVs parked illegally on the streets, dumping their effluents and engine oil all over the City streets. To get these RVs off the streets, the City is spending $36M+ (and counting). So money can be found for the homeless, the RV dwelllers, etc. but not for the city's lawful residents and taxpayers.
SF's budget doesn't contain $15B of money it can use for whatever it wants. Most of it isn't discretionary, either because of voter mandates or by federal/state government requirements and has to go to specific programs. A good chunk is actually city businesses (hospitals, airport, utility, port, etc.) which mostly break even.
SF was able to spend money trying to getting rid of RVs because it was living on emergency money from the state and shifting capital expenditure priorities around (capital expenditures costs are offset mostly by the asset you're buying, at least in the short term).
That emergency money is gone now, so now we're living in an era of budget cuts, though given SF's history, I full expect it to spend money recklessly and hope revenue turns around, but even they aren't so far gone to add $300M in operating expenditures to make MUNI free with no plan for a source of revenue to make up the difference.
SF Muni is literally so deep in a financial hole, service may be cut in half next summer if they don't pass a sizable spending measure (the last two both failed). SFMTA faces a deficit of about $320 million starting next year... and that will grow. The system has already been bailed out by the state. We now going to get a $750 million loan is just to keep the system functioning until the measure has a chance to pass.
This platitude of "Muni should be free" has no bearing on reality when the system is literally collapsing as we speak.
The MVTA in Minnesota operates with 90% subsidies, so only 10% of revenue is from fares.
It feels like there could be some societal benefit to similarly reducing the number of busses and just making them free. (Today most busses are only at 10-30% capacity). This seems to support that idea.
This is one of those NYTimes "solutions journalism" pieces meant to celebrate the program rather than truly analyze it.
You can pick free, or scalable, or financially sustainable (and without sustainability, a political shift will kill it), but you cannot have all three at once. The minute you push on one, second-order effects pop up somewhere else.
It is a classic wicked problem: solving it literally changes the problem.
Big-city transit has an equilibrium point, and it is incredibly stable. Every serious transit city in the world ends up in the same place: charge fares, subsidize low-income riders, and fund the basic system with taxes.
That equilibrium is stable for a reason. Every major city that tries free transit at scale will eventually snap back to it, because it is the only configuration that does not implode under feedback loops. It keeps demand reasonable, service reliable, and the politics tolerable.
> financially sustainable (and without sustainability, a political shift will kill it)
Fiscally sustainable is a BS excuse often put forward by conservatives to not fund the things they don't want funded. Most things the government runs are not fiscally sustainable on their own, but they provide some sort of societal value. See things like the military, police, fire departments, etc...
A political shift could certain still kill it, but let's not pretend it has anything to do with fiscal policy.
> Every major city that tries free transit at scale will eventually snap back to it, because it is the only configuration that does not implode under feedback loops.
Less Jevons Paradox and more Theory of Constraints...
Five million people are not going to descend on Iowa City because buses are free. Luxembourg has full free public transport from buses to trains, with no feedback loops. Same in Tallinn, Estonia capital where is free for residents.
You are objectively wrong. Public transit scales the same way free and paid (i.e. based on demand). The cost for free countrywide public transport in a country with very high quality public transportation (so not the US) is about 8k per person, per year. This isn't some insurmountable amount of money - it's not even particularly costly when you compare it to what the infrastructure costs are for cars (mostly related to accident mitigation. Especially bad in the US).
> Every serious transit city in the world ends up in the same place
If we look to Asia, we see that's not the only way things can work. Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, Tokyo, Osaka, are serious transit cities in my book, and their way is to have property development, diversified business models, or operating in extremely dense corridors where demand is high enough to cover costs through fares alone.
But you're right that "just run trains and collect fares" doesn't work and has to be subsidized everywhere else. The question is, how do you account for the subsidies that cars get. The cost to invade Iraq isn't usually accounted for when screaming about how much it costs to fund public transportation out of tax money.
sounds smart, but this a false premise because its not zero sum and theres this magical thing called taxes that allow you to reap the benefits of a more productive system.
If you have free public transit and that enables more economic activity or more disposable income to be funneled into services that boost the tax rake of the city the gains can offset the cost. This is an equation none of us have the info to do as randos online and its pointless to claim otherwise.
and even if your point was true free buses are a partial subsidy to low income people like you suggest in nyc its busses are a predominantly taken by low income individuals (source https://blog.tstc.org/2014/04/11/nyc-bus-riders-tend-to-be-o... subway nearly everyone, and ride share has their own tax as well.
> charge fares, subsidize low-income riders, and fund the basic system with taxes.
Car traffic is also expensive. Highways, parking, and maintenance are massively subsidized through taxes, and they consume far more space per traveler making cities more congested and polluted.
Cities with good public transport also tend to be more walkable, which has health benefits and could provide significant impact to healthcare costs.
According to this article, every $1 invested in public transit generates about $5 in economic returns:
A transit ride in the US might be $12 of subsidies and a $2 fare. Making the ride $14 of subsidies isn't a big difference. There are even situations where eliminating fares saves money because of the overhead.
That said we'd probably be better off if we eliminated subsidies and introduced competition.
The thing about public bus systems is that none of them are financially sustainable. If they were, you wouldn't need a government to run them.
My local system collects about 1/3rd of the annual operational costs and none of the (sizable) capital & infrastructural costs in fares.
The choice to collect insufficient fares versus collecting no fares at all, has secondary effects - fewer people choose to ride, spending any money is a psychological nudge against taking the trip, especially if you're not sure how much money you're going to have to spend. The car historically appears to be ~free, while the bus demands exact change in an impatient voice. You can solve the change issue with cards, but you could also just not charge fares.
Let's say you double ridership by taking away fares. This doubling adds approximately nothing to your considerable costs, but you get twice as much direct social benefit, and the price you pay for it is having to cover ~100% of the program cost using taxes instead of ~90%. On top of this you get secondary social benefit - buses move people so much more efficiently than cars that traffic speeds up dramatically, and you don't need to perform continuous expansion of the road network to accommodate ever-growing traffic problems. The labor value of those hours stuck in traffic alone covers the whole program, even if that value isn't something you can practically "capture" for some kind of profit.
> You can pick free, or scalable, or financially sustainable (and without sustainability, a political shift will kill it), but you cannot have all three at once.
You can't name three things, rule out any combination that includes more than two things, and call it a day.
The gas saved is less resources wasted, savings which to a large part are taxable. Etc.
You mean capitalists will stir up a shitfit if they aren't allowed to profit from someones misfortune. The proper amount of traffic on roads should be close to 0. All LA would have to do is offer more and free bus rides and charge for driving in the city and everyone would save hours of their life for no cost.
> You can pick free, or scalable, or financially sustainable (and without sustainability, a political shift will kill it), but you cannot have all three at once. The minute you push on one, second-order effects pop up somewhere else.
What is your basis for this assertion? One could simply increase the tax rate on high income earners and large property holders and readily fund fare free transportation in a financially sustainable and scalable way.
I believe the unstated mechanism of failure here is "it will piss off the wealthy and they will kill it" - which, at some point, needs to stop being true about literally everything in our society, or some extremely unpleasant consequences will manifest.
So, in Ireland, which has a historically pretty terrible public transport system, the government has been fairly aggressively cutting fares. A journey which cost me about 6 euro literally 20 years ago (about 9 euro in today's money) now costs 2 euro, transport is free for kids under 8 and extremely cheap for people under 25, and so on. And it has _worked_; public transport utilisation is dramatically up.
Now, maybe there's a point where it stops working as you reduce fares. But it's not particularly _clear_ that that is the case.
Here in Czechia, I lived in two cities with a great public transport system. Prague and Ostrava. Ostrava, despite being much poorer, is actually often voted to have the best system in CZ, because the management is really creative and diligent here and they often pull off miracles with a relatively small purse.
That said, yes, it is a major burden on municipal finances. The taxpayer here is mostly OK with it, but compromises have to be done, such as fixing sidewalks when they really fall apart and not a day sooner. Maths cannot really be wished away.
Important factors that plague the entire system:
* fluctuations in cost of energy. The Russo-Ukrainian war, European Green Deal etc. Getting a multi-year contract for electricity that can be used as a basis for budgeting has become impossible,
* driver wages. Drivers can move around the EU and they indeed often do, being a wandering folk almost by definition. Thus every city in the EU competes with Stockholm, Amsterdam or Milan on wages, while having half or less the economic power of those metropolises. So you have to find a precarious balance between "paying your drivers so little that they leave for greener pastures" and "paying your drivers so much that the budget cannot tolerate it".
Full self-driving could alleviate the second problem. Robots don't eat and don't pay any rent.
I think if you treat the bus including "externalities", the bus problem might be very smart.
What if you include road construction and widening, road repair costs, impact of traffic on commerce and taxes, and more nebulous stuff like pollution, quality of life, noise, etc.?
The article is dishonest. A better title would be: "Making transit free in Iowa City did not significantly increase the ridership (just 18% over the 2019 level), while imposing more taxes on everyone".
They claim to have removed 5200 cars, out of area of 500000 people ("Iowa City-Cedar Rapids statistical region"). The increase is pitiful, from 6.7% of people using transit to 7.2% with the rest being car commutes.
Neither has it "cleared the traffic". Iowa City is also a well-run city, with just a 17-minute average commute time, indicating that it has no congestion to speak of.
Not only that, it can be infeasible for a single-passenger as well. There's only the train available here, and I need to be ~400km away every couple months. Most of the time tickets are ~40€, but sometimes they're 200€+ one-way, even if you book weeks in advance. It makes it infeasible to plan anything when prices may fluctuate so wildly.
As a comparison, my 2009 diesel gets me there at around 4,7L/100km, but let's round it to 5, at average cost of fuel 1,65€/L that's 33€, for a single passenger, and I can leave whenever I want, have any sort of holdup and just go.
Irish Rail wants to charge me €15-€20 for a single trip from Wexford to Dublin, a 150km trip that would cost roughly €5 when taking my EV and can be an hour quicker with nice traffic. Buses aren't much better.
Sure, parking and wear/tear on my car needs to be factored in, but the moment I'm not travelling alone, the public transport costs are completely blown out the water. A trip to the big city for me and my wife will be €60 when taking the train, and with the car it will be about €20-€30 depending on where I park.
It's crazy frustrating, because I would LOVE to take public transport more.
The claimed increase in ridership is modest (18%) off a low baseline (0 service on weekends) and occurred over a long time period (pre-pandemic to today.) They also expanded service during that period, which probably fully explains the increase in ridership. Certainly the reduction in fare ($1-->0) is nice for some people, but it's hard to imagine that it is actually decisive for a large portion of trips.
The estimates of traffic reduction and CO2 reduction just quote the city's numbers without establishing that "traffic cleared, and so did the air."
Key paragraphs:
> In 2021, the city starting [sic] running more buses, streamlining routes and seriously considering waiving the $1 fares. In 2023, the City Council voted to pay for a two-year fare-free pilot with Covid-19 relief funds.
...
> Ridership eventually grew to 118 percent of prepandemic levels, compared to the average nationally transit ridership-recovery levels of 85 percent.
In a country like the US there are many opportunities like this to improve the overall status but other than small hyper local changes nothing will happen at a large scale because the powers be will not let it happen.
Problem is politcians and aspiring politicians/media influencers have figured out that the money is not in solving problems but keeping it in the news and agitating people. They will never do anything to solve problems but keep throwing wrenches and never let it be solved. Well, if it’s solved they need to find a new problem, worse still, what if people now expect things to be actually solved!
In my country, the elderly used to ride for free on busses and trams. 15 years ago I was involved in this problem where some decided to get on a bus or tram in the morning, go back and forth all day, bring a lunchbox, and go home just in time for the favorite soap series. They got free heating and some social contact.
It turned out, in my region, about 1/3 of public transport capacity was lost on them on peak hours. Also, some decided a specific seat was 'theirs' and started verbally abusing 'seat thiefs', throwing their stuff around, or even hitting them with canes. They also drove everyone bonkers by begging drivers to speed up or change routes so they would be home in time for their favorite soap series.
At the time, not much was done about it. The busses and trams forced everyone off at the terminus, made a round, enforced being empty while pausing a bit, and then the elderly were allowed back on, but at least places got shuffled and others got a chance for a seat. There was great gnashing of teeth about this decision.
I still feel double about it. It is very sad how this was a great life quality improvement for these people, but public transport is not the right medium for fixing this.
I read an old study that claimed driving a mile cost society 20 cents and cycling a mile had 20 cents of societal benefits.
I'd imagine public transport is similar so we should move the Overton window towards bus and train tickets entering you into a lottery funded by charging cars for entry to, and for parking in, downtown areas.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 64.8 ms ] threadSo when I see stories like this I compare it to people suggesting we adopt a Scandinavian public school policy, it worked for them why not us, proposal.
I wonder how much the traffic would improve in/out of SF if BART is cheaper.
Maybe this program wouldn't work everywhere. Makes sense it would work there.
As to why Iowa City doesn't run on Sundays and Federal Holidays:
The University is about half the population of the city. The University runs a separate "Cambus" system[1] (that the community can also use) and after-hours routes for students[2].
We're also still in relatively early days of finding out how Iowa City residents use public transit when there's no barrier. For instance, they stopped running the downtown shuttle and reduced the number of stops downtown[3] because downtown is relatively dense, walkable, and student-heavy (i.e. mostly young, healthy, ambulatory people) and served by the University.
There's also a growing interest in adding service to nearby towns and adding Sunday service, even if it's in a limited capacity.
1: https://transportation.uiowa.edu/cambus/cambus-service-calen... 2: https://safety.uiowa.edu/nite-ride 3: https://www.icgov.org/Home/Components/News/News/2165/390
It would directly help the taxpayers of the City. But obviously nobody wants that (sarcasm)!
Example: the City has been trying to get rid of the RVs parked illegally on the streets, dumping their effluents and engine oil all over the City streets. To get these RVs off the streets, the City is spending $36M+ (and counting). So money can be found for the homeless, the RV dwelllers, etc. but not for the city's lawful residents and taxpayers.
SF was able to spend money trying to getting rid of RVs because it was living on emergency money from the state and shifting capital expenditure priorities around (capital expenditures costs are offset mostly by the asset you're buying, at least in the short term).
That emergency money is gone now, so now we're living in an era of budget cuts, though given SF's history, I full expect it to spend money recklessly and hope revenue turns around, but even they aren't so far gone to add $300M in operating expenditures to make MUNI free with no plan for a source of revenue to make up the difference.
This platitude of "Muni should be free" has no bearing on reality when the system is literally collapsing as we speak.
https://www.sfmta.com/project-updates/sfmtas-financial-crisi...
https://sfstandard.com/2025/09/10/routes-eliminated-trains-o...
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/politics/bay-area-transit-ba...
It feels like there could be some societal benefit to similarly reducing the number of busses and just making them free. (Today most busses are only at 10-30% capacity). This seems to support that idea.
You can pick free, or scalable, or financially sustainable (and without sustainability, a political shift will kill it), but you cannot have all three at once. The minute you push on one, second-order effects pop up somewhere else.
It is a classic wicked problem: solving it literally changes the problem.
Big-city transit has an equilibrium point, and it is incredibly stable. Every serious transit city in the world ends up in the same place: charge fares, subsidize low-income riders, and fund the basic system with taxes.
That equilibrium is stable for a reason. Every major city that tries free transit at scale will eventually snap back to it, because it is the only configuration that does not implode under feedback loops. It keeps demand reasonable, service reliable, and the politics tolerable.
Fiscally sustainable is a BS excuse often put forward by conservatives to not fund the things they don't want funded. Most things the government runs are not fiscally sustainable on their own, but they provide some sort of societal value. See things like the military, police, fire departments, etc...
A political shift could certain still kill it, but let's not pretend it has anything to do with fiscal policy.
What about US school bus programs. They have existed in many areas for decades.
Less Jevons Paradox and more Theory of Constraints...
Five million people are not going to descend on Iowa City because buses are free. Luxembourg has full free public transport from buses to trains, with no feedback loops. Same in Tallinn, Estonia capital where is free for residents.
If we look to Asia, we see that's not the only way things can work. Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, Tokyo, Osaka, are serious transit cities in my book, and their way is to have property development, diversified business models, or operating in extremely dense corridors where demand is high enough to cover costs through fares alone.
But you're right that "just run trains and collect fares" doesn't work and has to be subsidized everywhere else. The question is, how do you account for the subsidies that cars get. The cost to invade Iraq isn't usually accounted for when screaming about how much it costs to fund public transportation out of tax money.
If you have free public transit and that enables more economic activity or more disposable income to be funneled into services that boost the tax rake of the city the gains can offset the cost. This is an equation none of us have the info to do as randos online and its pointless to claim otherwise.
and even if your point was true free buses are a partial subsidy to low income people like you suggest in nyc its busses are a predominantly taken by low income individuals (source https://blog.tstc.org/2014/04/11/nyc-bus-riders-tend-to-be-o... subway nearly everyone, and ride share has their own tax as well.
Car traffic is also expensive. Highways, parking, and maintenance are massively subsidized through taxes, and they consume far more space per traveler making cities more congested and polluted.
Cities with good public transport also tend to be more walkable, which has health benefits and could provide significant impact to healthcare costs.
According to this article, every $1 invested in public transit generates about $5 in economic returns:
https://govfacts.org/housing-infrastructure/transportation/p...
That said we'd probably be better off if we eliminated subsidies and introduced competition.
Now it is lauded as one of the highest ROI investments the US govt ever made.
If you really want to do the math: if we value all urban land equivalently, what is the subsidy provided by free parking? In NYC, it’s astronomical.
Free transit is trivial to fund if you actually care about humans being productive.
Not everyone does: harder to capture rents that way.
My local system collects about 1/3rd of the annual operational costs and none of the (sizable) capital & infrastructural costs in fares.
The choice to collect insufficient fares versus collecting no fares at all, has secondary effects - fewer people choose to ride, spending any money is a psychological nudge against taking the trip, especially if you're not sure how much money you're going to have to spend. The car historically appears to be ~free, while the bus demands exact change in an impatient voice. You can solve the change issue with cards, but you could also just not charge fares.
Let's say you double ridership by taking away fares. This doubling adds approximately nothing to your considerable costs, but you get twice as much direct social benefit, and the price you pay for it is having to cover ~100% of the program cost using taxes instead of ~90%. On top of this you get secondary social benefit - buses move people so much more efficiently than cars that traffic speeds up dramatically, and you don't need to perform continuous expansion of the road network to accommodate ever-growing traffic problems. The labor value of those hours stuck in traffic alone covers the whole program, even if that value isn't something you can practically "capture" for some kind of profit.
You can't name three things, rule out any combination that includes more than two things, and call it a day.
The gas saved is less resources wasted, savings which to a large part are taxable. Etc.
You mean capitalists will stir up a shitfit if they aren't allowed to profit from someones misfortune. The proper amount of traffic on roads should be close to 0. All LA would have to do is offer more and free bus rides and charge for driving in the city and everyone would save hours of their life for no cost.
What is your basis for this assertion? One could simply increase the tax rate on high income earners and large property holders and readily fund fare free transportation in a financially sustainable and scalable way.
I believe the unstated mechanism of failure here is "it will piss off the wealthy and they will kill it" - which, at some point, needs to stop being true about literally everything in our society, or some extremely unpleasant consequences will manifest.
Now, maybe there's a point where it stops working as you reduce fares. But it's not particularly _clear_ that that is the case.
That said, yes, it is a major burden on municipal finances. The taxpayer here is mostly OK with it, but compromises have to be done, such as fixing sidewalks when they really fall apart and not a day sooner. Maths cannot really be wished away.
Important factors that plague the entire system:
* fluctuations in cost of energy. The Russo-Ukrainian war, European Green Deal etc. Getting a multi-year contract for electricity that can be used as a basis for budgeting has become impossible,
* driver wages. Drivers can move around the EU and they indeed often do, being a wandering folk almost by definition. Thus every city in the EU competes with Stockholm, Amsterdam or Milan on wages, while having half or less the economic power of those metropolises. So you have to find a precarious balance between "paying your drivers so little that they leave for greener pastures" and "paying your drivers so much that the budget cannot tolerate it".
Full self-driving could alleviate the second problem. Robots don't eat and don't pay any rent.
What if you include road construction and widening, road repair costs, impact of traffic on commerce and taxes, and more nebulous stuff like pollution, quality of life, noise, etc.?
They claim to have removed 5200 cars, out of area of 500000 people ("Iowa City-Cedar Rapids statistical region"). The increase is pitiful, from 6.7% of people using transit to 7.2% with the rest being car commutes.
Neither has it "cleared the traffic". Iowa City is also a well-run city, with just a 17-minute average commute time, indicating that it has no congestion to speak of.
It is a fucking nightmare. I'm a liberal guy but the amount of bums make the transit here unusable.
In Europe, if you're a group of 2-5 adults with no discounts, it's often cheaper to take a car than to use the bus / train. That makes no sense.
As a comparison, my 2009 diesel gets me there at around 4,7L/100km, but let's round it to 5, at average cost of fuel 1,65€/L that's 33€, for a single passenger, and I can leave whenever I want, have any sort of holdup and just go.
even a taxi or ride share may come out cheaper than public transit too.
Part of it is public transit like trains and trams have to maintain their own infrastructure.
Not sure about buses, I would guess these are way cheaper to operate. In many parts of the world they are cheap, private and profitable, e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/Detroit/comments/1l5pt2a/detroit_th...
Sure, parking and wear/tear on my car needs to be factored in, but the moment I'm not travelling alone, the public transport costs are completely blown out the water. A trip to the big city for me and my wife will be €60 when taking the train, and with the car it will be about €20-€30 depending on where I park.
It's crazy frustrating, because I would LOVE to take public transport more.
The claimed increase in ridership is modest (18%) off a low baseline (0 service on weekends) and occurred over a long time period (pre-pandemic to today.) They also expanded service during that period, which probably fully explains the increase in ridership. Certainly the reduction in fare ($1-->0) is nice for some people, but it's hard to imagine that it is actually decisive for a large portion of trips.
The estimates of traffic reduction and CO2 reduction just quote the city's numbers without establishing that "traffic cleared, and so did the air."
Key paragraphs:
> In 2021, the city starting [sic] running more buses, streamlining routes and seriously considering waiving the $1 fares. In 2023, the City Council voted to pay for a two-year fare-free pilot with Covid-19 relief funds.
...
> Ridership eventually grew to 118 percent of prepandemic levels, compared to the average nationally transit ridership-recovery levels of 85 percent.
Problem is politcians and aspiring politicians/media influencers have figured out that the money is not in solving problems but keeping it in the news and agitating people. They will never do anything to solve problems but keep throwing wrenches and never let it be solved. Well, if it’s solved they need to find a new problem, worse still, what if people now expect things to be actually solved!
It turned out, in my region, about 1/3 of public transport capacity was lost on them on peak hours. Also, some decided a specific seat was 'theirs' and started verbally abusing 'seat thiefs', throwing their stuff around, or even hitting them with canes. They also drove everyone bonkers by begging drivers to speed up or change routes so they would be home in time for their favorite soap series.
At the time, not much was done about it. The busses and trams forced everyone off at the terminus, made a round, enforced being empty while pausing a bit, and then the elderly were allowed back on, but at least places got shuffled and others got a chance for a seat. There was great gnashing of teeth about this decision.
I still feel double about it. It is very sad how this was a great life quality improvement for these people, but public transport is not the right medium for fixing this.
I'd imagine public transport is similar so we should move the Overton window towards bus and train tickets entering you into a lottery funded by charging cars for entry to, and for parking in, downtown areas.