Is it cheaper to lobby or to create an incompetent monopoly to ruin things?
While I have never lived in a place with free transit, I have lived in places where it was possible to board trains without passing through fare gates and certain busses through the rear exit. It is amazing how much faster boarding is. They probably face some lost fares, but the benefit of faster travel times outweigh the cost.
I also think that those criticizing free fares are disingenuous. None of those cities had problems with (insert stereotypical undesirable group) using public transit. If anything, there were fewer issues because everyone was more inclined to behave since there were more eyes on the trains and busses.
EDIT: it's also worth noting that collecting money costs money. That's especially noticeable when upgrading to (or to new) electronic fare systems, but it's also true when using things like tickets and cash. It probably doesn't mean such in the cities I've lived in ($3+ fares), but I'll bet it accounts for a lot more in cities that charge $0.50 or $1 fares.
In my mind it would be a no-brainer for all the benefits you would get from free service, but 20% increase in cost is not an easy sell - especially when a lot of people paying tax on it never go to NYC
In any case, cities can engage in value capture for public transportation. Just direct some of the property taxes collected directed to public transit. Even better would be some sort of LVT, ideally but not necessary 100% of the economic rent from land.
In any case, public transit should also engage in value capture on their own property. If they own a train station, they should consider building on top or adjacent to it spaces that they can then rent out to tenants. It's not only efficient but also serve the public and the local economy and making public transit more economical to run due to higher ridership.
Like airports in America. We should pursue a similar path for our rail stations and, frankly, ensure they are heading toward locations that are walkable and connected.
Almost every smaller station shows ads on walls, too, and every train carriers ads inside.
I don't see why the subway specifically could not be self-sufficient, or even a profit center. Sadly, this is not so, because of very large expenses, not because of low revenue.
And urban malls and chain stores are frankly often depressing — awkward layouts translated imperfectly from suburban sprawl, along with obviously underpaid and burned out staff.
Many companies in Tokyo prevent their employees from commuting by car (legally commute is covered by workers comp insurance, and many companies do not elect the more expensive car coverage option) - so even in the absence of workers paying for the commute, public transit (or bike/walk) would be the only realistic option.
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/health/trimet-max-fentanyl-...
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-08-13/carjacki...
Personally, I would rather be on a bus with someone high on drugs than be carjacked at gunpoint.
I’ve lived in two cities with free fare zones: Subsections of public transport where no fares are collected, but if you want to go outside of the zone you need to buy a ticket.
The free fare zones were far more likely to have people causing problems. It’s not just “undesirable groups”. It’s people stealing your stuff if you aren’t paying attention, stalking women, creating messes, or just harassing people who want to be left alone.
Then you’d leave the free fare zone and see almost none of that. It was night and day different. This was within the same city, same mode of transport. The only difference was that one vehicle had someone maybe checking your fare 1/10 times and writing a ticket if you didn’t have it, while the other you were guaranteed not to encounter anyone checking tickets and could ride as long as you wanted.
I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss anyone concerned about this. Unless you have sufficient enforcement to go along with it and the enforcers are empowered to deal with people who are causing problems, having free fares can be a real problem.
It was nice to not have to deal with ticket purchases when going to a sporting event or meeting up with friends at a bar, but this was mostly before apps came along anyway. I don’t go out as much now that I’m older but using the apps to buy tickets is trivially easy. Even the tickets by stations will accept tap to pay from phones making it much more convenient than my younger days.
This seems to be a symptom, not a cause. The free zone, let me guess, more densely populated, city center area, and the not free zone, a bit less urban? Smells like income disparity zoning.
I mean if you think about, doesn't it seem a bit off to suggest that the prevalence of crime would be affected by whether a bus is free or not? My instinct is to get further into why there's crime happening at all, on or off bus. Why does it happen there, and not e.g. here in Taipei? Or other places with tons of public transit going on and very low crime, like Japan? The PRC?
The free fare zone was only included a subset of the city and only applied to certain modes of transportation.
> Smells like income disparity zoning.
Not really. I don’t see why it’s hard to believe that areas with no enforcement are a draw for people who want to e.g. ride a warm train than the areas with enforcement.
> I mean if you think about, doesn't it seem a bit off to suggest that the prevalence of crime would be affected by whether a bus is free or not?
No? It’s not just crime, it’s harassment, antisocial behavior, and other things that are not strictly crimes but you don’t want to be around. A lot of crimes are crimes of opportunity where someone strikes because they’re in the same place as you and see an opening. The more time they’re in the place, the more opportunities for those crimes.
Isolating people from each other is a really dystopian "solution" to reduce crime and antisocial behavior. Things naturally tend to happen more when people come together – in both good and bad. The good usually outweighs the bad by a wide margin.
Whats worse is that, theres a certain perspective, one of declining CBD use, where cross river rail makes a mountain of sense. But in that case we should be bypassing the CBD with a lot of room for expansion, ie, 8 lines worth of track. But this isnt being done either.
>When you have the electronic ticketing system already in place like Brisbane it makes sense to use it to monitor usage
This and being able to continue charging fines is why it was left in place 100%
IIRC the 50 cent fares allow them to still charge ridiculous fines for fare evasion, keeping the Queensland Rail rentacops in business.
Most non metro stations only have tap on pillars and no fare gates anyway, and I think the inner city fare gates that still exist are on the list for removal.
The 50 cents also allowed them to track the changing usage profile and justify it by the explosion of use. Its basically self reporting that you used the system, and the origin and destination of your trip. Otherwise they would need to install foot traffic counters at train and bus stations and still end up with incomplete data.
It wasnt just super popular, it was that the data showed such a dramatic uptick in usage, which carried over to numbers of cars removed from the roads etc.
Probably took 5 minutes out of my normal commute, and that's in reduced vehicle traffic, I don't use the system at all except to take my kiddo to the museum on weekends. Benefits tracked to all punters results in an absolutely untouchable policy change.
Austin. Tried it and rolled it back.
It was before my time here but I’ve heard: Homeless camped on the buses. Bored teens hung out on the buses riding nowhere and making trouble. Bus drivers demanded the change back.
I’m an economist and YIMBY activist. Only 10% to 15% of the Austin bus system budget comes from fares. (Most is a 1% sales tax.) I’d love to make the buses free. But it has negatives.
Personally, the $1 commute from the Sunshine Coast has been very good. I occasionally drive in but the Bruce Hwy has been a constant process of widening each section as they barely keep up with the traffic increases.
I think what you will see is a lot more people moving out to residential areas north of Brisbane seeking cheaper housing as they can take advantage of the almost free travel. Especially if they eventually build the Rail/Light Rail through South Caloundra to Maroochydore.
It has been so wildly popular, bringing happy Kansas Citians to the restaurants and clubs downtown that the business owners begged KC to keep it free.
Still free and I believe they are extending it.
I would love to see K.C. bring back some of the jazz nightlife that once charged downtown. (Though it might have been the availability of liquor there during Prohibition too.)
Or to put it a different way, it costs money to run transit. So what if we take the money you are proposing to add to cover the loss of fares and give it to the transit agency but retain fares: they could afford to add more service and I contend that this would do far more for ridership. (assuming we are smart about what service we add)
And in other places they had light year that gets paid that had effects that were much the same.
Once you are talking about an actual working transportation system and not the occasional line here and there. Where it is actually real then there is a clear scientific question. Lets assume 500M to operate the system:
Should you A: Invest 500M in service improvements every year
Should you B: Invest 500M in giving away free transport
And the science on this is perfectly clear.
I moved from Iowa City to Kansas City after college so I have been spoiled with public transit.
Both bicycles & free transports would be even better !
Honestly it’s not that big a deal if someone sleeps on the bus. Homeless, drunk, tired from work, whatever.
If you’re appalled by the idea, you may not be aware: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-14/horror-t...
LAMetro recently woke up and started cleaning this up. Not sure how long it will take before ridership fully returns.
We know free transit works in many cases. There are plenty of examples. But it's rare to compare and contrast the contexts. (But, see, e.g., this 2012 National Academy of Sciences report: https://cvtdbus.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/2012-07-TCRP-...) It's far easier to promote free transit than it is to address underlying issues, like regulatory barriers to housing production and infrastructure projects, that limit organic improvements to social welfare and which are likely to cause free transit to fail long-term in large, diverse metro areas.
Ipso facto, eliminating fare collection eliminates crime. Fare evasion as a crime amounts to make-work for cops. Not all value, and often least of all value in public goods, is derived from charging at the point of use.
Why can't buses be regulated the same way?
Similar questions get asked often enough. The problem is that there aren't any easy answers or solutions. Cities have tried different things but none that appear to work for medium to large sized cities.
If you see a city employ a workable solution that can used as a model and be deployed everywhere, that would be awesome.
Exactly. and asking the wrong question is nothing new either. there were plenty of folks wondering aloud about how to "get rid of" the homeless people back in the 1980s in NYC (then the homeless population there was ~50,000).
Usually it was some sort of "arrest/detain them all, then reroute them to shelters." The shelters being places where they can be warehoused and victimized over and over again without disturbing the normies or, heaven forfend, the tourists!
Only once did I see the right question being asked. I've searched and searched but have been unable to find the article online. It's an op-ed piece from the Village Voice, circa 1987 by Nat Hentoff or Dan Ridgeway entitled" What Do Homeless People Want?"
Fortunately the question posed in the title is answered in the very first sentence of the body: "Homes, mostly."
Why is it that we're not asking (or acting upon the obvious answers to) the right questions? That's not really rhetorical, although the answers will likely be pretty ugly.
Here in the US we
can* do better, and we should do better. This is not a new issue that requires new solutions. Give homeless people, you know, homes.But that's evil and wrong and absolutely Stalinism that will end up with tens of millions dead, right? Please.
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.
I wonder how much the traffic would improve in/out of SF if BART is cheaper.
It adds up super fast; even “kids ride free with parent” would go a long way.
On a side note we should drop the public bit of this because it implies a bus is “publicly funded” but highways aren’t. Both are subsidized by the taxpayer.
Arguably, neither of them should be. Give poor people money, instead of giving free highway access (and bus transit) to rich and poor alike. Rich people don't need our help, and poor people would rather have the money to spend as they wish instead of other people deciding for them what alms they should consume.
Individual cars have worse externalities than busses, so that means we should tax them more than busses. Though I suspect once drivers of cars and busses are paying non-subsidised prices for road access and fuel, busses will naturally look better in comparison, no extra tax differential needed.
> In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good)[1] is a commodity, product or service that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous [...]
That's because roads are rather excludable (see toll roads), and if you've ever been in a traffic jam, you'll notice that road use is rivalrous.
It's independent of the argument against giving well-off people free stuff.
Note that I don't know how to identify people who cannot handle money. I know individuals, but how to you fairly do this in a way that doesn't get abused or abuse someone - both have been major problems with every plan to help the poor in the past.
Welfare (nor any other undertaking) doesn't have to be perfect. Good enough is good enough. And you can always optimise over time, as you learn. There's plenty of programmes out in the real world and throughout history to learn from: the good programmes as examples to perhaps imitate, the bad programmes as illustrations of what to avoid.
> If we need to identify those who cannot handle money then we may as well use that same effort to identify who doesn't need help in the first place.
Isn't that perfectly compatible with what I'm suggesting? (Though I'm not quite sure they are actually the same kind of effort. Looking at eg people's taxable income is rather different from judging their mental state.)
I'm making two points:
(A) Don't bother giving welfare to the well-off.
(B) Prefer cash payments over in-kind provision, where possible.
You convinced me to add the 'where possible' clause, because there are some cases were people can't handle money. Though I hold that these spendthrifts should be dealt with as a special case, and not be the default template for how we treat everyone else.
I'm not really in favor of or against UBI, but I think that your assessment here isn't quite right. It's not that there are some cases where people can't handle money, it's actually the norm that people can't handle money, at least in America. And when you expand your scope to include folks with steady jobs and such and "can" handle money, they don't really make enough money such that their better handling of money will make a difference either. UBI kind of rests on this assumption that people will "spend their money wisely" or spend their money efficiently - but people will spend their money in obviously stupid ways and then we'll deal with the consequences anyway because as a society we are not willing to let people die on the street. To be fair, not all who would make use of UBI would do so in a poor fashion, and like you said don't let perfect become the enemy of good.
Most people who are competent and kind enough to look at these kinds of problems and want to provide a great solution for them out of the kindness of their heart, in my estimation, just do not have experience dealing with the target population and understanding the true limitations of just giving a little bit of help.
If you grew up in a roughly middle class environment, went to college afterward, etc. and you didn't know any crackheads in your family, you probably should stay far away from trying to find solutions for these problems because you're just going to wind up frustrated and wrong about worthwhile solutions for the rest of your life which will distract anyone from actually making progress. I'm not suggesting this about you or anything, just speaking broadly. Most of the time people working on these issues are like product managers who just care about what the data says instead of having a really good intuition for the "customer" or the "problem".
Back to UBI itself I actually think it should go to everyone, because at the end of the day those who are high earners are just going to net out paying for it, and it'll be simpler to administer if "everyone gets it" and there's less room to complain about it and less hand-wringing and adjustments for whatever excuse people come up with for who gets some and who gets more. If everyone gets it, there's much less arguing about that stuff.
The best part about a potential UBI implementation is that we can replace all of the government workers administering and declaring who is eligible for benefits whether that's SNAP or Welfare and one dude can be sitting at home and push the big red "send checks" button with an offshore team in India in case that guy is too drunk to do his job.
Maybe just providing free healthcare and dental care, job training and education, and a sack of fresh produce is the way to go too. I'm not sure.
> If you grew up in a roughly middle class environment, went to college afterward, etc. and you didn't know any crackheads in your family, you probably should stay far away from trying to find solutions for these problems because you're just going to wind up frustrated and wrong about worthwhile solutions for the rest of your life which will distract anyone from actually making progress.
I grew up on welfare in the place formerly known as East Germany. Bleak times. Not sure that will get me past the gate you are keeping here.
(As late as 2006 a government spokesman warned foreign football fans coming for the world cup of no-go areas that they should avoid, if they want to survive. Compared to the 1990s, the late 2000s were the Good Times.)
> Back to UBI itself I actually think it should go to everyone, because at the end of the day those who are high earners are just going to net out paying for it, and it'll be simpler to administer if "everyone gets it" and there's less room to complain about it and less hand-wringing and adjustments for whatever excuse people come up with for who gets some and who gets more. If everyone gets it, there's much less arguing about that stuff.
Someone has to pay the taxes to finance the redistribution. The average person can't get more out of the system than they pay in (by definition of how averaging works).
I would suggest to pay attention to the net effective marginal tax you charge people across the spectrum of incomes. Basically, for every level of income ask: taking account of welfare phase-outs and marginal income tax, how many cents of net income would a person get for an extra dollar in gross income?
This effective marginal tax rate matters a lot more than how you split the rate between welfare phase-outs and other taxes. Yes, for simplicity you could have no welfare phase-outs (aka UBI) and create the whole shape of the taxation graph simply with progressive income tax rates. Or you could merge both systems, and call your UBI a negative income tax.
In any case, what you want to really avoid are sudden cliffs, where an extra dollar in gross income costs you more than a dollar in net income. And ideally, you also want to avoid unduly high marginal rates (even if they are still below 100%) from phasing out multiple, uncoordinated welfare payments.
> The best part about a potential UBI implementation is that we can replace all of the government workers administering and declaring who is eligible for benefits whether that's SNAP or Welfare and one dude can be sitting at home and push the big red "send checks" button with an offshore team in India in case that guy is too drunk to do his job.
Well, as described above at the moment we have (at least) two arms of the government that assess how much you earn: the tax people and the welfare people. My suggestion would be to streamline that into one organisation. At least, if you want to keep an income tax around at all.
In the American context that's the generally agreed upon "alternative". There's no appetite for, say, all of the existing welfare programs and also handing out cash. I don't think there's a meaningful distinction between "handing out cash" and "UBI", but of course I want to acknowledge that cash paid or services rendered (healthcare, etc.) can be a mix in an overall scheme and that UBI typically refers to a specific program. To me it's all the same thing with just a mix of how you want to do it but it's not fair of me to suggest that you think of it the same way so I apologize for that.
> Not sure that will get me past the gate you are keeping here.
If you haven't personally deal with or lived with crackheads, homeless, hustlers, etc. you have little to no insight into how to effectively work with people who are experiencing those issues or lifestyle challenges and you just make the problem worse in general while also wasting money.
It's not gatekeeping to suggest one must have more experience with something in order to make informed decisions or create helpful and fair programs. But if you want to call that gatekeeping I'm happy to gate-keep.
Last Tuesday I called the local police because a homeless guy was standing on the side of the road with a good chunk (the size of an average hand or so) of his leg missing, out in the rain at night, in 40 degree weather. He's not doing that because he just needs some UBI or healthcare, and there's no clinic or pamphlet that will "fix" that person's problems.
The ivory tower will tell you we just need to get that person help, a safe place to live, etc. but they're wrong. I'm sure you see a lot of that in Germany too? What do you guys usually do when you see a homeless person in such circumstances? Do you give the money and does that fix the issues?
> Someone has to pay the taxes to finance the redistribution. The average person can't get more out of the system than they pay in (by definition of how averaging works).
That doesn't make any sense at all. Plenty of people in the United States at least get more than they pay in, even if it's not exactly a cash reimbursement. Not that I have a problem with that.
> In any case, what you want to really avoid are sudden cliffs, where an extra dollar in gross income costs you more than a dollar in net income. And ideally, you also want to avoid unduly high marginal rates (even if they are still below 100%) from phasing out multiple, uncoordinated welfare payments.
Right and we can just avoid those by not having restrictions on the income. It doesn't matter if Bill Gates gets a $2,000 UBI check, he's going to more than make up for it in overall taxes (ideally, unfortunately our government is all too happy to tax anyone but the ultra wealthy). I think the same is true for many other folks too and don't think it's a worthwhile concern.
How the "Users Pay" Myth Gets in the Way of Solving America's Transportation Problems
Road Taxes and Funding by State, 2025
Most states fail to collect enough in user fees to fully provide for roadway spending. This necessitates transfers from general funds or other revenue sources that are unrelated to road use to pay for road construction and maintenance.
Only three states—Delaware, Montana, and New Jersey—raise enough revenue to fully cover their highway spending. The remaining 47 states and the District of Columbia must make up the difference with tax revenues from other sources.
The states that raise the lowest proportion of their highway funds from transportation-related sources are Alaska (19.4 percent) and North Dakota (35.1 percent), both states which rely heavily on revenue from severance taxes.There are benefits too and all, just saying we don’t really have a full cost readily available for comparison because it’s hard to measure, never mind the literal dollars and cents that go into funding.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-road-taxes-fu...
that's about what I expected. And that's not even including sales tax from car purchases, and maintenance related spending. Suffice to say, without cars, a year bus pass would need to run ~ however much the average person spends per year on all car related taxes.
In Ohio we just spend $2bn on about 2 miles of road to effectively temporarily ease congestion. That’s $2bn paid for by taxpayers regardless of how it’s paid, that we didn’t necessarily need to spend.
I’d also like to add, yes that “bus ticket” (I’m no fan of busses for short term travel) might be a little more expensive but consumer costs overall would’ve likely to go down. Why? Well in addition to already paying for highway infrastructure you’re paying $30,000, $50,000, &c . on a vehicle, plus insurance, gas, repairs, tires, maintenance, interest on loans, &c. So while I think it’s hard to compare apples to apples, I think it’s good to have this information in mind as well when discussing this topic broadly.
Small amounts of cost sharing are a useful technique for incentivizing people to make wise decisions in general, so there’s some value in having token small fares. It’s the same difference that shows up when you list something for $10 in your local classifieds as opposed to listing it as FREE. Most people who use classifieds learn early on that listing things for free is just asking for people to waste your time, but listing for any price at all seems to make people care a little more and put some thought into their decisions. I’ve often given things away for free after listing them for small amounts in classifieds because it filters for people who are less likely to waste your time.
> I was stunned by how little the fares covered operating costs.
(And I'm talking about buses -- there's not a ton of construction involved.)
[0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=patio11+%22pathological+custom...
In a sane world you would either not have any public parking spots, or parking spots that cost so much that about 10-20% of them are empty, and you would have a road use tax (like Singapore).
And American transit systems are uniquely bad at fare recovery because they are just uniquely bad at everything.
Strong Towns talks quite a bit about how especially suburban roads are not financially sustainable.
US cars get 1 cent per passenger mile.
US Transit gets $2.39 per passenger mile.
https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=22027
Also look up the Farebox Recovery Ratio.
There are values for many US cities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio#United_...
From :
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01660...
Our measure of environmental performance is a transit agency's average carbon dioxide emissions per passenger-mile or vehicle-mile.
During the period of analysis, the sector's carbon dioxide emissions declined by 12.8%, while vehicle-miles travelled increased by 7.1% and passenger-miles increased by 10.5%.
Thus, the emissions intensity of public transit has shrunk since 2002 using both measures.
Yet, compared with public transit emissions in the United Kingdom and Germany, we document that the U.S. bus fleets had the highest carbon emissions per mile and the smallest efficiency progress.
The only exceptions are the places with free public transit and expensive parking, like Luxembourg.
To me this is big reason why transit has to be basically free to attract riders. It has to compete with marginal cost per kilometer of private car use, not total cost.
Where I live and with what I drive, once there is a single passenger, the car breaks even on the milage. But parking can shift things back in favor of public transit. It's close enough that traffic is always the deciding factor for which mode I take.
If transit were free, I would probably just take it most of the time.
people from outside the US often think it’s a land of fabulously rich ppl and are aghast at how we treat our citizens
Giving someone a house and health care will, though.
Every addict I have ever known (I’ve known many) consume drugs in order to escape something. Addressing this while also treating the user will indeed help them. Mental health care + physical health care = “health care” in my opening sentence.
I don’t know what it is about people in the US, but almost all of us completely reject the idea that someone can be held down entirely by their own mind. Large amounts of people are, and those that don’t seem to understand that this is possible are often people whose own mind holds them down, but not so much that they’re homeless.
People in other countries get this. We do not. I don’t understand it.
Otherwise, what do you propose?
1: https://nlihc.org/resource/new-study-finds-providing-people-...
The proportion of heroin addicts who would still be wrecks with healthcare that extends to prescribing what they need is miniscule.
So the first problem is thinking you need to get them off heroin to be able to start dramatically helping.
Then tackle the more complex.
We can have concern for residents who feel justifiably unsafe and uncomfortable on public transit as well as homeless riders.
addiction, mental health, childhood drama… only in america would that lead to sleeping on the streets
It's by no means zero, but in autum 2024, rough sleepers were estimated at less than 4700 in the UK. That might well represent and undercount, but it is certainly nowhere remotely near the people counted as homeless, who would include anyone without a permanent address, such a people e.g. sleeping at friends places on a non-permnanet basis.
Cuba, also, but their economic priorities are very different.
Then if someone is habitually in the system for a significantly longer time than it reasonably takes to travel from point A to B, deactivate their access.
But, it is kind of a non issue. You are responsible for your ticket. Having a dead battery is no different to losing your paper ticket.
But in the edge case of the edge case, security can let you out. If it becomes a pattern, they’ll note it somehow.
Seems like the most important thing to do is _anything_. The current approach of doing nothing and shaming people who suggest public transport is a poor option because it’s full of druggies doesn’t seem to work.
I don't know, I think it's much worse, in the wealthiest nation that ever existed, to shame those who have no place to live by singling them out for abusive treatment for not leaving the transit system in a (arbitrary) timely fashion.
I'd much rather shame those claiming public transport is a poor option, and even more so those advocating for evicting passengers -- presumably violently -- because they spend "too much" time on public transportation.
Ugh!
For that reason, among others, I strongly prefer non-phone, non-battery-powered options for transit payment.
Not sure about the "measure how long the subway rider has been in the subway system for a continuous period of time" feature, but otherwise that's how subway in Japan works. You gotta tap on your way in and out of the current system you are riding on (as there are multiple competing subway system companies running together even within a given city, often enough with their stops being near each other).
Their reason for doing so is a bit different though. In NYC, your ride is a flat fee, as long as you don't exit subway, no matter where you are going. In Japan, your ride cost is determined by your actual route, as some parts of it have different rates. They actually need to know where you exited in order to calculate the final cost of your ride.
You scan when you enter the system, and you scan when you exit. Your fare is calculated based on where you enter and exit. If you stay in the system longer than some define period of time, you are automatically charged the maximum fare, regardless of where you got on and off.
You can either scan with a dedicated train fare card, your debit/credit card and also NFC mobile payment.
The buses linked to the train service and the parking uses the same payment system, so you get automatic discounted bus fares and parking fees if you actually use the train as well, but you can park and use the bus without taking the train.
It works quite well.
And $1 is already expensive enough that if the destination is within 5-10 miles, driving is cheaper if you already have a car and parking, so you are keeping that class of people out.
Though really I find the main reason people don't take the bus is that there aren't enough buses (in time or space) for where/when people really want to go. This is an `m×n` problem.
Wear and tear is generally assumed to be roughly equal to gas costs on well-maintained roads, depending on a lot of varying assumptions of what to include. So, 5 miles.
In Tokyo, parking is managed by the market, so it’s incredibly expensive. So it’s always cheaper to take public transit without artificially low public transit prices.
And I live in a car centric city. But literally millions of people ride trains in Tokyo everyday, and because of that they have clean air, nice walkable streets, and far few deaths.
No they haven't. Places with "gobs of parking" are suburban Walmarts. Pretty much every city is super short on parking.
For almost everywhere in LA country (where I live), it is illegal to have a store, coffee shop, gym, restaurant, laundry mat or almost anything else without attached parking. There are pockets where they've allowed parking reform (like Old Pasadena) and beautiful, walkable neighborhoods spring up. But these are rare exceptions.
I just find it genuinely perplexing. A 1-hour commute in LA is absolutely unremarkable. That's 500 hours a year! We have horrible air pollution even though we're right by the ocean. The weather is perfect and yet people need to go drive someplace to be able to walk around in it. Like why do so many people out here think the status quo is so great?
But city parking is very expensive and still often fills up, and the free parking at suburban Walmarts usually has plenty of open spots.
Maybe this program wouldn't work everywhere. Makes sense it would work there.
Most of the routes run Monday thru Saturday. Schedules are something that are easily changed to support demand.
If I want to look at succesful systems, IDGAF where they are, but how they operate.
Let's just look at some basic comparison between Iowa City and my own city of the same population (mine is somewhat larger in metro city):
about 1.05 million trips
about 50.1 million trips
Its not even close. Why would you look at some tiny US city that doesn't even have actually good results if you compare it to anybody even halfway competent. Why not look for evidence in systems that are better by LITERALLY EVERY METRIC?
That's the basic issue with looking to the US cities for evidence. Their baseline is so pathetic that 'improvements' isn't really that significant.
So maybe its time to start giving a fuck, and not cherry-picking examples to confirm your bias. Actually learn from the systems that achieve the best results.
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.
Making the buses free isn't going to produce any more of it.
I live in an area that had outdated payment systems on their bus network. They determined that the cost to upgrade the payment systems would be higher than the revenue of fares, so they just made the buses free.
Edit: A lot of replies associate fare payment with behaviors (and smell?) of riders. I think that it's important to recognize that ones ability to pay a fare does not inherently indicate that they are "undesirable" in some way. Could their be a correlation? Possibly. But dedicate the policing to things that actually matter - an unruly passenger should get policing efforts, not a non-paying one (or smelly, really? Obviously homeless people can be putrid but seriously people smelling bad is not a crime).
Huh? I never owned a car and taken public transport all my live, and it's never been much of a problem kicking non-paying people off. What kind of lawless hellholes are you guys living in?
(I lived in Germany, Turkey, Britain, Singapore and Australia.)
Feels like a coy way of getting to say something as inflammatory as "the US a lawless hellhole" on HN: which is fine enough... but there's also a reason YC isn't a Singaporean or Turkish or British or German institution.
The U.S. is a pretty far outlier in this regard. It's strange how many people in the U.S. don't realize this at all, and become appalled at when foreigners are shocked by the way things are done in U.S. cities.
American exceptionalism is just as silly when it’s “America bad.”
It's obvious nowhere near e.g. Switzerland or Singapore, for example.
But then on the other hand, people obey the rules a ton more than in places like Brazil or India.
Just as many foreigners are shocked at how polite and orderly Americans are, compared to back home.
The world is a vast and diverse place.
Once might be a coincidence, twice might be me overestimating how carefully people read other comments before jumping into conversations.
Some public transit has a much more rigid fare collection structure - trains are typically much more controlled entry points. But buses? It's in their best interest to get everyone on as quickly as possible and get everyone off as quickly as passive. Are you going to have gates that block you if you don't scan your card/phone from exiting? Same for boarding. Do you dedicate policing resources to ensuring the collection of what is certainly less than the cost to employ the police officer? Seems wasteful until you hit a very high ridership.
I see fare evasion almost every time I take the tube
Anecdotally, the bart gates seem to have improved the riding experience.
Some data from LA:
> Of the 153 violent crimes perpetrated on Metro between May 2023 and April 2024, 143 of them — more than 93% — were believed to be committed by people who did not pay a valid fare and were using the transit system illegally.
https://ktla.com/news/local-news/metro-violence-largely-perp...
Well, it's also a matter of fairness: I'm a law-abiding citizen, and I pay for my bus fare. It's the Right Think to do. But if I'm paying, I want the other guys to pay as well.
My claim is letting trash act like, well, trash and street people wild out on the system drives lots of commuters off. And ime, the worst riders are disproportionally fare thieves.
Depends on prevailing social norms, I guess?
In Germany it's typically something like max(2 * regular fare price, 60 Euro).
I know you asked a 'should' question and this is an 'is' answer, but I hope it's still useful.
Google Translate on https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bef%C3%B6rderungserschleichung... might be useful.
It's fascinating seeing your questions about something that's an everyday thing in all of the places I lived.
So in Germany it's typically the (public) companies running the transit systems that have teams that check that you've paid. Gates are almost unheard of for neither bus nor train. (I couldn't name one place in Germany that has gates for public transport at the top of my head.) The police would only get involved, if a passenger is getting violent or threatening to get violent, or won't get off the bus.
In Britain (and Singapore etc) you board the bus at the front, where the bus driver checks your ticket and otherwise will kick you off the bus. The bus driver itself won't get into a physical fight with you. But the bus driver can definitely call for backup and will (presumably) stop the bus and refuse to drive until a recalcitrant passenger has been dealt with. The social contract seems to that all the other passengers will blame the would-be fare evader for the stoppage and back up the driver. But I've never actually seen that acted out completely.
Trains in Singapore and many parts of Britain have gates, and there are usually either some people monitoring the gates for jumpers or at least cameras.
> Do you dedicate policing resources to ensuring the collection of what is certainly less than the cost to employ the police officer? Seems wasteful until you hit a very high ridership.
It's all pretty similar to how parking regulations are enforced: there's some dedicated people who write tickets (not police officers), and the tickets are typically a few dozen dollars.
The bus driver's union doesn't want drivers engaging in fare enforcement -- they're hired to drive, not to get into physical altercations. This was especially after a bus driver was stabbed to death in 2008 in a fare dispute.
There are fare enforcement teams that partner up with cops to catch people evading the fare, that are trained for this kind of thing. But obviously the chances are miniscule you'd ever encounter them on any single bus trip, and all that's going to happen is you get a summons with a $50-100 fine. So it's quite rational not to pay.
And I mean, as a bus rider, the last thing I want is my bus being delayed by 15 minutes while the driver stops and waits for the cops to come to evict someone who didn't pay. I just want to get to where I'm going.
So how do they handle it in the cities you've lived in? How do they kick them off without putting the driver in danger and without massively delaying the bus for everyone else? (And to be clear, we're talking about buses, not trains where monitoring entry and exit turnstiles is vastly more realistic.)
I told him my boss is an asshole and was paying. That made him happy, he said “f that guy” and wished me a good day.
There's absolutely no need to wait for the cops. They can drive to a stop in front of the bus.
Not to mention, you know, the person might have gotten off by that point since they got to their destination already.
If they get off the bus right away then no big deal in the first place.
Like, if there's a serious crime is being committed in a moving vehicle then sure they'll have someone constantly monitoring and redirecting in order to intercept. It's possible, with high enough priority. But someone not paying a fare does not have that priority.
And the point is the person refuses to get off the bus right away. They stay on it till they get to their destination and then get off.
It was noticeable in that as a tourist, it seemed like a chill place, but there are lots of police of various stripes and they seemed very serious when enforcing things.
This is very basic economics of public transit. I completely agree with the comment about having a minimum payment and enforcement.
Do they also not use the streets in that case? There's nothing preventing "mentally ill people or hucksters" from being there.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/san-franciscos-union-square-...
It's not rocket science and other countries figured out how to do it.
You'll never have enough police for regular enforcement on buses. The numbers don't add up, not even remotely.
Other countries do a better job when they're able to keep people off the streets in the first place. Which then becomes a much more complicated question about social spending and the civil liberties of mentally ill people who don't want to be institutionalized.
And that, of course, does not include all the unpriced externalities of roads. For example, if you value a life at $1M, then the 40,000 people killed by drivers each year cost us collectively another $40B.
At the risk of feeding the trolls, I have to object to this ignorant, callous, brutal bs. Please, read this account^1 of NBA player Chris Boucher staying alive by riding public transit, and try to put yourself in his shoes for a moment.
[1] https://www.theplayerstribune.com/chris-boucher-nba-boston-c...
Statistically you're just a few days of bad luck from being both homeless and carless. What's your plan for getting to work to not be in that situation?
What makes you think so? The poster you replied to might be sitting on a decent nest egg, have supportive friends and family, and insurance against all contingencies.
And some people are willing to bite the bullet and even say: 'Well, in that case, I shouldn't be on the bus, either.
Though it's fairly clear from context that the commenter you replied to doesn't want to check every person's home address before they are let on the bus. They want to ban anti-social behaviour on the bus, and 'homeless' is just a short hand for that, unfortunate as it is.
And a few days of bad luck might make you lose your home, but won't necessarily turn you into a drunk who shouts a lot.
"In effect, more than half of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and one crisis away from homelessness." https://www.usich.gov/guidance-reports-data/data-trends
I don't know the commenter specifically - that's why I said statistically.
> Though it's fairly clear from context
Ah, the classic "didn't mean the well presented part of group X when I said X". That's a cliche way to mask prejudice. No, if they didn't actually mean homeless, I'm calling them out on writing "homeless".
They say that, but they don't really substantiate that on the page you linked to.
That's a bit silly. I have sympathies for your views, but you can't have a policy of literally 0. Even spotless places like Singapore don't achieve that, even though they come pretty close.
A big problem now is people playing loud music, loud TikToks, phonecalls and videocalls on speaker phone (almost the default), feet on seats, vaping, bags on seats etc.
There are now no staff who enforce the norms and laws (Yup some of that legally could land you a prosecution if the railway chooses that).
Yes, society was less anti-social 20-30 years ago but IMO with strict enforcement of heavy punishment, the issues could be stamped out.
What's interesting is that one fairly large section of the railway does still have lots of staff who enforce anti-social behaviour (Merseyrail – they operate somewhat independently) and from what I've read and heard is that there tend to be far fewer issues in that network than the rest of the network. It's interesting to have the two areas to compare.
Unfortunately this governments want to continue defunding the railways, and so are happy with the cycle of managed decline and people opting to drive instead.
I used to be extremely pro public transport but it's fighting a losing battle. Trains are overpriced, delayed, cramped and anti-social
Tragedy of the commons is real, even a nominal stake in a service, thing or place impacts behavior. If you’ve ever shopped at Aldi, they make you put a quarter in each shopping cart. Most people wouldn’t pick a quarter up from the ground, but they almost always put their carts back at Aldi.
Personally, I could care less if a dude smells or is poor. We’re all the same. But I have tolerance for boorish behavior that scares people who are trying to go about their business.
I'm strongly in favour of free transit, but this boggles my mind. If your payment system is just a box where people drop in tickets/change, it's pretty low cost, never gets outdated, and pretty high compliance.
And it doesn't raise compliance at all. Why would it?
The boxes in my city of ~1.7 million don't do this. They're just boxes. Presumably they have some big box at the bus HQ they dump them in to sort the change.
> And it doesn't raise compliance at all. Why would it?
I'm not saying they raise compliance over other systems, I'm saying that observationally, compliance is pretty good. When I take the bus, I see basically everyone either put something that looks like a fare/ticket in the box or show a transit pass to the driver.
Do you have to show the coins to the driver that they add up to the fare, before putting them in the box?
I've only ever seen systems that count and display the amount of coins dropped in, until it adds up to a fare, and then there's an indication that it's sufficient and it beeps and then resets for the next person.
There’s nothing stopping you from putting half the fare amount in nickels in, but really, there’s nothing stopping you from putting nothing in and just taking a seat - bus drivers aren’t equipped to police fare evasion in either case.
In practice, 80-90% of riders have monthly passes that are just pieces of paper that you wave in front of the driver as you get on.
I’m not oblivious to the downsides of such a system, but there are real upsides around low cost, and no technology to ever go out of date.
What about transfers? Transfers between buses are supposed to be free, but how would you track that? There is also a reduced price from going from train -> bus. How would you track that? Obviously the system is significantly more complex than "drop some change in a bucket."
This is literally how my city of ~1.7 million operates now, and it seems... fine? Like it's obviously worse than free transit or a snazzy FeLiCa-based system, but it clearly works to collect fares and move people around.
> What about transfers?
The bus driver tears off a paper slip with a time on it that's good for 90 minutes.
> There is also a reduced price from going from train -> bus. How would you track that?
You don't, all routes/transfers are the same cost.
Again, I'm not saying this is the best system, but it's a false dichotomy to assume that "expensive new fare system" and "no fare system" are the only options. For some cost-value analysis, a basic/cheap fare system beats an expensive system even if it has fewer capabilities.
Why? We are excluding non-paying passengers from planes just fine. Why not busses and trains?
And over in many other parts of the world, they also manage this just fine, too. It's not exactly rocket science.
(Careful: I'm not suggesting that collecting fares would make streetcars widely profitable again. I am merely suggesting that whatever mechanisms they used to enforce fares can be learned from.)
> [...] and conversely people would then hitch a hike on roller skates behind the bus.
I assume there's not much overlap between the really problematic passengers (often loud, drunk, aggressive and/or mentally ill) and the skaters? Mostly just because you need a minimum level of physical fitness to pull this feat off, and you need to be organised enough to both have skates and have them at the ready?
In most places I lived in, the traffic police (if nothing else) would nab you for trying to pull this stunt.
Historically, it wasn't even the driver's job - the bus would have 2 employees: the driver and the conductor. The driver would drive, and the conductor would go around collecting fares after everyone gets on the bus. The conductor could have the angry discussion with the fare-evader without interrupting the driver, and if need be, the driver and conductor could 2v1 the fare-evader.
At some point, before computers were on buses, they got rid of conductors. For "efficiency".
what answer could i possibly give to you that would change your response? antarctica?
> Is it possible that what you assume it's normal and default is colored by your personal experience and not representative of the world at large?
of course this is true. what are you going for here. my objection is to standing up a Train Security Panopticon with "modern AI" and locking commuters (in north america) on a train (in north america) who might depend on a schedule (using a north american time zone) stuck at a station until the (north american) cops can come and pull someone (who statistically, but not for sure, would be north american) off of the car for being drunk (off of beer i've had in my personal experience, coloring this example, which may not be the beer that is representative of the world at large) and napping on the seats
In other cultures, being rude and disrespectful to other passengers is simply not done, and transgressors are actually punished.
Americans have a problem with public transportation, but the problem isn't public transportation, it's Americans.
Seriously, other than law enforcement what else can you do to someone who brazenly refuse to follow the rules? Even law enforcement (at least in the US) highly depends on where you live. In left leaning states and cities, DAs are not very likely to prosecute such small crimes like not paying a bus fare because they know it’ll make them unpopular next election. I live in a very left leaning county and state and it swings between center and left every 4 years or so. The swing is always “look how awful that guy was. He prosecuted vulnerable people for petty crimes for no reason”. Cops don’t wanna have to deal with all the paper work to book a guy for a couple of nights before they get released and do it all over again. If they know the person will not get prosecuted because there is no political capital to do so, why bother with the theatrics and all the paper work of arresting them? Brazenly refusing to pay the bus fare and getting in a verbal altercation with the driver and everyone on the bus is a fun afternoon for some people.
Where this happens they arrive promptly. And it doesn’t happen often.
>Where this happens they arrive promptly. And it doesn’t happen often.
Where, other than inside your mind, does this happen? Please, do be specific.
It’s pretty infuriating. I started biking to work 2 years ago and try to bike almost anywhere I can. Mostly to lose weight but also put my money where my mouth is. I voted for every levy and prop to improve bike-ability and public transportation of the city in the last 10 years and figured I’m a hypocrite if I expect others to bike and take the bus and I never do. My tolerance for the homeless on buses has been dropping as I have to deal with them more and more. I was always “It’s our failure in not helping them. If I can’t help, least I could do is let them be” kind of person. Now every other week I end up with a negative interaction with someone on the bus or at a bus stop. Every time I air my grievances with people I know (who never take the bus) I always have to find myself on the defensive somehow.
I mean, you're right in theory, but in the real world things are very different.
And in many places I haven't lived but only visited, too.
And if you’re from San Francisco and use MUNI, you’ll also know that half the people don’t pay anyway. There’s no reason to make people pay.
Rambling aside, I think it’s unfair to give people shit because they’re homeless. The real issue is we don’t commit people to psychiatric care when they’re clearly a problem in our society.
I’m old enough to remember when we did that. The homeless population absolutely skyrocketed, after all the mental institutions were closed in the 1980s and 1990s.
That said, many of them were hellholes. It’s sort of arguable as to whether the patients were worse off, but one thing’s for sure; the majority of city-dwellers (the ones with homes) are not better off, now. I’m really not sure who benefited from this.
Here, on Long Island (NY), we have some of the largest psychiatric centers in the world; almost all completely shut down, and decomposing.
The campuses are gorgeous, but can’t be developed, because they would require hundreds of millions of dollars in cleanup.
Where do you draw that line though? Are you really okay with committing people, i.e. imprisoning and medicating people, because society seems to find those people inconvenient?
Personally I've never understood any justification for committing a person without their consent. The line between being committed and being extra judicially imprisoned seems indistinguishable to me.
What scares me about deinstitutionalization is that there are ways that people can ‘exit’ as in: move to the suburbs, drive instead of take public transportation, order a private taxi for your burrito instead of go to a restaurant. If public spaces can’t protect themselves we’ll have nothing but private spaces.
Puts a different spin on the System of a Down lyrics, "The percentage of Americans in the prison system (prison system) has doubled since 1985" (Prison Song, Toxicity, 2001).
This further reinforces the other complaints (in the song) about drug offences landing people in jail, some of them from self-medicating a mental illness they can't or won't get treatment for
Well, that's what prison is, for some value of "inconvenient".
The problem is that at some point, if someone refuses to abide by laws/social norms, and can't be coerced via fines, etc., then the only options the state, and society has are either imprisonment, or allowing those people to ignore laws/social norms. Clearly some social norms (e.g. serious crimes) we aren't okay with ignoring, so it's really just a question of what the threshold is where we do something vs. allowing people to disregard said laws/norms.
> Personally I've never understood any justification for committing a person without their consent. The line between being committed and being extra judicially imprisoned seems indistinguishable to me.
Presumably the process to commit someone can involve the judiciary, so it wouldn't be extra-judicial.
Prison is for those convicted of a crime by a jury of their peers. There must not only be a criminal law on the books, you must be found guilt by trial.
Involuntary committal involves no laws being broken and there is no jury. I don't know every detail of that process though I am familiar with the general flow, I know multiple people that work in related roles, and my understanding from them is that it is generally not down through a legal proceeding.
I'm talking at a higher level - I'm saying that conceptually, "inconvenience" ranges from mild offences to murder, and society has to decide where to draw some line for inconveniences that it will not permit. If someone is determined to re-offend, regardless of severity, the state's only choices are to either let them re-offend, or to use force to prevent it.
> no drugs on the train
Nonsense. I'd rather have people carry their illegal drugs on the train and take them at home. The issue is people experiencing the effects of the drug on the train and often times making it unsafe for women, children, and men too (it doesn't really matter what your sex is when the drugged out man vomits on you). I honestly don't care if you carry your illegal drugs everywhere, as long as you make sure the effects of said drugs are dealt with privately. I have major issues with people making the consequences of their drug use other people's problem
The dangerous people are the ones spreading fear - that leads to horrible things. I've had no problem with unhoused people who I am around almost every day. Why would I?
All the fear mongering is wrong. You have nothing to fear but fear itself.
Schadenfreude is the dominant feeling of the times, and many if not most Americans would basically celebrate a “purge” of the homeless.
In places with less affordable housing, there is more homeless people. The solution to homelessness is to build more housing.
That's the solution a 5 year old would come up with, too, but it's correct.
Most of the homeless in SF and LA aren't from California. Red states love to "deal" with their homeless by buying them bus tickets to the West Coast (something that Texas used to openly brag about).
If SF and LA shipped the homeless back to where they originally came from, we'd all be talking about the Midwest homelessness crisis.
You'd still want to charge for congestion. Ie when a particular bus (or rather bus route) is reliably full at a particular time of the day, gradually raise prices until it's just below capacity.
Basically, you want to transport the maximum number of passengers while making it so that any single person who wants to get on the bus (at prevailing prices) still can.
Instead of a bespoke dynamic system that adjust prices dynamically, you might want to keep it simple and just have a simple peak / off-peak distinction.
Obviously you'd want both: charge for congestion, and use the price signals you get to help you decide where (and when) to add capacity.
Resources are limited, and buying yet another bus and hiring an extra bus driver just to shave the last tiny bit of congestion off Monday morning might be a noble ideal, but you might be better off using those funds to pay for another free school meal (or whatever other do-goodery is the best use of the marginal dollar).
The issue with SF (unlike Iowa city) is that free for all everybody is going to be harder sell to voters when there is large amount of out of city traffic -travelers and greater Bay Area residents who do not pay city taxes.
What is more realistic is extend subsidies to all residents of the city beyond the current programs for youth/seniors/homeless/low income etc.
But it's those lawful residents and taxpayers paying for it if you make it free anyway. They're just paying through their taxes rather than through fares. So still all taxpayer money, just non-riding taxpayers subsidizing riding taxpayers. Why is that better?
I'd have to assume that the ones who are driving the political political pressure for this money to be spent as it is are the so-called "lawful residents and taxpayers"; I'm sure the groups you mention facing extra scrutiny would be happy for that money to go towards the buses instead. It's not hard to imagine that certain issues like RV parking get outsized attention pretty much for the exact same reason that the buses don't.
How many other $200M projects should they just "find" budget for? Only the one you like?
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.
Public transit systems need to consider a lot of trade offs when they plan how to use the resources they have.
Optimizing for cost like this can make the busses less practical to use and less attractive to potential riders.
If a bus stop is only visited by a bus once an hour, then the average amount of time someone needs to wait for a bus to visit that bus stop is 30 minutes (assuming a uniform distribution for when that person arrives at the bus stop). If the bus stop is visited by a bus every 20 minutes, then that person would only need to wait at that bus stop for an average of 10 minutes.
The average time of a trip on this bus will be roughly equal to: the time to walk to the bus stop + the time spent waiting for the bus + the time the bus takes to reach the closest stop to the destination + the time to walk to the destination.
From that, reducing the number of busses that visit that bus stop increases the average amount of time for trips which originate from that bus stop.
A factor which impacts usage of public transit system is how quickly it can get someone to some arbitrary destination.
So, cutting the amount of busses a public transit system runs can reduce costs but also reduces how attractive that public transit system is to potential riders because of the increase in the amount of time an average trip takes.
That increases the use of other forms of transportation, assuming that people don't forgo trips entirely (e.g., staying home instead of going to a bar and getting a DUI, or eating at a hotel's restaurant to avoid spending $60-80 on taxis or Uber for a single meal).
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.
> 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.
Real polities are of finite size, so you don't need (infinitely) scalable.
Here in Singapore we could sustainably afford to make public transport free, if we wanted to.
However I agree with you that charging for public transport is the right thing to do. (And to charge users of government provided services in general for everything, and to give poor people money.) If nothing else, you at least want to charge for congestion at peak hours, so that there's always an epsilon of capacity left even at rush hour, so any single person who wants to board the train at prevailing prices can do so.
It's a simple matter of supply and demand so even if the transit system operates on tokens but those tokens are given away for free, my weird brain would still want to the system to exist to track how the system is being used.
Singapore charges for MRT rides, but it's not explicitly a congestion charge. Every once in a while they experiment with discounts for off-peak train usage, which can sort-of be interpreted as a congestion charge.
> Trains get crowded but still workable.
At the peak of rush hour you sometimes have to wait three or four trains before one comes that still has standing room. (It's not as bad as it sounds, because during rush hour trains come every three minutes or so.)
IMHO, varying train charges more with congestion would make a lot of sense; but the system as it is works well enough that it's probably not worth for any technocrat to spend the political capital to seriously do anything about it.
it might be more cost effective to expand public transport to transport every singaporean to where he/she needs to be on time, than to make them wait..
Not all GDP is created by work. See https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPSGA156NRUG to learn that our labour share of GDP is roughly 50%.
And, of course, the average hides a lot of information about the distribution.
Though even given all the caveats, your numbers still seem wrong to me. 90kUSD / 200 / 8 ~ 57 USD, not 5kUSD.
In that situation I suggest, you hike the price up to near infinity and pay off the public debt first and then buy up the entire world's assets.
You don't necessarily need all people to use it during peak hours, just "enough" people. There are people who do have flexible schedules, but they may simply may not have had enough motivation to change old habits (yet).
The point of a congestion charge (whether on driving or on public transport) is to alleviate the congestion 'punishment'.
As a mental model: congestion works a bit like an auction. Getting from A to B during rush hour brings people some benefits (otherwise, they wouldn't bother). Benefits differ between people. But that travel also costs, both in terms of fares and in terms of annoyance and perhaps delays.
So We can imagine every prospective commuter weighs their benefits against the costs. I say it works like an auction, because there's limited capacity, and the people who are willing to endure the most price + annoyance are going to 'win' the auction and will commute. Everyone else shifts their commute around or stays home.
The people you mention who 'have to' travel during rush hour are just the ones willing to bear the highest costs in our model, and thus they 'win' the auction. (Winning an auction isn't necessarily good..: after all, you have to pay the price.)
Having a congestion charge means different people can bid not just with their tolerance for annoyance and delay, but also with actual money.
So now people compare fare + congestion charge + annoyance against their benefits. Assuming benefits on the right side of the equation have stayed about the same, the breakeven point for 'annoyance tolerance' is going to be lower, just because the other part of the left side grew.
A similar example: if tomorrow your local Walmart was handing out free 20 dollar bills with every purchase, you can bet your hat that pretty soon the queues for the cashier at that shop would grow until the wait-in-line for the marginal customer cancels out the free 20 dollars. Keep in mind that the marginal customer isn't the average customer: the queue would mostly be made up of people who have more time than money.
Conversely, in our congestion charging scenario the winners of our auction will tend to shift towards the crowd that has more money than time (or tolerance for packed trains).
The nice thing about letting people bid with money is that afterwards someone else has the money and can spend it. When you bid with your capacity to endure frustration and delay, no one else gets any benefit from that. It's just a poor waste of society's resources.
If public transport provides value to people, they should pay for some of it. 30 day unlimited ride pass in only $132.
Registration fees are usually time-based, not usage-based.
We’re a quarter of the way through the 21st century, gas taxes have been optional for driving for quite a while now.
States mostly take the equivalent of those taxes out of vehicle registration fees for electric vehicles.
And bicycle usage is nearly a nil cost on the existing public roads, so the costs here would be appropriate to come out of the general sales/property taxes that fun the city/county. If anything you might argue to try to subsidize bicycle ridership more in urban areas, whether with bicycle paths or otherwise, to reduce the number of cars on the roads and reduce congestion for those still on the roads.
In any case, the point is that public transit riders pay fares. Not taxes, not registration fees, but fares. The equivalent for roads would be tolls. And it’s pretty uncommon to see any advocacy for charging tolls for all roads.
And electric cars don't pay a gas tax.
But that's still "some of it".
> And electric cars don't pay a gas tax.
Electric cars' registration fees are much higher to make up for that, e.g., in New Jersey, you owe an extra $260 per year for an EV (which automatically goes up by $10 every year) vs. a gas car.
And besides, the comment upthread said "some", not "all".
There are just a lot of people in New York. The roads are packed, and the public transit is packed. More transit would help solve both problems.
If you don't know that's a lot for some people ...
> they should pay for some of it
They do. It must be paid for, and all government money comes from the citizens.
> Under that metric, the poverty threshold for a couple with two children in a rental household in New York City is now $47,190. The study found that 58 percent of New Yorkers, or more than 4.8 million people, were in families with incomes below 200 percent of the poverty line — about $94,000 for a couple with two children or $44,000 for a single adult. Poverty rates among Black, Latino and Asian residents were about twice as high as the rate for white residents, according to the report.
Sorry I just can't take these arguments in good faith. $100 in the richest city of country of the richest country in the world is basically nothing. If you can't allocate that towards your mobility then IDK what to say to you.
That is 16 hours of work if you make $8 an hour. You obviously make more than that if you can say "only $132"
This isn't really unknown either. There's a very good story anyone can look up about Dr. V in India and what it took for him to actually get the eye care he wanted to provide to the people who needed it.
In the digital world many of us know you want to deeply understand your user and design with them in mind. Same thing here in the meat space.
Its still a lot of money at $16.50. 12 days a year you labor just for the opportunity to labor. Your point only makes it slightly better and doesn't really take away from my point - it's a lot of money for a good number of folks. You know, the folks that could really benefit.
A 50% discount is probably pretty hard to get - and you are still asking the poorest folks to pay 4 hours of labour for busses.
Meanwhile it's 70 deg F here in Atlanta. California and Florida have even warmer temps.
As someone who was homeless (for less than a year, thankfully!), my experience was that many people with nowhere to go (myself included) become incredibly despondent that they have no roof, no shower, no place to keep (let alone wash) their clothes and turn to drugs as a way of (temporarily) ameliorating their suffering.
Those with mental health issues often can't hold a job as they're suffering from debilitating mental illness (duh!) and those with no place to shower or keep clean clothes have a hard time getting, keeping jobs too.
The latter group mostly just needs the opportunity to present themselves for job inquiries bathed, reasonably well rested and in clean clothes.
The former group needs the same plus mental health services including supervision and treatment.
Don't forget that more than half of Americans are an unexpected $600 emergency away from being unable to pay for food, rent, utilities, etc.
But most folks ignore that and instead just want them gone. They don't care where -- in jail -- in another city -- just as long as they don't have to look at them. It's disgusting.
Really, the land of the free is going to enforce showering laws? If our standard for freedom is that low, I'd lock up all the people spreading fear - they do far more damage.
The Times editorial board repeatedly wrote anti-Mamdani opinion pieces. But speaking as a non-NYC New York Times reader I never saw it unless it was sent to me by a New Yorker--it simply wasn't commentary that was highlighted unless you were specifically trying to follow the NYC election. (And to the extent they criticised his candidacy, it wasn't in rejecting free busses.)
In the case of this specific story, there's an extremely straightforward potential explanation for why you story might have the bias that the parent comment describes, but for almost the exactly opposite reason that someone might think without that additional context.
You're cherry-picking your own examples. It worked in Iowa City.
Y Combinator and much of SV would be out of business if innovators followed that thinking. One reason is that people do come up with new ideas; that's how the world changes. The other is that the world changes, and what didn't work before now works - costs change and value changes, and now it's worthwhile. For example, with congestion pricing and other rapidly increasong costs of NYC car ownership, there's more value in free transit.
Oddly, it's the thinking advocated by many HN posts, denigrating the innovation under discussion as impossible, useless, etc.
> without sustainability, a political shift will kill it
That can be said of many things. A political shift could kill military funding in the US.
and lose the very thing that keeps the US top dog. You're implying that political shifts could happen to shift _anything_.
That's not true for things of fundamental importance. So is transit of fundamental importance?
Of course it could!
One of the key lesson of the twentieth century is that, with political will, a modern state can do almost anything and political power can change the world dramatically very fast, for the better or the worse…
It was the USD as reserve currency that enabled the US to fund it's military to a point that should have bankrupted the US. The US military hasn't won a war outside the Americas since WW2.
With a budget half or a quarter of the current, the US would remain secure behind two oceans. I do agree that politically the military budget will remain high due to the relationship between the MIC and US government.
The Gulf War and the war with ISIS. But yes, lots of bad results in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.
> With a budget half or a quarter of the current, the US would remain secure behind two oceans. I do agree that politically the military budget will remain high due to the relationship between the MIC and US government.
The US can't be a self-sufficient island. It's not even close to plausible. Also, people do care about freedom for others everywhere; it's not just Americans who deserve it.
Indeed, it worked in Brisbane (a metro area comparable to Baltimore in the U.S.) and Lanzhou (comparable to Boston-Cambridge-Newton): congestion was reduced, the environment benefited, and usage increased in many cities that dislodged from that equilibrium and switched to a free-of-charge or symbolic-charge model.
I don't think GP's claim stands, for transit cities big or small.
That doesn't make it a serious transit city
Beware: if there are no true Scotsmen left, and your definition of serious transit city excludes everything apart from ~10 European cities, the conclusions that one can draw from the policies of serious transit cities will be so limited that they will in fact be useless.
However, I think that Iowa City isn't doing the symbolic fare, and that Brisbane's 50 cent fare would make some kind of a difference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translink_(Queensland)#Fares
> However, I think that Iowa City isn't doing the symbolic fare, and that Brisbane's 50 cent fare would make some kind of a difference
A reasonable point. That very well might be the case, and if everybody thinks symbolic-fare is better than no-fare, I won't be the one to oppose it.
The point of buses is to replace cars, not short walks.
If you make it so that everybody who could walk 5min takes a bus, the bus will have to stop more often - and for longer - which makes it worse for the people who can't just walk 5min.
The trick is to balance the system so that buses (and other forms of transit) are cheaper - and approximately as convenient - as cars, without making them cheaper and more convenient than walking (for those who can still walk).
Fares don't necessarily need to be about financing the system. They can be about setting the correct incentives, and ensuring people value the service they're getting.
Most likely, you will have extra trips because people won't feel the need to justify the fare.
Also, it doesn't help to make bus stops more spaced, and you may not want a bunch of express routes that skip most stops, because another purpose of buses is to help people with difficulty moving (like the elderly), for whom it's not a 5min walk.
You just want to make the service available, and as good as possible, without incentivising people who could just walk to use it.
Because the actual goal is to displace cars (not walkers, or cyclists, or…)
... Eh?
I often hit the leap card weekly cap (24 eur) in Dublin. This absolutely does not lead me to take a bus instead of walking for five minutes, because that would be _insane_. Like, maybe there are a few people who despise walking to an unreasonable extent and do this, but it would not be common. If it was, you'd see people doing it anywhere which has a fare cap (ie. most cities, these days).
With all due respect, I expect more effort than Googling "are buses really free in Brisbane", then copy-pastig the AI summary. Symbolic charges were mentioned for a reason, both cities have a fixed "fare" of about 30 US cents on their networks.
If you think there are examples of GP's claim that "every major city that tries free transit at scale will eventually snap back to it", feel free to substantiate it by naming major cities which tried the Brisbane-Lanzhou model and snapped back.
What form of corruption-induced lobbying is this now? A sizable advantage of making it actually free is to remove the huge cost of the fare collections infrastructure.
There might also be other "social engineering" benefits to having a fixed symbolic charge, as some people argued in this thread. I don't know about that, but I don't think it's _just_ lobbying.
Most of the cost of collecting fares is actually the money. You need machines that can process currency, which are expensive and often requires network infrastructure and middlemen and contractors, and then they have to be secured against theft or card skimming etc., and you need customer service and billing and tech support when the machines break and all the rest of it.
If all you want is to track usage you can just put a simple pedestrian counter at the door and you're not actually disrupting anything if it's offline for a week because you're just looking for statistical sampling anyway.
> There might also be other "social engineering" benefits to having a fixed symbolic charge, as some people argued in this thread. I don't know about that, but I don't think it's _just_ lobbying.
Ambiguous "social engineering benefits" are the sort of thing that implies it is lobbying, because there is no good way to prove or disprove it but it gives someone something to claim is their reason when the real ones are less sympathetic, i.e. they're trying to get the collections contract (or have read a study funded by someone who does) or they just don't like spending money on transit but know that won't be a convincing argument to someone who does.
The cost of the programme rolling out new ticketing infra (the first major ticketing system upgrade in ~15 years since we first got integrated ticketing, going from a stored-value smart card to also being able to tap your credit card) is roughly the same amount of money as the annual revenue from fares.
Then as long as the system is in place you need to pay ongoing costs to repair and maintain the equipment, enforcement against anyone who skips the fare, payment network fees, customer service for anyone with payment issues or damaged cards, connectivity service for anything that needs to be networked, etc.
And the overhead percentage depends on the fares. If it was ~10% when the fare was $5, what is it when the fare is $0.50? Well:
> If fare revenue is now only about $20 million per year, does it even cover the cost of fare collection? The current ticketing system rollout was expected to cost $371m, but ended up at $434m – which appears to cover operations for 17 years from 2018… so $25.5m per year. [0]
[0] https://danielbowen.com/2025/07/11/brisbane-pt-patronage-gro...
And then what is it when that number hasn't included the time value of money or accounting for any of the operating costs?
> For every £1 invested, walking and cycling return an average of around £5-6
> A study of New York concluded that, in terms of health: “Investments in bike lanes are more cost-effective than the majority of preventive approaches used today.”
From https://www.cyclinguk.org/briefing/case-cycling-economy
If you drive by a small market you often won't park your car to go there. Cars and trucks destroy streets fast. Having less of them keeps repairs less frequent. Infrastructure for walking and biking can exist for multiple decades or even millennia
Shopping locally is more efficient, because the distribution network distributes things locally much more efficiently then a bunch of housewives in their SUVs.
Sure its cheaper for the shop providing the food, but for the society its more expensive. What you are completely missing is the massive cost of all the infrastructure and the massive subsidizes therein to create these centralized stores. And then the massive cost in time and capital investment for every users to buy a car to pick that stuff up.
You are also ignoring the massive waste this creates because people only go shopping every 1-2 weeks. And you are ignore the lack of fresh foods in the food system because of this behavior. That of course Americans eventually pay in their medical systems.
If you actually do some research you will see the systematic bias that is in the zoning code, infrastructure cost calculation and services. Walmart often consumer more in just police services then they pay in taxes. Walmart is systematically gaming the property rights system to pay almost no taxes. And yet Walmart uses a huge amount of land and requires a huge amount of public infrastructure to sustain itself.
If you really need to do some massive pickup of stuff for a party or something there are still larger stores you can go to as well, just not for everyday stuff.
Actually having a shop where I can locally pick up fresh food every day or every other day is actually much more convenient and saves far more time. And I know this is crazy for Americans to consider, but as a society it would be nice if people without a car could also buy food sometimes. This video points this out:
What people don’t benefit from is laws to artificially benefit small businesses at the expense of the consumer. Here in New York, we have this stupid law that one corporate entity can only have one liquor retail license. This law was created at the “behest” of the lobby of liquor store owners. The end result of this is that liquor is more expensive than my hometown of Vancouver, despite NYS collecting a significantly lower tax rate than BC province. That money all flew into private coffers, and the consumer still gets bent over in the end.
I also take issue with the implication that Walmart incurring policing costs is bad for society. The implication is that Walmart should either have private police or be a shoplifting free for all. The former is a bad idea because Walmart police don’t have the same responsibility or accountability to the public as public police. The latter is a bad idea because society will collapse without property rights.
Sure if you want to have an intellectual debate about what the economics of scale means then that's fine but your point about economics of scale about suburban super-markets was still wrong and that was the context of my critic.
The rest of your post is irrelevant to my point. I have not advocated for any policy specifically to help small business. Small shops in cities can and are operate by major cooperation. There is no contradiction between large companies and small/urban locations. Not sure why you are even bringing this up. Are you so 'America'-brained that you think large companies can only exist in large commercial zones right of highway exchanges?
> I also take issue with the implication that Walmart incurring policing costs is bad for society.
I didn't say the issue is that its incurring policing cost, I said the cost it incurs is higher then the taxes its paying. The whole point of taxes is that they finance the operation of a geographical area. And everybody living or operating in that area should help finance that area.
If somebody operates in that area that incurs more cost then benefits then that somebody should only continue to be doing so if people consider it a 'social good'. And supporting Wallmart a highly profitable company, clearly doesn't fall under that.
So designing policies so that a multi-billion $ company can show up and extract value from your town is nonsensically stupid.
In fact you are stealing from other business and people in your area to give more profits to wallmart.
> The implication is that Walmart should either have private police or be a shoplifting free for all.
No 'the implication' is that when a community does land use, infrastructure and tax planning it should consider facts, and consider cost to provide services and infrastructure for to those areas.
The fact is, most communities make most of their money in the 'down town' that is true even for very small town and even villages.
What you are proposing is basically that a community should finance, build and maintain a lot of public infrastructure, then finance continue police and other services far away from where most people actually live to protect cooperate property (and specifically the parking lot) all while Wallmart does everything in its power to pay the absolute minimum back to the community it is in. Both by local tricks and by tricks on a federal level.
But even if you have that you still need high quality public transport. Its not either or. And if you are going to invest in public transport, investing in capacity, speed and convenience. Is a better investment then not making people pay.
while the majority of [the savings] consists of traditional transport decongestion benefits, around a fifth are arising from e.g. health, journey quality and safety.
Once you're too old, the health benefits are less clear e.g. my mother dangerously broke bones after falling off her bike (I think cause was overloading herself with a grubber in a backpack).
The quote doesn't support that. It says decongestion is most of the savings, and decongestion is fewer cars, implying bikes replace cars.
Is there something else in the article that supports it?
Someone on a bike isn't driving - it seems like a clear substitute, though it also substitutes for public transit.
I would favour walking. Its far easier to get people to do it and most people can do it. A lot of infrastructure already exists and its cheaper and easier to improve.
If you provide reasonably public transport its far easier to walk. I drive into town, then park and walk, where I currently live because busses are infrequent. I never even owned a car in London because it has good public transport (to be fair, I probably would have if I lived in a suburb and had kids).
Why exclude cycling? You're range is ~5x walking - in the time and effort required to walk a mile, you could easily cycle 5 miles.
It doesn't have to be a universal panacea to be valuable. Walking isn't possible for everyone, including some who can cycle, and it's not useful for longer distances like 5 miles, ~2.5 hrs walking or 30 min cycling slowly.
Unfortunately stop lights/etc. will also make this longer. My "best" pace where I actually do get tired is about 15 minutes per mile. Few can keep up a 4mph pace even on a dedicated walking trail with no elevation changes for any material length of time.
Most folks average probably greater than 20 minutes per mile, especially for longer walks. 2.5 hours is definitely on the extreme end, but close to 2 hours is probably more realistic for most.
The quote I was replying to was about return on investment. Money spent on cycling infrastructure is money not spent on walking and public transport. Spending money is definitely XOR.
I am arguing that walking for shorter distances and providing public transport for longer distances is a better use of money in most places.
> Why exclude cycling? You're range is ~5x walking
Your range for walking plus public transport is far greater.
One big problem I see with cycling is low uptake in most places - in most (not all, to be fair) places I know cycles lanes are mostly empty.
> Walking isn't possible for everyone, including some who can cycle
People can cycle who cannot walk or use a bus?
You are right that money is XOR. But cycling takes people of roads and improves the overall system while being very cheap. Also, you don't need dedicated super dutch style infrastructure to encurrage cycling. Making it safe for walking and cars to interact, ALSO makes it much, much better for cycling. Its a mistake in thinking that 'cycling' infrastructure is only dedicated cycling lanes. Encuriging cycling almost always pays off, in pretty every systematic measurment ever done on the topic. And if you reach Dutch level it pays of a gigantic amount. Its really low investment high return.
Cycle lanes actually look empty often because they are so much more efficent. They have done some studies on paths that were always empty and the threwput is usually not as bad as people think. To be sure the place you are refering to could be totally empty, it happens, but its not the norm even in the US.
Also, of course in a lot of places, specially in the US where they are really bad at cycling infratructure, they believe that all it takes is for one road to have a cycle lane and then magically people on bikes show up. They just want to get in on the 'hype' and were pressured to 'do something'. You need to actually be able to reasonably safely go from A to B between places that are vaguly useful. Dedicate cycling lanes make sense in places where there is no alterantive and you need cars to go resonably fast. But generally its more about your car infrastructure and how fast and dangerous your cars are. Improving cycling always goes hand in hand with making cars less dangerous, and that always pays off.
It takes some up front investment and actual planning, but its not like that infrastructure is worthless after a few years. Cycle lanes once built basically never get destroyed, so putting it in speculatively while having a long term plan makes a lot of sense.
This worked well in Iraq.
A significant fraction of HN has been raised with the idea that “natural” innovation can only arise from the private sector competing on a market, and every attempt at public-funded out-of-market innovation is seen as “unnatural” and doomed to fail.
And like all religion, it's pretty hopeless to refute it with rational arguments.
> hopeless
Here you lose me. I find people respond very well to rational arguments, presented with openness, curiosity, and respect.
I think hopelessness is the religion of this day.
You should charge roughly what it costs to operate because that's information. People should ask why it costs so much. People should consider alternatives. Trying to remove prices is like fighting climate change by removing thermometers.
If it is decided by a city government that we want public transport as a public service, paid for by taxes and other means then removing prices is an option that could make sense in the right situations.
The road system doesn't have a price tag per trip, yet it's costs are managed through policy and governance. No difference here in my opinion.
I think your point about economic signals is very good - I wonder if any locality charges at cost; does NYC do it now? - though 'charging at cost' undermines the goals: universal mobility, reducing climate impact, reducing congestion, and (I think) increasing economic liquidity and competition (e.g., in the labor market, in retail, etc.).
We need another solution: Maybe vouchers for people based on income? That becomes much more complex.
Also, I would gues it impacts ease of use and adoption - imagine being able to just hop on any passing bus, as opposed to finding your payment, going only through the front door, paying, etc.
Also, the US heavily subsidizes fossil fuels, including with military spending.
Which seems to have drawn anger from Meninist circles.
People who support this say, it gives more mobility to women from poor and lower middle class households, and hence better employment opportunities, increased family incomes and by the effect taxes as well.
People who criticise this say, the expenses for free rides are offloaded to already burdened tax payers, who quite honestly in the Indian system get nothing in return. These forever increasing free perks for sets of people who won't contribute anything back, at the expense of ever increasing burden on people who are expected to pay without expecting anything in return, won't end well.
But also, why are women specifically traveling for free? What was the original argument?
Not women in specific, but India has a huge informal economy sector, where payments, salaries, spending are done outside of the tax system. Most people who take these buses work in that economy. So you end up enabling that part of the economy. At the expense of people paying taxes. It wouldn't be any different, if men got free rides as well.
>>But also, why are women specifically traveling for free? What was the original argument?
Women as a vote bank, has been a growing trend in Indian politics. In a lot of states far more generous perks are given to women. For eg- https://cleartax.in/s/ladli-behna-yojana
By offering these perks, you are basically buying votes from 50% of the net voting population. So a lot of states offer these perks.
Iowa City isn’t a big city. Most American cities aren’t.
I lived in New York. We had paid subways and busses and that didn’t stop them from being abused like park benches—enforcement did. (And to be clear, the minority creating a mess for others were all over the place. Homeless. Hooligans. Mentally ill who got lost.)
I now live in a small Wyoming town. We have free downtown rideshare. (It’s just slower than Uber.)
My small northern Minnesota town is far from perfect, but we don't let our neighbors and kids become fent zombies on the main drag. That's not a lifestyle that we want to enable or perpetuate. I do not understand the mental hurdles that Berkley-educated 'scholars' jump through to rationalize letting people suffer the most potent and deadly forms of addiction. The penal system is the last net to catch these people before they die from OD or blood-borne pathogenc or the consequences of criminal activity. And the "empathetic" west coast intellectuals say "legalize the drugs". Absolute lunacy
And you're out here bragging about what you "let" your neighbors and kids do. And bragging about visiting two US cities.
Source? (I genuinely know nothing about this. But would appreciate hard data.)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
Anecdotally, I used to take the Greyhound a lot and everyone on them is either a student or somewhat homeless, e.g. they just lined up another friend's couch to sleep on for a little while.
There was some bussing of homeless into city centres. But I haven't seen evidence that a majority, let alone significant plurality, of these cities' homeless addicts became homeless somewhere else.
https://hsh.sfgov.org/services/the-homelessness-response-sys...
Although, many cities do this, and everyone leaving is just arriving somewhere else.
"These three programs all help people relocate outside San Francisco to reunite with family or support networks." (Emphasis mine).
(Maybe this demographic skews more towards natives in the case of homeless addicts, but I can’t find a statistic to support that.)
[1]: https://popfactfinder.planning.nyc.gov/explorer/cities/New%2...
Nope, you'll take homeless folks right to jail, promptly, where they can be zombies out of sight. It isn't like folks in small towns are gonna help the person with treatment. As long as they stay out of view most times, they'll just be gossip. If they are lucky, someone will invite them to church. Small towns will absolutely let folks suffer if they just stay somewhere out of sight.
The best option is treatement. But the worst is leaving them on the streets. They're hurting themselves as much as they could otherwise. But they're also hurting bystanders.
The U.S. has one of the highest re-offense rates out of any developed nation because an arrest is something employers, banks, and even privately run welfare programs all see as a permanent red flag. It's like someone figuratively puts walls in the way so the person with the arrest on their record is confined to a tiny square, cut off from viable opportunities. What makes it even worse is the combination where some states don't expunge records of juvenile offenses when you turn eighteen if they're federal offenses, and records of arrests aren't differentiated by how long ago they happened. If you got thrown in juvie at sixteen for mail fraud for using your uncle's name to scam magazine subscriptions then in some places like New Jersey that'll still be there when you're forty and will be treated as if it happened yesterday.
From a macro view there's more harm done when you arrest an addict than if you had left them to teeter on the edge of an overdose, which is just really messed up. All because of zero tolerance policies from organizations that have nothing to do with law enforcement.
There's no way up from the bottom other than having another person take your hand. And nobody wants to be the one to reach down their hand. They rely on broken organizations and inappropriate tools to do that because their proximity to that ruin makes them uncomfortable. Either the addict gets screwed by the police or they get screwed by the rehabilitation facilities. So the addicts decide to turn away from both, and the public decides to turn away from the addicts. As you said, those in the public ostracize and shun them.
Do you have a source for this?
That's not even considering systems, like how a single arrest introduces costs to the state because of the transportation, the provided meals during their stay, the hygiene standards the arrestee must go through, and the required paperwork. Or how it affects total prosperity by almost guaranteeing that someone will be stuck with less productive and less meaningful employment for the rest of their lives, reducing taxes the town/city, county, state, and federal government can take and that person's own contributions to the local economy.
[1] https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/10/12/every-25-seconds/human... [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9302017/
I think the question turns on scale. If one person has the capacity to harm dozens, as one does in a city, the calculus may shift towards incapacitation. If it’s a small handful of non-violent interactions, on the other hand, as would be more likely somewhere less dense, then I agree with you. (Same turn on access to weapons.)
Yep. There is no solution except to shoot those filthy addicts, amirite?
I mean who wants to spend $35-50K/annum to keep these scum in prison, right?
In fact, why should my tax dollars pay for any of these subhuman criminals, addicts and other undesirables? A bullet only costs a dime.
That's the way to go, right soerxpso? Pew! Pew! Pew!
I wouldn't expect a drug addict to know the above, but it still needs to be stated. If anyone happens to be arrested in the US make sure you don't accidentally get listed as guilty and served time (that night in jail counts as time served so if the judge would sentence you to one night in jail)
So, lets jail the professionals that are addicted too. After all, it is the best option for treatment, right? They are also hurting themselves as much as they could otherwise and probably hurting bystanders and their family. But that's ridiculous - few support that. If it were the best option, it would be recommended treatment for all.
The best option for treatment is actual medical based treatment in a facility that isn't punishing you and with staff trained in caring for you in your state. The best option for not leaving people on the streets is to house them. Housing and feeding folks makes treatment much more likely to work.
It seems to be untrue, but I wanted to ask first.
They may want to decriminalise it and treat it as a health problem because empirically this has been shown to actually make a difference in outcomes.
My take away from that experience is that we normalize the misery around us but seeing it, even in a nearly identical form, in another context is shocking.
You can search for more articles, but small town America has been hit very hard by opioids and now fentanyl.
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us-politics/unbudgeted...
Thinking that it is only a city problem is itself part of the problem.
George Lopez at the LA Times used to be a huge advocate of the homeless. And then he tried to do a series of articles about the homeless in Hollywood to highlight their plight and get more people to think like him. When he went out to do his research, it took him over a day interviewing dozens of homeless people to find one who was actually from LA. Less than a quarter were even from California. Needless to say, he's no longer a huge advocate for the homeless.
So yes, it's easy for small towns to talk about how they don't have a homeless problem, because they've shipped their homeless off to the big cities to deal with.
There are BIG DIFFERENCES between how well different cities handle this. There is no "equilibrium", only wise(or unwise) governance.
How do you explain Luxembourg? They've had free public transport for 5 years now.
It's very possible it's the same in Iowa City.
“The truth about Zohran’s free busses” by Breaking Points:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P275SobdE-s
clickbait headline (of course) but gives a lot of facts about the proposal and talks about other places they’ve tried it.
Free roads and highways: GOOD AND NATUAL
The political class are not typically utilizers of public transit: hence even the best attempts are structurally challenged from the outset.
If that isn’t factored into your analysis, you are missing a huge reason why it sometimes fails and sometimes succeeds.
Every time you fuel up a vehicle you are paying a "fare" to use the road. The fare is subsidized (just like with the bus), but it is very much there and not zero.
I guess busses run on fairy dust too?
>I guess busses run on fairy dust too?
Every vehicle on the roads is basically paying to be there via fuel tax (which in whole or large part is spent on the roads). Busses pass some of this cost on to their riders who's fare may be then subsidized in part or full.
I don't see why you're being so hysterical.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jun/17/walmart-hid...
Why is that equilibrium impossible for other transportation infrastructure?
In which country? Because they certainly do in the UK - about £10b a year on maintenance vs £33b a year from road taxes. Half that maintenance comes from local property taxation and half from the central exchequer
If you include the societal costs from road accidents it's nearer, with estimates putting all costs from accidents including lost productivity at £35b a year. Throw in global warming and you find drivers only cover about half the costs.
But then people who argue societal costs need to be included never seem to acknowledge the societal benefits of a road network.
The point about social costs is valid, but there's no need to even consider them. The direct costs already need heavy subsidies in many countries.
Fuel taxes raise £25b a year (there's also a "sales tax" on top of that which raises another c. £10b a year)
Car taxes (VED - an annual tax to have your vehicle on the road legally) raise £8b
This revenue goes to the national budget. The national budget spends about £5b a year on maintaining and building major new roads.
Local roads are funded from local property taxes, and the total expenditure on those is under £5b a year.
The government has been trying to wean itself off fuel taxes over the last 20 years -- in 1999 it accounted for 2% of the GDP, it's now down to 1%. As more and more people shift to Electric vehicles the fuel revenue drops. There have been discussions on moving to a per-mile charge, but in any case, drivers subsidise other government funding priorities.
Rail on the other hand is massively subsidised -- on average it's about the same amount of subsidy as the fare revenue. The price charged per mile is far lower for regular long distance commuters (typically those with high wages), occasional use is peanalised. If I go to London at peak time tomorrow, I'll be paying about 90p a mile. If I lived in Brighton and travelled every day I'd pay under 20p/mile. The average rail user pays about 29p/mile (£3.1b and 17b km) and the subsidy is a similar amount.
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.
What I dislike about GP's comment is that it obfuscates that mostly it's the lower classes that ride the bus, and paying it with fares takes away from the potential to redistribute tax money that harmonises the way we all live together.
Like you've said: buses move people more efficiently, and once they're on the road they're better off being closer to full since that won't dramatically change the fuel they're burning. Plus less cars, etc.
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.
At the IMF suggested rate of €65 per tonne of CO2, a liter of fuel that produces 2.3 kg CO2 would cost €0.15 per liter, while European excise taxes on fuel average around €0.55.
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.
"The Social Cost of Automobility, Cycling and Walking in the European Union":
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...
* https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.12.016
* Via: https://medium.com/strava-metro/whats-the-cost-of-choosing-t...
“The truth about Zohran’s free busses” by Breaking Points:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P275SobdE-s
clickbait headline (of course) but gives a lot of facts about the proposal and talks about other places they’ve tried it.
Free public transit? KILL IT WITH FIRE!!! It will never work (those places it did are aberrations)
Go look up: 1. Jevons paradox (induced demand): More road capacity → more traffic. 2. Marchetti’s constant (30-minute city): Average commute time is stable; faster modes → sprawl. 3. Downs–Thomson paradox (transit sets highway speed): Car speeds improve only if transit gets better. 4. Braess’s paradox (network effect): Adding a new road can worsen traffic for everyone.
Kansas City’s street car system is an incredible testament to this as well. It’s clean, safe, and for the most part quite efficient. And with its recent extension down to UMKC’s campus it’s now a viable transportation method for a lot of people in the heart of Kansas City. Keeping it clean and safe after more than doubling the size of its route might be a bigger lift now, but as long as the city sticks with it post-World Cup I see it continuing to grow.
However- it shouldnt be simply "free".. it should be "free with a pass, which is free" and a pass is easy to get, tied to your ID, and easy to revoke. No pass? thats fine, pay the $3 to ride. bus driver yanked your pass because you were peeing on the seat or intimidating other riders? You can ride again, for $3. Concerned about security or privacy? No problem, Pay $3.
Before the majority of law abiding citizens and travelers, passes are easy and free to get.
RicoElectrico•2mo ago
3eb7988a1663•2mo ago
blitzar•2mo ago
trollbridge•2mo ago
In America we have very few private intra-city buses, ridership is low, and the buses are very expensive when you consider how much goes to them in the way of subsidies.
exasperaited•2mo ago
PopePompus•2mo ago
jerlam•2mo ago
I am surprised that the bus wasn't already free; in my college town and the one near it (both had their own bus line), fares are free for all undergraduates.
E39M5S62•2mo ago
SoftTalker•2mo ago
themafia•2mo ago
You need public transport in major cities. Not everyone can or should drive.
You need private transportation almost everywhere. Not everyone should be forced to ride public transport just because it exists.
As long as people have an actual choice that's not manipulated in some way then I think the system is fine. It has a public function and it provides immediate and secondary benefits.