The real problem with "free" is its emotional appeal to idealists who should never be allowed near transit policy, nor transit system management.

    > "Prices are information"
    > "Is a particular route lightly used? Is it overcrowded?"

There are plenty of ways to evaluate that without charging a fee. You can track utilisation without needing to charge for it.

There's also a qualitative vs quantitive element to it. Only one person uses the bus each day? Eliminate the bus route. Oh, that person is a student who uses the bus to travel to college, and without the bus they would have to drop out of schooling.

The equation isn't necessarily "Is the bus worth a $1.50 bus fare for one person", but rather, is the bus generating a much greater future value by ensuring a student can get to college?

This is 90% BS. People from the US should not be allowed to comment on public transport on the internet. They are traumatized by whatever is considered normal in the US but hardly anywhere else. As a monthly card holder from Europe I can tell you my life has improved from before when I payed per ride. I am fortunate to be able to afford the price of the monthly card, so in effect for me this feels almost like zero fare. The article argues that the price is valuable as a signal, but of course that completely ignores that transport providers can at any time count riderships if they want to, and they also have to because a ticket sold tells you only so much about the passengers' routes. When you buy a ticket from the driver of Line A and then use that ticket when you change to Line B, where does the price signal get picked up for Line B? But then in the US we can maybe safely assume that where there is any public transport at all you probably cannot buy a ticket that covers your journey across more than 1 line. It is also possible that you can cover more than a single line but you have to announce your destination, which is also horribly inconvenient for both the driver and the passengers. Now each halt turns into a small plane-boarding procedure, and although the passengers has maybe bought a ticket to the city center to go shopping, they still don't have the freedom to get around without having to pay again. The solution are time-based tickets that give you one or a few hours or the entire day, but now, again, that cherished price signal is more or less gone in that case. The entire ticket-price-as-signal idea is a moron's idea of how public transport can and does work in many parts of the world. Well, outside the US anyways.

> When public buses charge fares, private operators and alternative transportation services can compete. If they can move people more efficiently or cheaply, that is valuable information.

> When buses are “free,” competition evaporates. No private operator can compete with zero. You lock the system into a permanent political funding battle.

Well, they can - maybe the free buses have bad stops because allegedly nobody can evaluate whether they're good or not. Maybe to someone, a $3 van ride is worth more than the free bus ride.

This is sort of inconsistent, and I don't really understand why the assault-theory even rated a mention.