This is such a heinous non-sequiter i dont even know where to begin. Government services take money to operate. Government services are paid by taxes. In a democracy, you need to make people agree that they want to pay taxes for particular services.

The 60% of massachusetts residents who dont live in teh greater boston metro area do not want to pay for a service they dont use, so it is nearly politically impossible to raise the budget of the MBTA.

So if you are a massachusetts state legistlator you have a couple options. you can allow the MBTA to continue to deteriorate while also going over budget every year (current state) or you could increase the fare to compensate for the actual cost it takes to run the service, or your third option, which is to decrease the amount of money that goes to an already deteriorating public service.

edit: 50-55% of car related infrastructure costs are paid by gas taxes, tolls, excise taxes etc. currently <30% of the mbtas budget is covered by fares.

Car and truck owners pay fuel tax and registration tax (hundreds or thousands of dollars a year, especially heavy trucks) which all ostensibly goes to road upkeep and related infrastructure. It may not cover all the costs but neither do transit fares.

I don't know anything about Boston's system but most transit agencies would need to have fares in the tens of dollars per ride, at least, to come anywhere close to covering their costs. This is much closer to the costs of using a car, probably not coincidentally. Getting from point A to point B has a value that is independent of the transport mechanism.

The only time you should really be worried about limiting rides on transit is if the system is already overburdened (perhaps as the proverbial Japanese trains with shovers).

Nearly all of them will have some recurring service fees and paying ~3% to process credit card payments is fairly unavoidable, but those aren't even the biggest costs. You have to install card readers everywhere, which is not just the equipment cost but also the labor to install them, and maintain them, and keep them networked with all the costs of that. If any of it fails it's a service interruption which means you need redundancy and overnight support. People call you with billing problems or commit fraud and have to be investigated.

What's the point of any of that when the fares are generating less than 1% of the state budget, have privacy issues and deter people from doing something you want to encourage?

Which is a huge pain, because now you need to have a car, and already be in it to drive to the park and ride. A drive on which there could be traffic. Which means you could miss your train unless you leave early, but then you're standing around the train station doing nothing (and not getting paid) even when there isn't traffic, instead of spending that time either at home or at work. Whereas if you lived near the train stop you wouldn't have to leave early to not miss your train.

Meanwhile if you already need to have a car, and you're already in it and driving it, most people aren't going to drive northeast to the park and ride and then take a train southeast to their destination instead of saving time by just driving directly east all the way to the destination. So the thing that gets them on the train is not having to drive to get to it.

> theres commuter rail access in basically a 1 hour drive radius of the city.

There's commuter rail lines that go an hour from the center of the city. That's not at all the same thing as there being a stop within walking distance of every suburban home.

> they think they are going to get stabbed on the subway.

The people who think they're going to get stabbed on the subway are not going to use the subway. We're talking about the people who might actually use it.

> if the subway was faster, safer, cleaner, but more expensive, more people would use it.

The way you make it faster is to get more people to use it so you can justify more frequent service, which eliminating fares facilitates. The way to make it safer and cleaner is to get more people to use it, so there are more people who care if it's safer and cleaner because they're using it. Which is again facilitated by eliminating fares.

The only thing fares get you is an amount of money that represents less than 1% of the state budget, and then you lose a significant proportion of that to the cost of collecting the fares. It's taking a privacy-invasive deadweight loss to create a deterrent to something you're trying to encourage people to do.