[Contusion3532]

It's mostly the poor and middle-class that use public transportation, so ending fares for it is helpful to their finances.

Also, there are tremendous operating cost savings to a free at the point of use transit system. No ticket machines, turnstiles, the associated maintenance, ticketing staff, fare enforcement officers/police in places where there aren't turnstiles. Additionally, without turnstiles, people can enter and exit metro stations more quickly during peak service hours. On buses, the driver doesn't need to waste time dealing with payments.

It's cheaper to fund a public transportation system through taxation. Some may make the argument that why should people that don't use it have to pay for it? Well, since it's now included in your taxes, there's an incentive for you now to use it. For the wealthy that would never use it, I argue that they benefit from it. Their workers use the system to get to work, their customers use it to arrive at their businesses, students use it to get to school. These students use that education to become employees at those businesses.

[Swenrekcah]

As a regular transit user I must disagree.

While what you say is true in principle, in practice it would quickly translate into deteriorating service.

Public transit is and should of course always be mostly tax funded, but a small fare can add money in the system, it adds demands from users and a sense of responsibility for the suppliers.

The fare is always much cheaper than operating a car and its easy to have discount programs for those that need it.

Enforcement can be as easy as random checks, all the fancy infrastructure is not really needed although for underground systems its good to have a little barrier for entry.

I can afford a car just fine but I don’t want to spend my money on it just to get to work.

The real measure of the affluence and quality of life in a city is how large a portion of the wealthy take transit. The higher the better.

[smileysteve]

> but a small fare can add money in the system

That's the above poster's point; A small fare can easily cost more for infrastructure and enforcement than it brings into the system.

To the extreme, consider fare/ turnstile jumping. Requires

1. Ticket Sales (requires cash management, or credit card fees; $0.25 is a significant amount of $2.50)

2. Video or Person watching from turnstyle booth

3. Turnstile (that must be ADA, emergency, traveling with a roller bag, traveling with children compatible)

4. An officer to identify and ticket the offender.

5. A District Attorney to pursue charges

6. A judge to hear a defense

7. a courthouse bursar

8. a warrant officer to arrest someone charged with a $2.50 fare jump

9. a jail cell.

The real cost though, is criminalization of the poor, in a high income inequality country.

[packetlost]

Idk, every public transit system I've been on operated on barely above honor system for fares. Nearly every time someone gets on a bus where I live and their card doesn't work, the driver let's them on anyways and they just shrug. Seattle's monorail system doesn't have any apparent enforcement from what I could tell (I can't speak for their busses, haven't used them in quite awhile).

Most of the systems/employees you mention will be employed or paid for/installed anyways. Do you think that people go to jail or even get anywhere near the DAs desk for a parking ticket? Why would jumping a turnstile be treated different from the legal standpoint.

[smileysteve]

> Do you think that people go to jail or even get anywhere near the DAs desk for a parking ticket?

A parking ticket has an identification system via a license plate (or VIN number); so they can be identified later.

Jumping a fare, you've not given any identifying information until detained.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fare_evasion#Civil_and_crimina...

But it is criminalizing the poor; Someone who isn't paying $2.50 may not have $50, unless they're doing it for the fun. At best you block them from the transit system which stops them from their job, a place to sleep; at worst, it's another fee when they get arrested for something else

[nine_k]

You give the poorest a low-rate ticket (NYC subway and buses have half-price tickets, at the very least). You can even give them a free ticket.

The point is to avoid normalizing the turnstile jumps at stations, where everyone sees them. See broken windows theory.

[smileysteve]

But to give a free ticket, you still have to have the enforcement; you still have to use resources from the local government (to collect fines).

If you don't pay for enough enforcement (see NYC, Atlanta, Bart, etc that aren't free and have plenty of broken windows), then you still have a "broken window", only it has cost the system significantly more than your other opportunities, ie, armed security on the trains instead of staring at turnstiles; some positions may even be cheaper than your credit card fees on your profitable customers, less ridership (tourism, can't find card, uber competitor) because of fees and complexities reduces effectiveness of the system.

[soco]

Points 1-3 are the real investments there and they don't just exist. The other points do indeed exists but with a different workload, which again you could do without. Now the only point forgotten in the other comments is that a small fee, regardless how small, is making the users more responsible - I think at coin-operated shopping carts. But again, you need a level of security anyway, so they could better focus now doing their job: to sort out the disrupters whatever they are - drunks, litterers, vandals.

[torsday]

As a user of free transit, i must disagree. It's great. The first poster isn't just correct in principle, but also practice. And it certainly doesn't deteriorate service. A sense of community ownership/responsibility grows from it not being pay walled.

[Swenrekcah]

Yeah I can see how that might work but it’s probably very location/culture dependent.

I have a distinct feeling that in my location there would quickly be loud voices talking about how much of a burden the cost is and the users are freeloading off the “hardworking people of our country” and they should just feel happy with whatever they’re served.

[yowzadave]

> it’s probably very location/culture dependent

You see this class of argument often when it's pointed out that some issue is handled better in another part of the world; sometimes it seems like a posture of defeatism in the face of evidence that a better way is possible. See also: political polarization as a reason that nothing can ever get better.

Not saying that's how you mean it--I wonder, though, how we go about constructing a better culture? Are we merely victims of the culture we were given? Or are there efforts we can take to change the culture we have for the better? I'm curious what research shows about how cultural attitudes can be changed over time, either for better or worse.

[nine_k]

Transit is actually never free, you either pay for it from fares, or from taxes, or a combination thereof.

Since mass transit access is something you can't badly overconsume in a sensible way, nor can you hoard and resell it in meaningful quantities, it does not noticeably suffer from the problems that plague free-to-take physical stuff. If keeping the access infrastructure is expensive, shutting it down and making access free may indeed save money. See how it works e.g. for public parks and city streets; both are toll-free.

[jeromegv]

> its easy to have discount programs for those that need it.

Actually its not that easy. You need someone to check income threshold (how?), have a separate program to distribute that special fare, monitor for fraud, special fare system, etc. Tons of people that would benefit from cheaper fare end up not having access to it if the way to get that discount ends up being complicated (as many social programs are).

I agree transit should be cheaper, not free, but often cheaper helps everyone and encourage habits to change, even among the middle class.

[Swenrekcah]

Sure but don’t let perfection be the enemy of progress.

Cast a wide net, 50% discount for students, municipalities can hook people up with free or discounted passes depending on their municipal tax returns, it can all be automated even.

Some who don’t need discounts will get them and some who need them won’t but they will get better quality of service however. And if they don’t manage to get themselves a discount by any means, if the alternative is buying a car they’re saving anyway.

The absolute amount of money collected isn’t really the point, just that there is some of it and it is a non-negligible portion of the total.

[3683748]

> The real measure of the affluence and quality of life in a city is how large a portion of the wealthy take transit. The higher the better. <

I don't think this will actually measure anything but gentrification and how few social services a city offers. Of the wealthy friends I have, the reasons they don't take public transit are always either time or the trash people. Of those categories, I know a few willing to deal with the wasted time to feel good but none willing to deal with the junkies, homeless, or hood crowd. If none of these groups are on your public transit it's either because you priced them out or the region is already hostile enough to keep them out.

[jonhohle]

Is free transportation going to increase or decrease the number of junkies and homeless, not just on public transportation, but in general? It’s a boon for that crowd that can be piled on top of all the other programs that are argued to help, but have only entrenched that population.

Provide transit cards to those with low income budgeted through programs that are tasked with dealing with social welfare, homelessness, and rehabilitation. Let transit programs stick with transit.

I took public transit most work days using various methods in the Seattle metro area for years. The only one I didn’t frequently use (but did occasionally) were busses in the free ride zone outside of the bus tunnel.

[AndrewDucker]

There's nowhere to park in the center of Edinburgh. It's faster and cheaper to take the bus than it is to drive in and then look for a very expensive place to leave the car. And because nearly everyone takes the bus they don't just have awful people on them.

[Swenrekcah]

Or the region has other paths in life available for people who enter into tough times than being thrown on the streets.

[r00fus]

Do you pay for all the roads you drive on? Who pays for the infrastructure there?

[Swenrekcah]

Some of them are toll roads but yes generally the roads are free.

But the difference there is that the roads are usually maintained for industry, commerce, defence or political pressure.

The people can then use them also but that’s almost an afterthought in the system, the roads will be maintained because of moneyed or political interests.

Public transit is just as important for cities but the powerful advocates are missing.

[pierat]

> It's mostly the poor and middle-class that use public transportation, so ending fares for it is helpful to their finances.

Its the poor class that uses public transit because it is substandard, and they dont have other choices.

Public transit is substandard because public transit has to fight on the regular roads, and not dedicated track/roads for transit. This means it is innately as slow or slower than driving. Because of this, it anyone who has a car WILL TAKE A CAR.

For example, it takes me 20 minutes to go from 1 side of the city to the other. Using the bus routes, its 2 hours. This is the predominant reason why people don't use public transit - 6 times longer.

Free is an essential start, though.

[yardie]

So much of this. Public transit has to be a better alternative to driving a car. Time is the biggest factor to getting people to use it. I used to take the express bus into my office in the city. Since they had dedicated lanes it took me the same amount of time, all for $2.75. Driving is $10+ in tolls, $20 in parking, and fuel.

My coworkers thought I was crazy taking the bus thinking it was full of homeless. It was mostly lawyers, judges, jurists going to the federal court as well as medical staff at the nearby hospital. Based on the designer suits alone I can guarantee almost everyone had a European car or large body SUV sitting at home.

Free is a good start but if it still takes 2+ hours to get to a $15/hr job it's still a bad deal.

[maxfurman]

> For example, it takes me 20 minutes to go from 1 side of the city to the other. Using the bus routes, its 2 hours

Compared to SEPTA (Philly's bus system) this seems way off base. Yes, it takes longer to take the bus than to drive yourself because the bus has to stop for passengers. But your own car will still have to stop at red lights, wait for pedestrians, etc., nearly as much as a bus. I can see 30-45 minutes for a bus ride comparable to a 20 minute direct drive, but any more than that points to some other problem with your city's roads.

[pierat]

Try visiting the Midwest. Its like my anecdote, but for every city. And the larger the city, the worse the times with public transit vs car.

I would LOVE nice public transit where I would call a taxi OR walk to the public transit station, then get to a hub, and then head to the east/west coast. That *used* to be possible, with even commuter train stations available at cities with 1000 people. No more.

I WfH, so I'm already reducing my vehicular load on the atmo. I mow perhaps 4 times a year. Again, less poison in atmo. But when I want to pop over to the nearest big city (You know, microcenter/electronics/hobby/etc) I have only 1 choice. Car.

Maybe in eastern seabed cities that actually built their cities with public transit, it just works for you, cause those cities weren't completely demolished for interstates (well, just the redlined/black population of cities; they were demolished). But past your east coast mentality, the rest of us have no real choices. And it sucks.

And also, major shoutout to "Not Just Bikes" yt channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/notjustbikes

[jonhohle]

I rarely took non-express busses when I lived in Seattle, but once took the bus into the international district for work and then had to get to 23rd & Jackson (about 20 blocks, straight shot). First I had to wait for a route that went straight down Jackson - 10-15 minutes. Then the bus ride - 30 minutes. Then the same thing on the way back. Nearly an hour and a half, not including having to walk a few blocks to get to my destination. In retrospect, walking would have been faster, and had I driven that day, round trip would have been around 20 minutes, with traffic including the pickup I needed to make.

It may be a problem with the city, but it’s still a problem.

[BeetleB]

You're not accounting for time spent waiting for transfers.

[PaulHoule]

Where I live the major employer is Cornell University and almost all of the buses stop there. A Cornell id will get you on any bus in Tompkins County and it is almost always a single-seat ride to Cornell and to the downtown area. Transfers in the downtown-Cornell-Mall triangle are also easy because you can always get a bus in 15 minutes or less.

Overall transit works great if most people are going to a few central points. It's much more difficult if the destinations are distributed. Frequent service could be a balm for that: if you had buses every ten minutes on all routes transfers would not be bad at all.

[BeetleB]

Yes, but Cornell lives in a small city.

Concrete example for my city. Going from the east end to the west end took over 2 hours. And most of it was on the rail system - so not competing with traffic. But it involved one transfer for the train, and another for the bus near the end of my destination.

Frequent stops - by both the train and the bus, as well as the stops, made it take a lot longer. In my case a car would have done it in about 40 minutes.

[Contusion3532]

> For example, it takes me 20 minutes to go from 1 side of the city to the other. Using the bus routes, its 2 hours. This is the predominant reason why people don't use public transit - 6 times longer.

That's a problem that cities solve by using dedicated bus lanes. We should work on making public transportation faster and car transportation slower to change which mode of transportation that people are incentivized to use. Car owners are heavily subsidized by monopolizing the roads for an extremely inefficient per person mode of transportation. Cities subsidize them for any parking that is free. We all pay for the externalities of air pollution, climate change, and city space wasted on street parking and public/private parking lots/garages.

[coldpie]

This is often true, but definitely not always, and significantly it doesn't account for the quality of the time spent. It would take me about 20 minutes to drive to work, and it takes me about 40 minutes by bus. I choose to spend 40 minutes reading a book on the bus instead of 20 minutes staring at someone else's bumper and getting road rage. The amount of times I hear people in the office whining about traffic & parking & other drivers always makes me feel weird because my commute in is so pleasant. While they're raging about other drivers, I was finishing up a library book.

[rhn_mk1]

Except when public transit doesn't have to run on regular roads. Metro, trains, trams. Those win compared to cars a lot of the time.

Dedicated bus lanes don't run on regular roads, either.

Public standard is substandard when it's badly run, and not because it's public transit. People who have a car may still decide that the costs of running it are greater than the costs of using public transit.

[larsrc]

There are also further savings in not having to figure put, publish, and update fare systems. And if the change results in people taking public transit instead of cars, there are knock-on effects in the forms of less road congestion and fewer accidents. Accidents that cause costly policy work, hospitalizations, loss of work days, etc. These savings in other parts of the city finances are rarely figured in.

[Brian_K_White]

I would say it's like schools. I benefit from the fact that the society I live in has it, even if I don't have kids myself.

[sschueller]

In Switzerland we have no turn styles and no gates. You can hop on and off at any point. Rich or poor everyone uses it.

However public transport isn't even close to being free. I fact it is quite expensive in addition to being heavily tax supported.

This is the only way to offer the high quality of service we have from over 92.5% on time trains and 98.7% connections made [1]. It also allows to offer service at infrequent stops out nowhere.

You having a ticket is based on trust. There are random checks on short trip and more regular check on longer trips. It is estimated that around 10% don't have a valid ticket from wrong ticket to people who didn't get one on purpose. To get the percentage lower would cost more than what is lost in revenue and 100% is not something anyone can achieve.

[1] https://news.sbb.ch/medien/artikel/115696/gute-puenktlichkei...

[nerdbert]

> This is the only way to offer the high quality of service we have

The other way would be to make drivers pay for the advantages that public transportation provides them: Significantly less traffic congestion, etc. Per-km, per-kg charges for cars could be calibrated to completely cover the cost of transit, since many people are too snobbish to ever ride it no matter what the financial situation.

[sschueller]

If we want to keep cars those driver taxes are already being collected and are in use for highway maintenance etc.

[karmakurtisaani]

> However public transport isn't even close to being free. I fact it is quite expensive in addition to being heavily tax supported.

Oh boy is it expensive, in particular to the poor foreigners visiting without the half-price card. And for some reason if you're in the know, you can buy all-day whole country covering travel passes for 50 something chf. Something that the foreigners can never get without insider help.

There's absolutely no way it's ever going to be cheaper, the best one can hope is that the prices don't go up very fast. Still, it's cheaper than having a car somehow.

[sschueller]

The prices can not go up too fast as their are price controls on how much it can go up (Preisüberwachung). However that doesn't protect against outside inflation which does make it even more expensive for tourists.

[nerdponx]

People that don't use it on a regular basis also benefit in other ways, like cleaner air, less traffic on the roads (leading to better road quality, better emergency response times, etc), and the opportunity to use transit on the occasions when they do need it.

[nojvek]

You pay for schools even if you don’t have kids. Pay for highways you don’t use.

Agree with premise about free transit, or at-least certain free routes.

[tsukikage]

> I argue that they benefit from it

Fewer other cars on the road - fewer traffic jams, faster to get places, more pleasant drives!

Public transportation benefits even people who don't use it themselves /and also don't care about any of the ways it indirectly benefits them by benefitting others/.

[up2isomorphism]

“Their workers” you will be much more convincing if you actually know the people who are employed pays most of the taxes in the US.

Taxation almost never makes anything cheaper here.

[Contusion3532]

Public ISPs, power companies, and healthcare are examples where the government does it cheaper. Profit is unnecessary cost.

[up2isomorphism]

They are all more expensive compared to a free market private ones. Although in Europe thanks to the education standards and low corruption level, at least it is doing a good job. In US these are sink holes.

[vxNsr]

all that's gonna happen is service will get worse, budget cuts will mean there's no way to make up shortfalls, and fewer staff around means more people abusing the system (e.g. defecating on seats, stairs, platforms, attacking other passengers, creating a generally unsafe environment).

I don't expect any of this to be surfaced in the many "experiments" that are now ongoing because of course as we know any inconvenient truths can just be dropped/ignored from the final report as "anomalies" or "non-representative" or "racist".

[jonhohle]

Isn’t this the communist/socialist philosophy that ends up driving programs into mediocrity at best and awful at worst? If a program can’t pay for itself, what incentive does it have to be efficient and operate in the interest of riders? It’s now become a bureaucrat’s slush fund which will see an ever increasing budget divorced from the service it provides.

Others have mentioned public schools, and I would agree. For as expensive as many private schools are, the average cost per student is about 60% that of public schools.

Getting rid of turnstiles and other populating recording devices spreads the gap between ridership and funding even further. Minus fare evasion, there is a direct correlation between fares and riders. Programs to provide free transportation based on income are already available in many metro areas.

Everyone loves “free” stuff, but when it’s not really free, and the cost are just hidden in taxes, most people lose. Being cheaper to fund through taxes now has nothing to do with future costs that no longer correlate to ridership.

[PaulHoule]

I'd put it this way.

If you paid for the bus 100% with your fare it would be completely scalable. If transit demand doubled, revenue would double and they could run twice as many buses.

A fixed amount of public spending (typically 75% of expenses in many transit systems) is not scalable. You could double or triple bus ridership but service deteriorates because you don't get buses. The municipality, bus company, etc. have every incentive for transit promotion to fail because more people taking transit blows up their budget.

Note there is a good case for subsidization in that people riding the bus create benefits for others: 20 people riding the bus can take 20 cars off the road which makes life better for drivers, pedestrians, etc.

[jonhohle]

I am very much in favor of public transportation, especially light rail. The best systems I’ve used were Seoul and Tokyo. I rode King Metro most working days into Seattle for four years. When I lived near DC I’d rarely drive in because I preferred taking the metro trains.

The solution to congestion, imho, is making public transportation acceptable to the largest customer base by making it clean, convenient, and timely. That might not capture the poorest or the richest, but they still benefit from less congestion, noise, and air pollution.

Making it good would provide more benefits to most cities than making it free, imho.

[nerdbert]

> If a program can’t pay for itself

The problem is that the most valuable benefits of public transit, such as reduced congestion, reduced pollution, saved lives, etc., aren't priced in such a way that the transit system can charge the beneficiaries.

Instead, the way we run things, transit systems are stuck having to recover their operating expenses from the kind people who volunteer to ride them and thereby create all the real benefits.

[uv-depression]

Does the US interstate pay for itself?

> Isn’t this the communist/socialist philosophy

No. This is about changing how something is paid for under capitalism, and is a very normal way of paying for things under this system.

> If a program can’t pay for itself, what incentive does it have to be efficient and operate in the interest of riders?

The main problem with making it profit-based is that skimming off the top is the basic operating principle; you have strong incentives to make it less safe, not do upgrades, abuse inelastic demand &c. One should hope that the people elected (or appointed by someone elected) would have an incentive to work in the public's interest because they won't be re-elected otherwise, though obviously this doesn't always work. But that's _already_ a problem that needs fixing, so why not two birds with one stone rather than switching over to a funding system absolutely filled to the brim with bad incentives that repeatedly fails us?

> Getting rid of turnstiles and other populating recording devices spreads the gap between ridership and funding even further.

I'm not really sure what you're arguing here.

> Everyone loves “free” stuff, but when it’s not really free, and the cost are just hidden in taxes, most people lose.

The costs are not hidden, they're in your taxes. I also strongly disagree that most people lose when you fund things through taxes. That seems completely ignorant of how a ton of infrastructure and much of society is run.

> Being cheaper to fund through taxes now has nothing to do with future costs that no longer correlate to ridership.

The argument was that funding it not through fares is already _better_ because it can be adjusted to those situations.

[rootsudo]

"since it's now included in your taxes, there's an incentive for you now to use it."

The ironic part is, the poor and middle class may vote for it, but it's the local property owners that pay for it.

[madsbuch]

> but it's the local property owners that pay for it.

And the local property owners that benefit in increased real estate prices.

[rootsudo]

Exactly. No matter what it always comes from somewhere.

[Contusion3532]

The landlords pass the costs of property taxes onto their tenants in their rents. So who is really paying for them?

[theluketaylor]

Who then turn around and pass those costs along to renters as landlords. Or they take transit and get value. Or they drive and benefit from every vehicle not on the road since someone else took transit.