[nox101]

I feel like free transit is a bad idea in the long run. People generally devalue thing that are free in my experience. There's also culture, transit is seen as "the thing poor people use" in most of the USA and making it free just seems to re-enforce that prejudice. (oh, it's free? it must be for poor people, not me).

Free would also mean it's a place to just hang out. Homeless? Sleep on the free train, why not? It's free! Oh, they wake me up at the end of the line? So what, exit and re-enter. It's free and at least not too hot or too cold and I'm not getting rained on. Of course the homeless should be cared for, but if they end up in the train system even less people are going to use it.

Also, it's looked at as an expense for the city so there is always a push to cut it's budget or not raise it enough to do what's needed to make it good. It doesn't help that the previous two points make the non transit using tax base see it as a waste of their taxes.

I'm totally for transit. Hate driving a car. Love taking good transit in Paris, London, Berlin, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, etc... So if free works great! But, if free ends up making things worse for transit that would be bad.

I feel like Japan did a good job by privatizing their train system and giving the companies incentives to make the train system great by having them build and run adjacent businesses (offices, retail space, apartments, stores). The more people ride their trains the better these other interests do and visa-versa. Bad trains in this system = people move to a better line run buy a better company. They may not directly think that but they do hear that station X is the new up and coming place with all the cool stuff nearby and much of that is from train company investment so their appears to be a positive feedback loop.

[ensignavenger]

Kansas City Metro has stated that since going fare free they have seen an increase in "nusiance riders" (riders that don't follow the rules and get hostile with staff when given instructions). They are trying to find ways to combat this and have considered reinstituting fares, even just a small one. It will be interesting to continue following their experiment.

[coffeebeqn]

It coincided with opening the new light rail in the most popular nightlife areas. Hardly a laboratory setting

[friendzis]

Your point is nightlifers correlate with nuisance riders?

[rsynnott]

... I mean, yes, of course. Never been on a night bus after the bars close?

[rikthevik]

Riding the train in St. Louis after Strange Loop was an experience. Strangely, things were crazier on the way out to the bar than coming home...

[cogman10]

Does Kansas City have a police presence on the tram? I'd expect that to be more effective than a fare.

[tylerFowler]

Ohhh yeah, they definitely do. Usually just on weekends or for events but you have fully uniformed & armed officers riding the loops.

[jandrese]

Adding fares just means the nuisance riders will jump the fares. It won't stop them from riding.

[ensignavenger]

If that were the case, the theory is that the issues would not have increased after they went fare free. The increase may have been due to something else, though. Experimentation is probably the only way we will truly find out.

[bluGill]

Nuisance riders often have nothing better to do with their time and little money. They will find someplace else to go.

[tylerFowler]

The key thing that KC did in ~2014 or so is that they rebuilt a "streetcar" (identical to SFMUNI light rail so that name was a marketing tactic for sure) line downtown where parking has been scarce & is being eaten up by new developments (a good thing). This was the first public transit to be totally free, and to combat the idea that suburbanites wouldn't want to use it they freed up payments on parking zones _up the street_, so that for any decent sized event it became the smartest way to park and not overpay.

They also took a ton of time painting the trains in city colors or with city designs, keeping them incredibly clean, doing things like putting live music at every stop on certain days etc... It became really fashionable really fast to ride the thing. They also policed it like mad on the weekends.

Buses on the other hand, are a different story and carry the same stigma. Though I'm still really proud of KC for making that free as well.

[hibikir]

KC was smartin choosing lines that had actual demand, so the lines remained popular: Go to the other side of the state, and see what happened in the streetcar in St Louis. It's only running because running it seasonally at a loss is cheaper than paying back the federal government for their share of the project. No amount of pretty colors fix the fact that nobody needs to travel that route, and nowhere near enough people live near the stops

[toyg]

Effective commercialization of station space is indeed a positive development, but you don't really need to privatize railways to get that (even without going into the whole "privatizing in Japan is not the same as here", since large private companies and local authorities coordinate strongly in ways that we wouldn't consider acceptable in the West). Very dense European cities, like London and Paris, are getting more and more of that type of development too; and even in Tokyo, not all stations have a commercial development on top. It's mostly a function of density levels, which are sky-high in Japan.

One clear element of the Japanese system is that stations are hugely overmanned, and staff are still paid pretty good money. That means facilities are spotless, and drifters or nuisance riders are removed promptly, making the system more appealing. This is very hard to implement in the West, where the sacred fear of unionization pushes for constant cuts, both in the number of humans involved in any task and in their remuneration levels.

[nox101]

I agree with your general points and I don't know what worked in Japan would work in the USA. I'm pretty confident what works in Europe will probably not work in the USA either though :(

> That means facilities are spotless

I can assure you no stations are remotely spotless. In fact I'm surprised some of them aren't considered fire hazards. Ueno, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Shinagawa, Akihabara, all have extremely messy areas. Newer stations appear clean but that's only because they're new AFAICT. Just commenting because I don't want people to ge the wrong impression. They might be cleaner than SF, NYC, Paris on average but they're not as clean as Stockholm or Singapore

[pezezin]

Of the stations that you mention, I find Akihabara to be actually quite nice and reasonably well organized (for Japanese standards).

But I agree with you that the others are a mess. Shibuya and Ueno look like half the stations are falling apart, and Shinjuku is some kind of non-euclidean labyrinth, every time I go there, I get lost. If there is even a fire there, the death toll is going to be immense.

[nox101]

Akihabara, there are new and old parts of the station. The new part (lower level) are relatively clean. The old parts (upper level, Sobu-sen) are less clean (unless they've been renewed - I haven't been up in a 2-3 years)

[pezezin]

Mmm, I was there three months ago but I don't remember clearly. I will visit again in two weeks, so I will check it.

[bobthepanda]

I think that you and the OP have different notions of spotless.

In Japan, at major train stations I find the bathrooms reasonably clean and good to use. In New York, it smells of poop and pee because the odds are that someone probably publicly urinated, or some pipe somewhere in the subway tunnel is leaking sewage.

[nox101]

That's generally true of all bathrooms in the USA vs Japan. I think I've seen 1 disgusting bathroom in Japan a restaurant/mall/store in the more 15+ years I've spent there where as in the USA it's like 1 of 5 that's disgusting. In other words, it's not unique to train stations.

That said, the bathrooms between JR Shinjuku and Marunouchi-line used to smell pretty rancid. I haven't used them recently though.

[toyg]

Oh, I agree it's not unique of train stations. The Japanese overstaff pretty much anything - it's likely part of the reason for their massive public debt, but it helps maintaining infrastructure to good standards. It's the opposite attitude we see in most of the Western world, where public resources are cut to the bone until (and often even after) things rot and fall apart.

[bobthepanda]

JR East covers not only metropolitan train services in Tokyo but also a wider real estate/retail portfolio and all of eastern Honshu, with about 46k total employees.

MTA in New York City has about 70k employees.

[pezezin]

Maybe in Tokyo, but here in Tōhoku it looks like half the cities and roads were never very good to begin with, and now are falling apart.

[jen20]

My experience of the Kansas City tram is that everyone uses it, if they're already downtown. Admittedly I only see KC for ~5 days per year but I get the impression it's well handled. The city has changed beyond recognition in the 13 years I've been going.

[warcher]

Honestly the places that did it successfully didn’t try to make transit cheap, they didn’t subsidize cars. Requiring amenities like parking by law seems to be working at cross purposes to spending money on transit. For desirable real estate it seems the only way to make affordable housing it to take away expensive upgrades. I think we can agree that safety is not a luxury, but parking spots, private laundry, private kitchens, even private bathrooms, these are things that many people live without every day. I remember some of those times in my life fondly even. Making it illegal by force of law to live like that seems… counterproductive to me, if our stated goal is affordable housing.

[jimbob45]

Why not just ban the homeless then? They’re not hard to identify and remove.

[nomel]

> transit is seen as "the thing poor people use" in most of the USA

That’s the objective reality, in most of the USA.

The only way they’ll attract people that aren’t forced to use it, for financial reasons, is to remove the piss and puke from the floor, the stains of the same composition from the seats (although rock hard plastic is getting popular to compensate), and prevent, not remove, the guy with obvious drug and mental health issues, and now has his dick out, from boarding.

If you want something to be attractive for the general population, it has to, literally, be attractive, or at least not repulsive. Otherwise, the shorter commutes and clean interior that personal transport gives is the obvious choice, as it currently, measurably, is.

But, that can’t happen, because anything nice will be destroyed/vandalized, because anyone can board. The goal of not discriminating against anything or anyone is a choice that society has made (probably the correct one) that makes public transport literal shit.

I don’t miss the few times I used it, then noped back into my car.

[matt-p]

I suspect charging a nominal but non zero fee e.g $2 on peak $1 off peak per trip probably ends up with the best of both worlds. Free ends up with some negative side effects

[bluGill]

A couple dollars pre day is nothing to most people but multiply by thousands of riders every day and it is a lot of money. There is no transit system in the world that couldn't be better with more funding so take that money.

You of course need a plan for the poor but that should be a minority.

[wiether]

I can't find the sources anymore but where I live, PT was never free, but there was no physical restriction to access it.

So by not paying your ticket/subscription, you only had to hope for not seeing controllers who could fine you.

A few years ago, they said that too many people were not actually paying for usage, so they decided to put physical restrictions (fare gates?).

Journalists decided to investigate and they did the math. Basically they came up with something like : once you take everything into account (building and maintaining physical machines for buying fares and controlling access, managing everything around billing, enforcing fares with human controllers...), on every euro spent by a user, more than 60% went to the costs related to the fare system itself. Less than 40% was actual money that the company could use to improve the UX.

And obviously, the overall UX decreased because they also raised the fares. So we're paying more, there's still lots of bad people in the stations/subway, but now we have to go through a metal gate to prove that we have paid the fare and do the same to exit PT. Which, obviously, creates virtual congestion at peak hours, because the human flow is slowed and the width to pass is much narrower than it used to be.

Meanwhile, in another city, they went the other way : free PT. I have yet to hear of some regular users seeing it as the decrease in UX.

[bluGill]

Best practice is have enough people checking riders thatyou don't get there. You want those fare checkers around anyway for security.

[underlipton]

You're describing issues that all have a core of, "Snooty (upper) middle-class temporarily-embarrassed millionaires who won't let themselves have nice things because The Poors." Here is a short and simple plan for fixing the issue: get over yourselves.