[bobthepanda]

Removing fares does not actually move people out of cars into public transport because it is already cheaper than driving in most cases.

This has been proven time and time again; where free transit is implemented, car usage does not decline, and surveys of people who switch indicate they mostly come from people walking and cycling. https://www.fastcompany.com/90968891/estonias-capital-made-m...

[AnthonyMouse]

> Removing fares does not actually move people out of cars into public transport because it is already cheaper than driving in most cases.

Cheaper is relative. If transit costs $130/month and driving a car you already own costs an incremental $150/month but is $50 more convenient then you value the $50 in convenience over the $20 savings. If you eliminate the fares then the difference is $150 which is more than $50.

Collecting the money via taxes rather than fares also allows the transit budget to be increased relative to the same cost burden on the local population because you don't have to pay for the collections infrastructure, which goes to the article's point about increasing service contributing to the solution as another alternative to congestion pricing.

> This has been proven time and time again; where free transit is implemented, car usage does not decline, and surveys of people who switch indicate they mostly come from people walking and cycling.

You're citing a study where the existing mass transit cost was only ~$20/month to begin with. Meanwhile their GDP increased by 50% over the period in question and the area underwent a shift in the location of employment away from the city. Having only a modest increase in car use against that context is evidence that it does work.

[stouset]

People are not frictionless utilitarian spheres that perfectly obey the laws of economics. We have data, and removing public transit fares is not an effective lever to move people out of cars and onto buses, trams, trolleys, and trains.

[AnthonyMouse]

People always say they have data. Then you look at the data and it's full of confounders or confuses cause and effect or expects to see a stark instantaneous effect from something that gradually affects long-term population-level life choices.

Most data is trash. If the data is contrary to reason then either the reasoning is wrong or the data is wrong, but for anything with public policy implications it's more likely to be the data because policy data is disproportionately generated by people trying to influence the result.

Also notice that the benefits of the policy aren't limited to the thing you're disputing. Eliminating transit fares still removes a regressive tax, increases the government's revenue collecting efficiency by eliminating the transit collections infrastructure costs and improves privacy by stamping out a mass surveillance system regardless of what extent it reduces traffic congestion. Which means that if you're trying to reduce traffic congestion, you should definitely start there because it very well could work and it's something you should be doing anyway.

[stouset]

> If the data is contrary to reason

Literally everything in behavioral economics is contrary to reason because people simply do not behave like rational utilitarians in the real world, either individually or as a collective.

We are a species where people routinely spend ten minutes circling around to find a parking spot that's thirty seconds closer to their destination.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Literally everything in behavioral economics is contrary to reason because people simply do not behave like rational utilitarians in the real world, either individually or as a collective.

People largely do behave rationally, it's just that rational behavior includes things like heuristics to account for incomplete information or trading the optimality of the choice against decision time costs.

This is one of the reasons the data is always such a mess. You make a change and people don't immediately notice because they're still applying their old heuristics or haven't recognized that the new alternative is available yet. Then the data shows nothing relevant. Meanwhile five or ten years later people have largely figured it out, but by then a dozen other things have also changed and there is no way to measure the result of the original change net of the others whose true effects are also unknown.

This is why actual science uses double blind randomized controlled trials, but this happens for policy data approximately never.

[stouset]

We can also compare locales that implement do implement $policy and ones that don't. As with anything it's not perfect but it can be indicative.

For the exact same reason it's often so difficult to tease out the impact of policies in data, it's even harder to reason through what will happen from first principles. And yet for someone who wants to hold up actual science and double-blind studies, you seem awfully eager to throw out what precious little data we do have to just go with your gut.

That's not how science works.

[bobthepanda]

The average salary in Tallinn is 2415EUR a month before taxes, so that's roughly comparable to the NYC example.

[AnthonyMouse]

Vehicles and fuel are global commodities with cost floors set by international trade and the relevant comparison is to the cost of driving rather than the cost of New York Metro real estate.