[saithound]

> Brisbane's free buses are only the "city loop". The rest of the transit system is fare based

With all due respect, I expect more effort than Googling "are buses really free in Brisbane", then copy-pastig the AI summary. Symbolic charges were mentioned for a reason, both cities have a fixed "fare" of about 30 US cents on their networks.

If you think there are examples of GP's claim that "every major city that tries free transit at scale will eventually snap back to it", feel free to substantiate it by naming major cities which tried the Brisbane-Lanzhou model and snapped back.

[AnthonyMouse]

> both cities have a fixed "fare" of about 30 US cents on their networks.

What form of corruption-induced lobbying is this now? A sizable advantage of making it actually free is to remove the huge cost of the fare collections infrastructure.

[saithound]

If you remove the fare collection infrastructure, you remove beneficial usage tracking infrastructure too.

There might also be other "social engineering" benefits to having a fixed symbolic charge, as some people argued in this thread. I don't know about that, but I don't think it's _just_ lobbying.

[AnthonyMouse]

> If you remove the fare collection infrastructure, you remove beneficial usage tracking infrastructure too.

Most of the cost of collecting fares is actually the money. You need machines that can process currency, which are expensive and often requires network infrastructure and middlemen and contractors, and then they have to be secured against theft or card skimming etc., and you need customer service and billing and tech support when the machines break and all the rest of it.

If all you want is to track usage you can just put a simple pedestrian counter at the door and you're not actually disrupting anything if it's offline for a week because you're just looking for statistical sampling anyway.

> There might also be other "social engineering" benefits to having a fixed symbolic charge, as some people argued in this thread. I don't know about that, but I don't think it's _just_ lobbying.

Ambiguous "social engineering benefits" are the sort of thing that implies it is lobbying, because there is no good way to prove or disprove it but it gives someone something to claim is their reason when the real ones are less sympathetic, i.e. they're trying to get the collections contract (or have read a study funded by someone who does) or they just don't like spending money on transit but know that won't be a convincing argument to someone who does.

[invig]

That's not quite true, what they can measure with the "tap on tap off devices" is people's movement patterns (point to point). That is valuable data that you can't really get just by counting people on and off or taking cash.

[AnthonyMouse]

That's individualized tracking. You're describing the reason not to do that, and most of the digital payments systems have the same defect.

[aldonius]

In Brisbane I think our ticketing system cost overhead is maybe 10%?

The cost of the programme rolling out new ticketing infra (the first major ticketing system upgrade in ~15 years since we first got integrated ticketing, going from a stored-value smart card to also being able to tap your credit card) is roughly the same amount of money as the annual revenue from fares.

[AnthonyMouse]

So hundreds of millions of dollars to be saved then, and that's just for the periodic upgrades, which are an up-front cost and therefore cost you even more in terms of time value of money.

Then as long as the system is in place you need to pay ongoing costs to repair and maintain the equipment, enforcement against anyone who skips the fare, payment network fees, customer service for anyone with payment issues or damaged cards, connectivity service for anything that needs to be networked, etc.

And the overhead percentage depends on the fares. If it was ~10% when the fare was $5, what is it when the fare is $0.50? Well:

> If fare revenue is now only about $20 million per year, does it even cover the cost of fare collection? The current ticketing system rollout was expected to cost $371m, but ended up at $434m – which appears to cover operations for 17 years from 2018… so $25.5m per year. [0]

[0] https://danielbowen.com/2025/07/11/brisbane-pt-patronage-gro...

And then what is it when that number hasn't included the time value of money or accounting for any of the operating costs?