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> Free fares would significantly increase ridership, no? It's not just about that. Higher transportation costs are heavily regressive. People with less money can't afford to live in the city and have to commute and then anything they pay to commute is independent of their wages, so $100 in fares is $100 whether you make $200k/year or $20k, whereas even the taxes like sales tax labeled as "regressive" would have the former person paying ten times more than the latter. Moreover, fares are often heavily subsidized to begin with -- in large part because of the above -- but then not zeroing them out requires you to still pay the full cost of the collections infrastructure. Which is actually really expensive, because then you need turnstiles, payment processing equipment, security to prevent theft or card skimming, billing departments to deal with credit card fraud or chargebacks, customer service when people have problems, enforcement against people who skip the fare, etc. None of those costs go away if the fare is even $0.01, but they all disappear when it's actually zero. And people who have never used it before then wouldn't have to figure out how to set it up, which is a significant source of friction independent of the fare and can cause people to just get an Uber (which they've already set up) or rent a car etc. Which causes people to never even try using mass transit, and then regard it as that thing they never use so why is the government spending money on it, instead of that thing that was convenient to use when their car was in the shop and made them realize that they can get by as a one-car household instead of two, or at least something worth supporting because they remember actually using it. On top of that, removing the fares is better for privacy because then you're not tying your movement history to your payment card. |