This is one of those NYTimes "solutions journalism" pieces meant to celebrate the program rather than truly analyze it.
You can pick free, or scalable, or financially sustainable (and without sustainability, a political shift will kill it), but you cannot have all three at once. The minute you push on one, second-order effects pop up somewhere else.
It is a classic wicked problem: solving it literally changes the problem.
Big-city transit has an equilibrium point, and it is incredibly stable. Every serious transit city in the world ends up in the same place: charge fares, subsidize low-income riders, and fund the basic system with taxes.
That equilibrium is stable for a reason. Every major city that tries free transit at scale will eventually snap back to it, because it is the only configuration that does not implode under feedback loops. It keeps demand reasonable, service reliable, and the politics tolerable.
> Big-city transit has an equilibrium point, and it is incredibly stable. Every serious transit city in the world ends up in the same place
You're cherry-picking your own examples. It worked in Iowa City.
Y Combinator and much of SV would be out of business if innovators followed that thinking. One reason is that people do come up with new ideas; that's how the world changes. The other is that the world changes, and what didn't work before now works - costs change and value changes, and now it's worthwhile. For example, with congestion pricing and other rapidly increasong costs of NYC car ownership, there's more value in free transit.
Oddly, it's the thinking advocated by many HN posts, denigrating the innovation under discussion as impossible, useless, etc.
> without sustainability, a political shift will kill it
That can be said of many things. A political shift could kill military funding in the US.
> You're cherry-picking your own examples. It worked in Iowa City.
Indeed, it worked in Brisbane (a metro area comparable to Baltimore in the U.S.) and Lanzhou (comparable to Boston-Cambridge-Newton): congestion was reduced, the environment benefited, and usage increased in many cities that dislodged from that equilibrium and switched to a free-of-charge or symbolic-charge model.
I don't think GP's claim stands, for transit cities big or small.
Further cherry picking. Brisbane's free buses are only the "city loop". The rest of the transit system is fare based. It also has not stood the test of time yet.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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]
The point of buses is to replace cars, not short walks.
If you make it so that everybody who could walk 5min takes a bus, the bus will have to stop more often - and for longer - which makes it worse for the people who can't just walk 5min.
The trick is to balance the system so that buses (and other forms of transit) are cheaper - and approximately as convenient - as cars, without making them cheaper and more convenient than walking (for those who can still walk).
Fares don't necessarily need to be about financing the system. They can be about setting the correct incentives, and ensuring people value the service they're getting.
It's very unlikely people are actually going to take the bus for a 5 minute walk : the wait time for the bus is going to be on that order of magnitude and you'd need your route to be perfectly aligned and have perfect stop placement for that to happen.
Most likely, you will have extra trips because people won't feel the need to justify the fare.
That's not true on a major avenue that serves 10 different routes, which combined have a frequency of one every couple of minutes.
Also, it doesn't help to make bus stops more spaced, and you may not want a bunch of express routes that skip most stops, because another purpose of buses is to help people with difficulty moving (like the elderly), for whom it's not a 5min walk.
You just want to make the service available, and as good as possible, without incentivising people who could just walk to use it.
Because the actual goal is to displace cars (not walkers, or cyclists, or…)
> If you make it so that everybody who could walk 5min takes a bus, the bus will have to stop more often - and for longer - which makes it worse for the people who can't just walk 5min.
... Eh?
I often hit the leap card weekly cap (24 eur) in Dublin. This absolutely does not lead me to take a bus instead of walking for five minutes, because that would be _insane_. Like, maybe there are a few people who despise walking to an unreasonable extent and do this, but it would not be common. If it was, you'd see people doing it anywhere which has a fare cap (ie. most cities, these days).
It also hasnt worked in other places. Like Estonia. The data for "invest in capacity and speed" is much better then the for "reduce fares". So if you have extra money, the evidence on what to do is 100% clear.
If you're looking for return on investment, then cycle infrastructure is the way forwards. Each mile travelled by bike actually benefits society (less illness etc) whereas each mile travelled by car costs society.
> For every £1 invested, walking and cycling return an average of around £5-6
> A study of New York concluded that, in terms of health: “Investments in bike lanes are more cost-effective than the majority of preventive approaches used today.”
People that walk or bike are also more likely to do small shopping locally. This benefits the local economy and gets less money to international big box retailers, which generally pay less taxes.
If you drive by a small market you often won't park your car to go there. Cars and trucks destroy streets fast. Having less of them keeps repairs less frequent. Infrastructure for walking and biking can exist for multiple decades or even millennia
So you’re saying that people should do shopping locally, spend more, and waste more time to prop up inefficient businesses who don’t benefit from economies of scale? Tell that to voters and then try to win an election. Society exists to make our lives easier, not to prop up as many businesses and employees as possible as a make-work make-taxes program.
Oh my god the obsession with 'economics of scale' is such narrow minded nonsense.
Shopping locally is more efficient, because the distribution network distributes things locally much more efficiently then a bunch of housewives in their SUVs.
Sure its cheaper for the shop providing the food, but for the society its more expensive. What you are completely missing is the massive cost of all the infrastructure and the massive subsidizes therein to create these centralized stores. And then the massive cost in time and capital investment for every users to buy a car to pick that stuff up.
You are also ignoring the massive waste this creates because people only go shopping every 1-2 weeks. And you are ignore the lack of fresh foods in the food system because of this behavior. That of course Americans eventually pay in their medical systems.
If you actually do some research you will see the systematic bias that is in the zoning code, infrastructure cost calculation and services. Walmart often consumer more in just police services then they pay in taxes. Walmart is systematically gaming the property rights system to pay almost no taxes. And yet Walmart uses a huge amount of land and requires a huge amount of public infrastructure to sustain itself.
If you really need to do some massive pickup of stuff for a party or something there are still larger stores you can go to as well, just not for everyday stuff.
Actually having a shop where I can locally pick up fresh food every day or every other day is actually much more convenient and saves far more time. And I know this is crazy for Americans to consider, but as a society it would be nice if people without a car could also buy food sometimes. This video points this out:
Cities only exist because of economies of scale! Public transit, road maintenance, utilities delivery, public recreation facilities, and the plethora of small and large businesses are more efficient in a city because of economies of scale.
What people don’t benefit from is laws to artificially benefit small businesses at the expense of the consumer. Here in New York, we have this stupid law that one corporate entity can only have one liquor retail license. This law was created at the “behest” of the lobby of liquor store owners. The end result of this is that liquor is more expensive than my hometown of Vancouver, despite NYS collecting a significantly lower tax rate than BC province. That money all flew into private coffers, and the consumer still gets bent over in the end.
I also take issue with the implication that Walmart incurring policing costs is bad for society. The implication is that Walmart should either have private police or be a shoplifting free for all. The former is a bad idea because Walmart police don’t have the same responsibility or accountability to the public as public police. The latter is a bad idea because society will collapse without property rights.
I would favour walking. Its far easier to get people to do it and most people can do it. A lot of infrastructure already exists and its cheaper and easier to improve.
If you provide reasonably public transport its far easier to walk. I drive into town, then park and walk, where I currently live because busses are infrequent. I never even owned a car in London because it has good public transport (to be fair, I probably would have if I lived in a suburb and had kids).
It's not XOR; you can do both. Most people who cycle also walk at times.
Why exclude cycling? You're range is ~5x walking - in the time and effort required to walk a mile, you could easily cycle 5 miles.
It doesn't have to be a universal panacea to be valuable. Walking isn't possible for everyone, including some who can cycle, and it's not useful for longer distances like 5 miles, ~2.5 hrs walking or 30 min cycling slowly.
16 minutes per mile (3.75mph) (5 miles in 80 minutes) is basically my 'fast walk' time in the city. My wife who is shorter has a hard time keeping up with that.
Unfortunately stop lights/etc. will also make this longer. My "best" pace where I actually do get tired is about 15 minutes per mile. Few can keep up a 4mph pace even on a dedicated walking trail with no elevation changes for any material length of time.
Most folks average probably greater than 20 minutes per mile, especially for longer walks. 2.5 hours is definitely on the extreme end, but close to 2 hours is probably more realistic for most.
The quote I was replying to was about return on investment. Money spent on cycling infrastructure is money not spent on walking and public transport. Spending money is definitely XOR.
I am arguing that walking for shorter distances and providing public transport for longer distances is a better use of money in most places.
> Why exclude cycling? You're range is ~5x walking
Your range for walking plus public transport is far greater.
One big problem I see with cycling is low uptake in most places - in most (not all, to be fair) places I know cycles lanes are mostly empty.
> Walking isn't possible for everyone, including some who can cycle
You are right that money is XOR. But cycling takes people of roads and improves the overall system while being very cheap. Also, you don't need dedicated super dutch style infrastructure to encurrage cycling. Making it safe for walking and cars to interact, ALSO makes it much, much better for cycling. Its a mistake in thinking that 'cycling' infrastructure is only dedicated cycling lanes. Encuriging cycling almost always pays off, in pretty every systematic measurment ever done on the topic. And if you reach Dutch level it pays of a gigantic amount. Its really low investment high return.
Cycle lanes actually look empty often because they are so much more efficent. They have done some studies on paths that were always empty and the threwput is usually not as bad as people think. To be sure the place you are refering to could be totally empty, it happens, but its not the norm even in the US.
Also, of course in a lot of places, specially in the US where they are really bad at cycling infratructure, they believe that all it takes is for one road to have a cycle lane and then magically people on bikes show up. They just want to get in on the 'hype' and were pressured to 'do something'. You need to actually be able to reasonably safely go from A to B between places that are vaguly useful. Dedicate cycling lanes make sense in places where there is no alterantive and you need cars to go resonably fast. But generally its more about your car infrastructure and how fast and dangerous your cars are. Improving cycling always goes hand in hand with making cars less dangerous, and that always pays off.
It takes some up front investment and actual planning, but its not like that infrastructure is worthless after a few years. Cycle lanes once built basically never get destroyed, so putting it in speculatively while having a long term plan makes a lot of sense.
while the majority of [the savings] consists of traditional transport decongestion benefits, around a fifth are arising from e.g. health, journey quality and safety.
Cycling doesn't replace cars, it just reduces the cost of cars!
Once you're too old, the health benefits are less clear e.g. my mother dangerously broke bones after falling off her bike (I think cause was overloading herself with a grubber in a backpack).
Yes I know. I'm a huge, huge fan of cycling infrastructure. And I agree that it is the highest value.
But even if you have that you still need high quality public transport. Its not either or. And if you are going to invest in public transport, investing in capacity, speed and convenience. Is a better investment then not making people pay.
Odd hill to die on, but if you wish to argue that Iowa City is a serious transit city, but Brisbane and Lanzhou are not, feel free to state your definition of serious transit city. These cities are bigger than Iowa City and their public transport share of journeys to work is higher than any similarly-sized U.S. metro area.
Beware: if there are no true Scotsmen left, and your definition of serious transit city excludes everything apart from ~10 European cities, the conclusions that one can draw from the policies of serious transit cities will be so limited that they will in fact be useless.
> Oddly, it's the thinking advocated by many HN posts, denigrating the innovation under discussion as impossible, useless, etc.
A significant fraction of HN has been raised with the idea that “natural” innovation can only arise from the private sector competing on a market, and every attempt at public-funded out-of-market innovation is seen as “unnatural” and doomed to fail.
And like all religion, it's pretty hopeless to refute it with rational arguments.
I find this attitude less common than it used to be. (Also, while it doesn't change your point, I find the same response to private-sector innovation: the top post on most threads is how useless/pointless/ridiculous the OP is.)
> hopeless
Here you lose me. I find people respond very well to rational arguments, presented with openness, curiosity, and respect.
I don't get your comparison to VC model. Sure it's temping to sell $10 for $5 and many VCs fund this business for a while. But the difference is there isn't an infinite backstop. It's not really new or innovative to give things away from "free" and fund it through some other means. But that's the problem. There's a disconnect with the service and what it costs.
You should charge roughly what it costs to operate because that's information. People should ask why it costs so much. People should consider alternatives. Trying to remove prices is like fighting climate change by removing thermometers.
At the moment, we (in the U.S. anyway) don't charge for tht true cost of operating roads and private cars, which makes transit look bad in comparison. If we want to make transit look reasonable, we need to stop pretending cars are so cheap.
That is only true if public transport is supposed to participate in the free market economy, which it doesn't have to.
If it is decided by a city government that we want public transport as a public service, paid for by taxes and other means then removing prices is an option that could make sense in the right situations.
Then it's covered by the government and cost is more or less ignored. It still costs something but now there is no or little visibility as to how much it costs which is obviously bad for incentives and general governance
Bad for who? The incentive is for more people to use the system, since we are aiming for a Greater Good kind of outcome. Cost and efficiency becomes a government problem, which we manage through policy and voting.
The road system doesn't have a price tag per trip, yet it's costs are managed through policy and governance. No difference here in my opinion.
I don't meant to compare the VC model specifically (though I can see the givaway comparison now that you mention it), just innnovation generally.
I think your point about economic signals is very good - I wonder if any locality charges at cost; does NYC do it now? - though 'charging at cost' undermines the goals: universal mobility, reducing climate impact, reducing congestion, and (I think) increasing economic liquidity and competition (e.g., in the labor market, in retail, etc.).
We need another solution: Maybe vouchers for people based on income? That becomes much more complex.
Also, I would gues it impacts ease of use and adoption - imagine being able to just hop on any passing bus, as opposed to finding your payment, going only through the front door, paying, etc.
The moment the military pillages an area, its ability to fight insurgency in that area vanishes. And since most of the US's wars have been of the anti-insurgency variety (barring the first few days, or possibly hours, that it takes for the full might of the US military to topple a middle-eastern govt), that would be a fundamental strategic failure.
> and lose the very thing that keeps the US top dog. You're implying that political shifts could happen to shift _anything_.
It was the USD as reserve currency that enabled the US to fund it's military to a point that should have bankrupted the US. The US military hasn't won a war outside the Americas since WW2.
With a budget half or a quarter of the current, the US would remain secure behind two oceans. I do agree that politically the military budget will remain high due to the relationship between the MIC and US government.
> The US military hasn't won a war outside the Americas since WW2.
The Gulf War and the war with ISIS. But yes, lots of bad results in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.
> With a budget half or a quarter of the current, the US would remain secure behind two oceans. I do agree that politically the military budget will remain high due to the relationship between the MIC and US government.
The US can't be a self-sufficient island. It's not even close to plausible. Also, people do care about freedom for others everywhere; it's not just Americans who deserve it.
> You're implying that political shifts could happen to shift _anything_.
Of course it could!
One of the key lesson of the twentieth century is that, with political will, a modern state can do almost anything and political power can change the world dramatically very fast, for the better or the worse…
For what it's worth, the New York Times has spent most of this year actively trying to dissuade people from voting for the mayoral candidate in New York that had free buses as one of the more widely known parts of his platform. I'm not saying there's not an agenda in them publishing this article, but I suspect it has a lot less to do with a predilection for "solutions journalism" as much as trying to backtrack their pretty noticeable opposition to the incoming mayor that ostensibly came from them not being as far leftward as he is.
> the New York Times has spent most of this year actively trying to dissuade people from voting for the mayoral candidate in New York that had free buses as one of the more widely known parts of his platform
The Times editorial board repeatedly wrote anti-Mamdani opinion pieces. But speaking as a non-NYC New York Times reader I never saw it unless it was sent to me by a New Yorker--it simply wasn't commentary that was highlighted unless you were specifically trying to follow the NYC election. (And to the extent they criticised his candidacy, it wasn't in rejecting free busses.)
I think that's kind of my point. There's a perception of the NYT as leaning pretty strongly to the left, which isn't necessarily false, but it's missing the important context that being based in New York and mostly run by people living in New York, it's arguably a lot less left leaning relative to the city itself. This likely isn't going to be obvious to someone outside of the the city, but I think it's useful information for the wider audience to understand. It's leftward leaning compared to the nation as a whole, but not its local audience, and those dynamics both come into play for its editorial policy.
In the case of this specific story, there's an extremely straightforward potential explanation for why you story might have the bias that the parent comment describes, but for almost the exactly opposite reason that someone might think without that additional context.
You are making a lot of assertions.
Meanwhile, I travel globally for work and my preferred mode of transportation is walking and public transport(ideally tram).
There are BIG DIFFERENCES between how well different cities handle this. There is no "equilibrium", only wise(or unwise) governance.
How do you explain Luxembourg? They've had free public transport for 5 years now.
Every time you fuel up a vehicle you are paying a "fare" to use the road. The fare is subsidized (just like with the bus), but it is very much there and not zero.
>Every time you earn money/spend money you are paying taxes.
>I guess busses run on fairy dust too?
Every vehicle on the roads is basically paying to be there via fuel tax (which in whole or large part is spent on the roads). Busses pass some of this cost on to their riders who's fare may be then subsidized in part or full.
The funniest thing about Luxembourg is that it is a known tax haven for American corporations. So American corporations will lobby against social programs in the US, but will make Americans fund Luxembourg's free public transport.
Luxembourg has insane tax revenue per capita because of its status as an international tax haven. A program that might be hardly noticeable on Luxembourg's budget could put a big dent into the budget of an American city.
> charge fares, subsidize low-income riders, and fund the basic system with taxes.
Car traffic is also expensive. Highways, parking, and maintenance are massively subsidized through taxes, and they consume far more space per traveler making cities more congested and polluted.
Cities with good public transport also tend to be more walkable, which has health benefits and could provide significant impact to healthcare costs.
According to this article, every $1 invested in public transit generates about $5 in economic returns:
> You can pick free, or scalable, or financially sustainable (and without sustainability, a political shift will kill it), but you cannot have all three at once.
Real polities are of finite size, so you don't need (infinitely) scalable.
Here in Singapore we could sustainably afford to make public transport free, if we wanted to.
However I agree with you that charging for public transport is the right thing to do. (And to charge users of government provided services in general for everything, and to give poor people money.) If nothing else, you at least want to charge for congestion at peak hours, so that there's always an epsilon of capacity left even at rush hour, so any single person who wants to board the train at prevailing prices can do so.
In Singapore there is no MRT congestion prices only for private cars, right? Trains get crowded but still workable. It’s not clear if people would start working 6am to 3pm or something if you did. Overall I think charging money made more sense when there were more private, profit seeking companies involved as it’s the name of the game… buts it’s cheap enough that it’s hard for someone with an ok job the get bothered about it
> In Singapore there is no MRT congestion prices only for private cars, right?
Singapore charges for MRT rides, but it's not explicitly a congestion charge. Every once in a while they experiment with discounts for off-peak train usage, which can sort-of be interpreted as a congestion charge.
> Trains get crowded but still workable.
At the peak of rush hour you sometimes have to wait three or four trains before one comes that still has standing room. (It's not as bad as it sounds, because during rush hour trains come every three minutes or so.)
IMHO, varying train charges more with congestion would make a lot of sense; but the system as it is works well enough that it's probably not worth for any technocrat to spend the political capital to seriously do anything about it.
> Charging more for publicity transit during peak hours won’t make people use it less, there’s a reason why so many people commute during peak hours
You don't necessarily need all people to use it during peak hours, just "enough" people. There are people who do have flexible schedules, but they may simply may not have had enough motivation to change old habits (yet).
I actually think riding on a crowded train would be more deterrent than a fare increase, so I feel like that would be needlessly punishing people already suffering the full trains because they have to.
See sibling comment by eru: they said there isn't a fare increase congestion charge; instead "Every once in a while they experiment with discounts for off-peak train usage"
The point of a congestion charge (whether on driving or on public transport) is to alleviate the congestion 'punishment'.
As a mental model: congestion works a bit like an auction. Getting from A to B during rush hour brings people some benefits (otherwise, they wouldn't bother). Benefits differ between people. But that travel also costs, both in terms of fares and in terms of annoyance and perhaps delays.
So We can imagine every prospective commuter weighs their benefits against the costs. I say it works like an auction, because there's limited capacity, and the people who are willing to endure the most price + annoyance are going to 'win' the auction and will commute. Everyone else shifts their commute around or stays home.
The people you mention who 'have to' travel during rush hour are just the ones willing to bear the highest costs in our model, and thus they 'win' the auction. (Winning an auction isn't necessarily good..: after all, you have to pay the price.)
Having a congestion charge means different people can bid not just with their tolerance for annoyance and delay, but also with actual money.
So now people compare fare + congestion charge + annoyance against their benefits. Assuming benefits on the right side of the equation have stayed about the same, the breakeven point for 'annoyance tolerance' is going to be lower, just because the other part of the left side grew.
A similar example: if tomorrow your local Walmart was handing out free 20 dollar bills with every purchase, you can bet your hat that pretty soon the queues for the cashier at that shop would grow until the wait-in-line for the marginal customer cancels out the free 20 dollars. Keep in mind that the marginal customer isn't the average customer: the queue would mostly be made up of people who have more time than money.
Conversely, in our congestion charging scenario the winners of our auction will tend to shift towards the crowd that has more money than time (or tolerance for packed trains).
The nice thing about letting people bid with money is that afterwards someone else has the money and can spend it. When you bid with your capacity to endure frustration and delay, no one else gets any benefit from that. It's just a poor waste of society's resources.
on the other hand. gdp is ~200 days of work. 1 day is 0.5% gdp. 1 hour (assuming 8hr day) is 0.06% gdp. gdp/capita is nearly us$90k. 1hr of work is >us$5k!
it might be more cost effective to expand public transport to transport every singaporean to where he/she needs to be on time, than to make them wait..
> charging for public transport is the right thing to do
It's a simple matter of supply and demand so even if the transit system operates on tokens but those tokens are given away for free, my weird brain would still want to the system to exist to track how the system is being used.
Consider the case of roads as a system of transit. Fuel taxes and licensing costs don't remotely cover the infrastructure costs, and roads predated them by decades. They're obviously scalable. They're not remotely sustainable financially (and effectively free to access) yet they remain stubbornly resilient even in the face of massive political shifts.
Why is that equilibrium impossible for other transportation infrastructure?
> Fuel taxes and licensing costs don't remotely cover the infrastructure costs
In which country? Because they certainly do in the UK - about £10b a year on maintenance vs £33b a year from road taxes. Half that maintenance comes from local property taxation and half from the central exchequer
If you include the societal costs from road accidents it's nearer, with estimates putting all costs from accidents including lost productivity at £35b a year. Throw in global warming and you find drivers only cover about half the costs.
But then people who argue societal costs need to be included never seem to acknowledge the societal benefits of a road network.
Not familiar with the UK and quite surprised if what you say is true, but in the US about half of highway maintenance costs are covered by the various dedicated taxes. The rest come from general funding. In Canada, the dedicated taxes go to general funding, but fuel taxes and such suffice to cover around 1/3rd of costs. Australia is a bit better at around 2/3rds.
The point about social costs is valid, but there's no need to even consider them. The direct costs already need heavy subsidies in many countries.
Unlikely in Europe given that fuel prices across the continent are roughly the same (if anything the UK is cheaper)
Fuel taxes raise £25b a year (there's also a "sales tax" on top of that which raises another c. £10b a year)
Car taxes (VED - an annual tax to have your vehicle on the road legally) raise £8b
This revenue goes to the national budget. The national budget spends about £5b a year on maintaining and building major new roads.
Local roads are funded from local property taxes, and the total expenditure on those is under £5b a year.
The government has been trying to wean itself off fuel taxes over the last 20 years -- in 1999 it accounted for 2% of the GDP, it's now down to 1%. As more and more people shift to Electric vehicles the fuel revenue drops. There have been discussions on moving to a per-mile charge, but in any case, drivers subsidise other government funding priorities.
Rail on the other hand is massively subsidised -- on average it's about the same amount of subsidy as the fare revenue. The price charged per mile is far lower for regular long distance commuters (typically those with high wages), occasional use is peanalised. If I go to London at peak time tomorrow, I'll be paying about 90p a mile. If I lived in Brighton and travelled every day I'd pay under 20p/mile. The average rail user pays about 29p/mile (£3.1b and 17b km) and the subsidy is a similar amount.
The thing about public bus systems is that none of them are financially sustainable. If they were, you wouldn't need a government to run them.
My local system collects about 1/3rd of the annual operational costs and none of the (sizable) capital & infrastructural costs in fares.
The choice to collect insufficient fares versus collecting no fares at all, has secondary effects - fewer people choose to ride, spending any money is a psychological nudge against taking the trip, especially if you're not sure how much money you're going to have to spend. The car historically appears to be ~free, while the bus demands exact change in an impatient voice. You can solve the change issue with cards, but you could also just not charge fares.
Let's say you double ridership by taking away fares. This doubling adds approximately nothing to your considerable costs, but you get twice as much direct social benefit, and the price you pay for it is having to cover ~100% of the program cost using taxes instead of ~90%. On top of this you get secondary social benefit - buses move people so much more efficiently than cars that traffic speeds up dramatically, and you don't need to perform continuous expansion of the road network to accommodate ever-growing traffic problems. The labor value of those hours stuck in traffic alone covers the whole program, even if that value isn't something you can practically "capture" for some kind of profit.
IIRC the Flemish bus system is profitable. So is the public train company, even if marginally so.
What I dislike about GP's comment is that it obfuscates that mostly it's the lower classes that ride the bus, and paying it with fares takes away from the potential to redistribute tax money that harmonises the way we all live together.
Like you've said: buses move people more efficiently, and once they're on the road they're better off being closer to full since that won't dramatically change the fuel they're burning. Plus less cars, etc.
Iowa City isn’t a big city. Most American cities aren’t.
I lived in New York. We had paid subways and busses and that didn’t stop them from being abused like park benches—enforcement did. (And to be clear, the minority creating a mess for others were all over the place. Homeless. Hooligans. Mentally ill who got lost.)
I now live in a small Wyoming town. We have free downtown rideshare. (It’s just slower than Uber.)
I visited NYC and San Francisco. It's appalling and unacceptable in this day and age.
My small northern Minnesota town is far from perfect, but we don't let our neighbors and kids become fent zombies on the main drag. That's not a lifestyle that we want to enable or perpetuate. I do not understand the mental hurdles that Berkley-educated 'scholars' jump through to rationalize letting people suffer the most potent and deadly forms of addiction. The penal system is the last net to catch these people before they die from OD or blood-borne pathogenc or the consequences of criminal activity. And the "empathetic" west coast intellectuals say "legalize the drugs". Absolute lunacy
we don't let our neighbors and kids become fent zombies on the main drag
Nope, you'll take homeless folks right to jail, promptly, where they can be zombies out of sight. It isn't like folks in small towns are gonna help the person with treatment. As long as they stay out of view most times, they'll just be gossip. If they are lucky, someone will invite them to church. Small towns will absolutely let folks suffer if they just stay somewhere out of sight.
> homeless folks right to jail, promptly, where they can be zombies out of sight
The best option is treatement. But the worst is leaving them on the streets. They're hurting themselves as much as they could otherwise. But they're also hurting bystanders.
Once they're arrested that screws up their chances of recovery though. Even if an officer formally books someone and puts them in the drunk tank until the methamphetamine wears off so they don't scratch their own face down to the bone, they were still arrested. That arrest follows them around, and it severely reduces their chances of finding employment that will actually motivate them to work towards financial goals instead of merely just getting by. A lot of former drug addicts end up working in construction or commercial sailing not because they're too dull to be hydronautics engineers or factory logistics overseers, but because those are two of the few well paying industries who will hire regardless of your arrest record.
The U.S. has one of the highest re-offense rates out of any developed nation because an arrest is something employers, banks, and even privately run welfare programs all see as a permanent red flag. It's like someone figuratively puts walls in the way so the person with the arrest on their record is confined to a tiny square, cut off from viable opportunities. What makes it even worse is the combination where some states don't expunge records of juvenile offenses when you turn eighteen if they're federal offenses, and records of arrests aren't differentiated by how long ago they happened. If you got thrown in juvie at sixteen for mail fraud for using your uncle's name to scam magazine subscriptions then in some places like New Jersey that'll still be there when you're forty and will be treated as if it happened yesterday.
From a macro view there's more harm done when you arrest an addict than if you had left them to teeter on the edge of an overdose, which is just really messed up. All because of zero tolerance policies from organizations that have nothing to do with law enforcement.
Arrests do not follow you around if you do just a little effort to legally fight it. Until you are convicted you are innocent, you just need to follow the process to ensure that you are never listed as guilty by no contest (which is sadly often the default if you don't ask for a court hearing).
I wouldn't expect a drug addict to know the above, but it still needs to be stated. If anyone happens to be arrested in the US make sure you don't accidentally get listed as guilty and served time (that night in jail counts as time served so if the judge would sentence you to one night in jail)
There's a heavy need for rehabilitation shelters, but the public at large looks down on addicts and refuses to fund them. That leaves organizations like the Salvation Army to take up the slack, and the results can negligible. There's very little support on the private shelter's side other than providing a roof, a cot, and some basic directions to nearby organizations. Meanwhile the addict is meant to improve their behaviour almost immediately, fight the shelter itself to maintain their cot, and facilitate setting up their own recovery. Many of them choose to be homeless rather than put up with the ridiculous standards of these privately run shelters. Meanwhile on the public side it's a problem we started working on in the 1970s after the Vietnam War created a large wave of drug users, but Reagan gutted psychiatric care in the U.S. in 1982 and that meant that any progress towards making those shelters a reality was smashed into shards. What we were left with is people being put into psychiatric facilities that don't have the type of structure needed to rehabilitate an addict.
There's no way up from the bottom other than having another person take your hand. And nobody wants to be the one to reach down their hand. They rely on broken organizations and inappropriate tools to do that because their proximity to that ruin makes them uncomfortable. Either the addict gets screwed by the police or they get screwed by the rehabilitation facilities. So the addicts decide to turn away from both, and the public decides to turn away from the addicts. As you said, those in the public ostracize and shun them.
I can provide some, specifically the section on probation in [1] and "drug war logic" in [2], though it's not really something you need a source for. If you arrest someone it affects them for the rest of their life. Drug abuse is a terrible affliction, but it's still temporary. The abuse stops when access is revoked. Revoking that access can be a difficult and sometimes even dangerous process, but it marks the end. It can begin again if it's induced by an addiction, but that merely starts another temporary behaviour.
That's not even considering systems, like how a single arrest introduces costs to the state because of the transportation, the provided meals during their stay, the hygiene standards the arrestee must go through, and the required paperwork. Or how it affects total prosperity by almost guaranteeing that someone will be stuck with less productive and less meaningful employment for the rest of their lives, reducing taxes the town/city, county, state, and federal government can take and that person's own contributions to the local economy.
When someone is a danger to innocent people walking by who didn't choose to do any fentanyl, their recovery chances are secondary to the safety of the innocent passers by. The people who advocate for leaving them on the street never want to take responsibility when one of them kills a random kid for fun. That may be something that only a small minority of fentanyl addicts are going to do, but it's not something that we have any obligation to allow in the name of helping drug addicts.
That's the biggest issue. The police aren't the correct solution, at least in their current form, but there are no other solutions. Is it worth it to unfairly limit one person's life in order to protect them and people around them from a short period of harmful behaviour? If that limitation was temporary, yes. But it isn't temporary. Being arrested and having a minor possession charge that will be erased after five years without the person re-offending wouldn't be as bad.
> Is it worth it to unfairly limit one person's life in order to protect them and people around them from a short period of harmful behaviour? If that limitation was temporary, yes
I think the question turns on scale. If one person has the capacity to harm dozens, as one does in a city, the calculus may shift towards incapacitation. If it’s a small handful of non-violent interactions, on the other hand, as would be more likely somewhere less dense, then I agree with you. (Same turn on access to weapons.)
>That may be something that only a small minority of fentanyl addicts are going to do, but it's not something that we have any obligation to allow in the name of helping drug addicts.
Yep. There is no solution except to shoot those filthy addicts, amirite?
I mean who wants to spend $35-50K/annum to keep these scum in prison, right?
In fact, why should my tax dollars pay for any of these subhuman criminals, addicts and other undesirables? A bullet only costs a dime.
That's the way to go, right soerxpso? Pew! Pew! Pew!
Somehow, you believe that jail is the best option for treatment?
So, lets jail the professionals that are addicted too. After all, it is the best option for treatment, right? They are also hurting themselves as much as they could otherwise and probably hurting bystanders and their family. But that's ridiculous - few support that. If it were the best option, it would be recommended treatment for all.
The best option for treatment is actual medical based treatment in a facility that isn't punishing you and with staff trained in caring for you in your state. The best option for not leaving people on the streets is to house them. Housing and feeding folks makes treatment much more likely to work.
If professionals harass people under drugs (or without) we do jail them. It's just the homeless in the liberal cities who have untouchable status and can freely violate all kinds of laws.
They were not saying such a thing, you can open the post and Ctrl-F for "jail" to 0 results outside the quote.The comment says that treatment would be the best option, but anything else would be better than letting dangerous criminals roam the streets unmolested.
Why is the assumption here that big cities (East/West Coast or otherwise) want to perpetuate addiction? I think a simpler assumption (that involves fewer inferential leaps) is that large, wealthy cities provide more resources for homeless addicts, and so they end up congregating there.
> large, wealthy cities provide more resources for homeless addicts, and so they end up congregating there
There was some bussing of homeless into city centres. But I haven't seen evidence that a majority, let alone significant plurality, of these cities' homeless addicts became homeless somewhere else.
Given that less than half of NYC residents are born in NYC, the null hypothesis would be that the average homeless person is also born outside of the city[1].
(Maybe this demographic skews more towards natives in the case of homeless addicts, but I can’t find a statistic to support that.)
Small town America has an overdose rate 48% higher than big city America, despite the fact that many drug users move from small town America to the big cities.
I visited a couple of West Virginia towns that _shocked_ me with the rampant and obvious drug addiction this summer. And I live in a big city (Chicago) that suffers from homelessness.
My take away from that experience is that we normalize the misery around us but seeing it, even in a nearly identical form, in another context is shocking.
The dirty secret about NYC's, SF's, and LA's homeless are that more than 3/4ths of the homeless aren't local, or even regional.
George Lopez at the LA Times used to be a huge advocate of the homeless. And then he tried to do a series of articles about the homeless in Hollywood to highlight their plight and get more people to think like him. When he went out to do his research, it took him over a day interviewing dozens of homeless people to find one who was actually from LA. Less than a quarter were even from California. Needless to say, he's no longer a huge advocate for the homeless.
So yes, it's easy for small towns to talk about how they don't have a homeless problem, because they've shipped their homeless off to the big cities to deal with.
I lived in Los Angeles for years and in that time got to know exactly one person who was from Los Angeles (well, Beverly Hills, if you're local). Melting pot cities just simply have people from all over. Including the ones who made a conscious decision to leave small towns in Minnesota that the original commenter thinks are perfect; I knew several.
Anecdotally, I used to take the Greyhound a lot and everyone on them is either a student or somewhat homeless, e.g. they just lined up another friend's couch to sleep on for a little while.
You are objectively wrong. Public transit scales the same way free and paid (i.e. based on demand). The cost for free countrywide public transport in a country with very high quality public transportation (so not the US) is about 8k per person, per year. This isn't some insurmountable amount of money - it's not even particularly costly when you compare it to what the infrastructure costs are for cars (mostly related to accident mitigation. Especially bad in the US).
What is your point? The assumed demonization of people because they lack homes is a false assumption. I've spent plenty of time around people who apparently lack housing (I don't ask), including on public transit. I don't find they behave better or worse than others, on average.
>Homeless people have higher rates of substance and mental-health issues, and, unsurprisingly, less access to showers and laundry facilities.
As someone who was homeless (for less than a year, thankfully!), my experience was that many people with nowhere to go (myself included) become incredibly despondent that they have no roof, no shower, no place to keep (let alone wash) their clothes and turn to drugs as a way of (temporarily) ameliorating their suffering.
Those with mental health issues often can't hold a job as they're suffering from debilitating mental illness (duh!) and those with no place to shower or keep clean clothes have a hard time getting, keeping jobs too.
The latter group mostly just needs the opportunity to present themselves for job inquiries bathed, reasonably well rested and in clean clothes.
The former group needs the same plus mental health services including supervision and treatment.
Don't forget that more than half of Americans are an unexpected $600 emergency away from being unable to pay for food, rent, utilities, etc.
But most folks ignore that and instead just want them gone. They don't care where -- in jail -- in another city -- just as long as they don't have to look at them. It's disgusting.
Really, the land of the free is going to enforce showering laws? If our standard for freedom is that low, I'd lock up all the people spreading fear - they do far more damage.
I didn't suggest that. I was only addressing the question of whether "they behave better or worse than others, on average," and the evidence clearly leans toward "worse."
> You can pick free, or scalable, or financially sustainable (and without sustainability, a political shift will kill it), but you cannot have all three at once. The minute you push on one, second-order effects pop up somewhere else.
What is your basis for this assertion? One could simply increase the tax rate on high income earners and large property holders and readily fund fare free transportation in a financially sustainable and scalable way.
I believe the unstated mechanism of failure here is "it will piss off the wealthy and they will kill it" - which, at some point, needs to stop being true about literally everything in our society, or some extremely unpleasant consequences will manifest.
> Every serious transit city in the world ends up in the same place
If we look to Asia, we see that's not the only way things can work. Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, Tokyo, Osaka, are serious transit cities in my book, and their way is to have property development, diversified business models, or operating in extremely dense corridors where demand is high enough to cover costs through fares alone.
But you're right that "just run trains and collect fares" doesn't work and has to be subsidized everywhere else. The question is, how do you account for the subsidies that cars get. The cost to invade Iraq isn't usually accounted for when screaming about how much it costs to fund public transportation out of tax money.
Here in Czechia, I lived in two cities with a great public transport system. Prague and Ostrava. Ostrava, despite being much poorer, is actually often voted to have the best system in CZ, because the management is really creative and diligent here and they often pull off miracles with a relatively small purse.
That said, yes, it is a major burden on municipal finances. The taxpayer here is mostly OK with it, but compromises have to be done, such as fixing sidewalks when they really fall apart and not a day sooner. Maths cannot really be wished away.
Important factors that plague the entire system:
* fluctuations in cost of energy. The Russo-Ukrainian war, European Green Deal etc. Getting a multi-year contract for electricity that can be used as a basis for budgeting has become impossible,
* driver wages. Drivers can move around the EU and they indeed often do, being a wandering folk almost by definition. Thus every city in the EU competes with Stockholm, Amsterdam or Milan on wages, while having half or less the economic power of those metropolises. So you have to find a precarious balance between "paying your drivers so little that they leave for greener pastures" and "paying your drivers so much that the budget cannot tolerate it".
Full self-driving could alleviate the second problem. Robots don't eat and don't pay any rent.
> You can pick free, or scalable, or financially sustainable (and without sustainability, a political shift will kill it), but you cannot have all three at once.
You can't name three things, rule out any combination that includes more than two things, and call it a day.
The gas saved is less resources wasted, savings which to a large part are taxable. Etc.
Bangalore(+State of Karnataka) is currently having free transit, but only for women.
Which seems to have drawn anger from Meninist circles.
People who support this say, it gives more mobility to women from poor and lower middle class households, and hence better employment opportunities, increased family incomes and by the effect taxes as well.
People who criticise this say, the expenses for free rides are offloaded to already burdened tax payers, who quite honestly in the Indian system get nothing in return. These forever increasing free perks for sets of people who won't contribute anything back, at the expense of ever increasing burden on people who are expected to pay without expecting anything in return, won't end well.
>>Why are women considered to be people who "wont contribute anything back"?
Not women in specific, but India has a huge informal economy sector, where payments, salaries, spending are done outside of the tax system. Most people who take these buses work in that economy. So you end up enabling that part of the economy. At the expense of people paying taxes. It wouldn't be any different, if men got free rides as well.
>>But also, why are women specifically traveling for free? What was the original argument?
Women as a vote bank, has been a growing trend in Indian politics. In a lot of states far more generous perks are given to women. For eg- https://cleartax.in/s/ladli-behna-yojana
By offering these perks, you are basically buying votes from 50% of the net voting population. So a lot of states offer these perks.
> financially sustainable (and without sustainability, a political shift will kill it)
Fiscally sustainable is a BS excuse often put forward by conservatives to not fund the things they don't want funded. Most things the government runs are not fiscally sustainable on their own, but they provide some sort of societal value. See things like the military, police, fire departments, etc...
A political shift could certain still kill it, but let's not pretend it has anything to do with fiscal policy.
> Every major city that tries free transit at scale will eventually snap back to it, because it is the only configuration that does not implode under feedback loops.
Less Jevons Paradox and more Theory of Constraints...
Five million people are not going to descend on Iowa City because buses are free. Luxembourg has full free public transport from buses to trains, with no feedback loops. Same in Tallinn, Estonia capital where is free for residents.
It didn't work out well when the NYC MTA tried fare free rides.
https://www.mta.info/document/147096
Dwell time and customer journey time decreased.
The bus speeds were lower on the fare free routes.
If public transport provides value to people, they should pay for some of it. 30 day unlimited ride pass in only $132.
i will gently point out that new york state and new york city are not the same thing
> Under that metric, the poverty threshold for a couple with two children in a rental household in New York City is now $47,190. The study found that 58 percent of New Yorkers, or more than 4.8 million people, were in families with incomes below 200 percent of the poverty line — about $94,000 for a couple with two children or $44,000 for a single adult. Poverty rates among Black, Latino and Asian residents were about twice as high as the rate for white residents, according to the report.
So you need 2% of your income to generate 100% of your income (assuming you need to get to work).
Sorry I just can't take these arguments in good faith. $100 in the richest city of country of the richest country in the world is basically nothing. If you can't allocate that towards your mobility then IDK what to say to you.
You're not exposed to how many people live. There are people, for example, who must choose to budget between food and medication. Those are also people without other forms of transit.
That's great. It's only around 8 hours of work instead of 16.
Its still a lot of money at $16.50. 12 days a year you labor just for the opportunity to labor. Your point only makes it slightly better and doesn't really take away from my point - it's a lot of money for a good number of folks. You know, the folks that could really benefit.
A 50% discount is probably pretty hard to get - and you are still asking the poorest folks to pay 4 hours of labour for busses.
To get the reduced rate many municipalities will require you to visit an office, somewhere you likely have to take transportation to, during office hours (aka working hours), and provide documentation to prove this.
This isn't really unknown either. There's a very good story anyone can look up about Dr. V in India and what it took for him to actually get the eye care he wanted to provide to the people who needed it.
In the digital world many of us know you want to deeply understand your user and design with them in mind. Same thing here in the meat space.
I dont' know how you reached the "didn't work out well" conclusion, both metrics you mentioned were commensurate with systemwide metrics, meaning fare-free didn't have much of an impact on these routes. Ultimately, ridership increased
Ridership increasing doesn't make it a success. I read that New Yorkers who frequently used the bus system were asked what the city could do to make their experience better. Among those who were polled the top two complaints were that the buses were too crowded and often late. The free bus trial program made these two metrics worse - 30% more riders (aka even more crowded) and longer dwell times (aka more delays). The bus fare being too high was like number five or six on their list of things that riders cared about.
> We’re a quarter of the way through the 21st century, gas taxes have been optional for driving for quite a while now.
States mostly take the equivalent of those taxes out of vehicle registration fees for electric vehicles.
And bicycle usage is nearly a nil cost on the existing public roads, so the costs here would be appropriate to come out of the general sales/property taxes that fun the city/county. If anything you might argue to try to subsidize bicycle ridership more in urban areas, whether with bicycle paths or otherwise, to reduce the number of cars on the roads and reduce congestion for those still on the roads.
The cost of adding one more car to existing public roads is also essentially zero, as is the cost of adding one more rider to an existing bus route. Until you hit some tipping point and need to add more capacity, then it costs a lot. Bicycles can do that too, if a significant number of them shows up.
In any case, the point is that public transit riders pay fares. Not taxes, not registration fees, but fares. The equivalent for roads would be tolls. And it’s pretty uncommon to see any advocacy for charging tolls for all roads.
EVs pay a gas tax in the form of enormously more expensive registration in almost all states. I pay way more for my EV registration than I would have paid in gas tax.
> Registration is like $100 a year for "unlimited" access to roads. Quite a bit cheaper than a yearly unlimited transit pass.
But that's still "some of it".
> And electric cars don't pay a gas tax.
Electric cars' registration fees are much higher to make up for that, e.g., in New Jersey, you owe an extra $260 per year for an EV (which automatically goes up by $10 every year) vs. a gas car.
So, in Ireland, which has a historically pretty terrible public transport system, the government has been fairly aggressively cutting fares. A journey which cost me about 6 euro literally 20 years ago (about 9 euro in today's money) now costs 2 euro, transport is free for kids under 8 and extremely cheap for people under 25, and so on. And it has _worked_; public transport utilisation is dramatically up.
Now, maybe there's a point where it stops working as you reduce fares. But it's not particularly _clear_ that that is the case.
I think if you treat the bus including "externalities", the bus problem might be very smart.
What if you include road construction and widening, road repair costs, impact of traffic on commerce and taxes, and more nebulous stuff like pollution, quality of life, noise, etc.?
sounds smart, but this a false premise because its not zero sum and theres this magical thing called taxes that allow you to reap the benefits of a more productive system.
If you have free public transit and that enables more economic activity or more disposable income to be funneled into services that boost the tax rake of the city the gains can offset the cost. This is an equation none of us have the info to do as randos online and its pointless to claim otherwise.
and even if your point was true free buses are a partial subsidy to low income people like you suggest in nyc its busses are a predominantly taken by low income individuals (source https://blog.tstc.org/2014/04/11/nyc-bus-riders-tend-to-be-o... subway nearly everyone, and ride share has their own tax as well.
A transit ride in the US might be $12 of subsidies and a $2 fare. Making the ride $14 of subsidies isn't a big difference. There are even situations where eliminating fares saves money because of the overhead.
That said we'd probably be better off if we eliminated subsidies and introduced competition.
You mean capitalists will stir up a shitfit if they aren't allowed to profit from someones misfortune. The proper amount of traffic on roads should be close to 0. All LA would have to do is offer more and free bus rides and charge for driving in the city and everyone would save hours of their life for no cost.
San Francisco's Muni (light rail + bus) system has a budget of about $1.2B and its ticket revenues are about $200M. That means, 5/6th of the budget is subsidized by the taxpayers of SF. There is no reason why Muni can't be free. Surely a city with a budget of $15B can find $200M (about 1.5% of budget) to make up for the shortfall?
It would directly help the taxpayers of the City. But obviously nobody wants that (sarcasm)!
Example: the City has been trying to get rid of the RVs parked illegally on the streets, dumping their effluents and engine oil all over the City streets. To get these RVs off the streets, the City is spending $36M+ (and counting). So money can be found for the homeless, the RV dwelllers, etc. but not for the city's lawful residents and taxpayers.
Most of the homeless in SF and LA aren't from California. Red states love to "deal" with their homeless by buying them bus tickets to the West Coast (something that Texas used to openly brag about).
If SF and LA shipped the homeless back to where they originally came from, we'd all be talking about the Midwest homelessness crisis.
You can’t unless were willing to forcibly put these people in shelters. Many of the persistent ones are hardcore drug users waiting to die, they don’t give a damn about being rehabilitated.
The number of people who can afford a home is very strongly correlated with how affordable homes are. I therefore propose that if we can make homes more affordable, homelessness will decrease.
Most people here don’t realize how much the homeless are hated and how willing trump voting Americans are to literally let them die on the streets or worse.
Schadenfreude is the dominant feeling of the times, and many if not most Americans would basically celebrate a “purge” of the homeless.
Nice Faith based argument there. Requiring "free" citizens to care about a problem they didn't have anything to do with. No different than saying "if everyone went to church/temple/mosque and and adhered to $DEITY all problems would vanish"
The fee gives a reason to kick them off. Portland's trimet recently made it a policy to not allow sleeping which means the transit police can now intervene when the opioid addict does his dose on the train. Meanwhile the tired professionals are left alone. As it should be
It seems like the more straight forward version of that policy is 'no drugs on the train'. Allowing selective enforcement is a sure path to unintended consequences.
Nah the consequences are more riders. That's a great consequence.
> no drugs on the train
Nonsense. I'd rather have people carry their illegal drugs on the train and take them at home. The issue is people experiencing the effects of the drug on the train and often times making it unsafe for women, children, and men too (it doesn't really matter what your sex is when the drugged out man vomits on you). I honestly don't care if you carry your illegal drugs everywhere, as long as you make sure the effects of said drugs are dealt with privately. I have major issues with people making the consequences of their drug use other people's problem
They will just get on another bus. Meanwhile the entire bus will be slowed down by the inspectors asking everyone to leave the bus so they can check for payment or by holding up passengers exiting at connection stations.
You think it's presence of a fare that prevents homeless people from getting on a bus?? Even the light rail has ways to get on without paying, and the homeless know them.
Some countries have cameras on public transport with security people watching the footage live. If someone misbehaves ever so slightly (like drinking alcohol) the doors wont open until enforcers arrive. With modern AI you can have one person monitor countless cameras. They could even retract before the doors open so that you cant smash or spray them and run away.
Assuming a perfect system this still fails because you have now locked in all the law abiding citizens with someone who has proven they are ready to break the rules, effectively inventing a hostage situation out of thin air whereby a miscreant can terrorize their fellow passengers for the duration of the police response time.
The spiel is to do things you can get away with. You don't know if the other passengers are law abiding citizens. There is no way to tell how they respond when locked up with you.
I believe they don't keep the recordings for long if no arrests are made. It certainly seems like a good idea to not create data sets that are open for abuse later.
Oh which continent? Is it possible that what you assume it's normal and default is colored by your personal experience and not representative of the world at large?
what answer could i possibly give to you that would change your response? antarctica?
> Is it possible that what you assume it's normal and default is colored by your personal experience and not representative of the world at large?
of course this is true. what are you going for here. my objection is to standing up a Train Security Panopticon with "modern AI" and locking commuters (in north america) on a train (in north america) who might depend on a schedule (using a north american time zone) stuck at a station until the (north american) cops can come and pull someone (who statistically, but not for sure, would be north american) off of the car for being drunk (off of beer i've had in my personal experience, coloring this example, which may not be the beer that is representative of the world at large) and napping on the seats
which cultures? which public transportation? is it possible that what you assume is the problem is colored by your personal experience and not representative of members of a country at large?
lol, what? You’re gonna hold 20 people hostage on the bus until some enforcers navigate a busy city to ticket a person who is likely to wipe their ass with the ticket? What country is that exactly?
Seriously, other than law enforcement what else can you do to someone who brazenly refuse to follow the rules? Even law enforcement (at least in the US) highly depends on where you live. In left leaning states and cities, DAs are not very likely to prosecute such small crimes like not paying a bus fare because they know it’ll make them unpopular next election. I live in a very left leaning county and state and it swings between center and left every 4 years or so. The swing is always “look how awful that guy was. He prosecuted vulnerable people for petty crimes for no reason”. Cops don’t wanna have to deal with all the paper work to book a guy for a couple of nights before they get released and do it all over again. If they know the person will not get prosecuted because there is no political capital to do so, why bother with the theatrics and all the paper work of arresting them? Brazenly refusing to pay the bus fare and getting in a verbal altercation with the driver and everyone on the bus is a fun afternoon for some people.
I'm sure the trip to the police station and immediate release is a real setback for these people. Unless they're breaking more serious laws, no one is paying to put these people behind bars for any length of time.
I mean, you're right in theory, but in the real world things are very different.
I don't know, all the places I lived in (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46029488) manage just fine. Must be some crazy black magic rocket science they are doing over in Germany or Britain or Turkey or Singapore or Australia to keep non-payers off their public transport.
And in many places I haven't lived but only visited, too.
You end up with an outcry from the rich “liberals” (for lack of a better word), who never take the bus in the first place, complaining about how enforcing fares on buses is harming the poor who can’t afford transportation and pushing people away from public transportation.
It’s pretty infuriating. I started biking to work 2 years ago and try to bike almost anywhere I can. Mostly to lose weight but also put my money where my mouth is. I voted for every levy and prop to improve bike-ability and public transportation of the city in the last 10 years and figured I’m a hypocrite if I expect others to bike and take the bus and I never do. My tolerance for the homeless on buses has been dropping as I have to deal with them more and more. I was always “It’s our failure in not helping them. If I can’t help, least I could do is let them be” kind of person. Now every other week I end up with a negative interaction with someone on the bus or at a bus stop. Every time I air my grievances with people I know (who never take the bus) I always have to find myself on the defensive somehow.
In my third world big city, a lot of people sleeping in the streets are the ones who don't have money to pay public transport for their far way homes. The jobs are downtown. It's perverse.
They're already mobile benches for unhoused people and druggies. They just get on anyways already and don't pay the fare. And the driver does nothing because they don't want to get in a fight. (Unless a passenger threatens others, then they get the police involved.)
Making the buses free isn't going to produce any more of it.
Yeah comments like the parents are typical from people that don't use public transit. The people who can't/aren't going to pay that some people "don't want" on public transit are always going to not pay and still use it, so why not make it free for everybody?
I live in an area that had outdated payment systems on their bus network. They determined that the cost to upgrade the payment systems would be higher than the revenue of fares, so they just made the buses free.
Edit: A lot of replies associate fare payment with behaviors (and smell?) of riders. I think that it's important to recognize that ones ability to pay a fare does not inherently indicate that they are "undesirable" in some way. Could their be a correlation? Possibly. But dedicate the policing to things that actually matter - an unruly passenger should get policing efforts, not a non-paying one (or smelly, really? Obviously homeless people can be putrid but seriously people smelling bad is not a crime).
I use public transit (mostly SF BART) on a regular basis. It's not a matter of "don't want," it's a matter of public safety. People won't use public transit if they have to deal with mentally ill people or hucksters.
This is very basic economics of public transit. I completely agree with the comment about having a minimum payment and enforcement.
Yes, they avoid streets too. That's one of the reasons that San Francisco shopping around Union Square has collapsed. [0] There were other reasons like COVID as well.
Nah, I’ve rode a bus to work most days forever. It’s my calm place when I go home.
Tragedy of the commons is real, even a nominal stake in a service, thing or place impacts behavior. If you’ve ever shopped at Aldi, they make you put a quarter in each shopping cart. Most people wouldn’t pick a quarter up from the ground, but they almost always put their carts back at Aldi.
Personally, I could care less if a dude smells or is poor. We’re all the same. But I have tolerance for boorish behavior that scares people who are trying to go about their business.
> The people who can't/aren't going to pay that some people "don't want" on public transit are always going to not pay and still use it, so why not make it free for everybody?
Why? We are excluding non-paying passengers from planes just fine. Why not busses and trains?
And over in many other parts of the world, they also manage this just fine, too. It's not exactly rocket science.
It's because the fare and boarding latency on planes is much higher, which funds the cost of having security guards around and amortizes the check-in time penalty.
Maybe. But in any case, you don't need to re-invent the wheel to check that passengers on busses and trains pay their fare. Just learn from any of the countless successful systems around the world today, or in the US's own past: streetcars used to be widely profitable, and that only worked because they actually managed to collect fares.
(Careful: I'm not suggesting that collecting fares would make streetcars widely profitable again. I am merely suggesting that whatever mechanisms they used to enforce fares can be learned from.)
It's a tradeoff you can make. The US is far from the only country in the world where fare evasion is a problem. I've lived in countries with similarly high inequality and homelessness where fare evasion was such a problem despite enforcement that the bus drivers would simply refuse to pick up certain passengers, and conversely people would then hitch a hike on roller skates behind the bus.
I don't doubt that there are countries worse than the US (in this regard). But that doesn't mean you can't learn from the success stories. Especially since they are really common in a variety of places that don't have much in common otherwise, so it can't be too hard to clamp down on most fare evasion.
> [...] and conversely people would then hitch a hike on roller skates behind the bus.
I assume there's not much overlap between the really problematic passengers (often loud, drunk, aggressive and/or mentally ill) and the skaters? Mostly just because you need a minimum level of physical fitness to pull this feat off, and you need to be organised enough to both have skates and have them at the ready?
In most places I lived in, the traffic police (if nothing else) would nab you for trying to pull this stunt.
> I live in an area that had outdated payment systems on their bus network. They determined that the cost to upgrade the payment systems would be higher than the revenue of fares, so they just made the buses free.
I'm strongly in favour of free transit, but this boggles my mind. If your payment system is just a box where people drop in tickets/change, it's pretty low cost, never gets outdated, and pretty high compliance.
Selling tickets and collecting change from thousands of boxes is actually quite expensive in terms of manual labor and machines. The boxes themselves are expensive, as they have to be able to sort and count coins. And then the vending machines for the tickets.
And it doesn't raise compliance at all. Why would it?
> The boxes themselves are expensive, as they have to be able to sort and count coins.
The boxes in my city of ~1.7 million don't do this. They're just boxes. Presumably they have some big box at the bus HQ they dump them in to sort the change.
> And it doesn't raise compliance at all. Why would it?
I'm not saying they raise compliance over other systems, I'm saying that observationally, compliance is pretty good. When I take the bus, I see basically everyone either put something that looks like a fare/ticket in the box or show a transit pass to the driver.
Who counts that the coins all add up to the fare then?
Do you have to show the coins to the driver that they add up to the fare, before putting them in the box?
I've only ever seen systems that count and display the amount of coins dropped in, until it adds up to a fare, and then there's an indication that it's sufficient and it beeps and then resets for the next person.
The box is clear, the driver can see what people drop in.
There’s nothing stopping you from putting half the fare amount in nickels in, but really, there’s nothing stopping you from putting nothing in and just taking a seat - bus drivers aren’t equipped to police fare evasion in either case.
In practice, 80-90% of riders have monthly passes that are just pieces of paper that you wave in front of the driver as you get on.
I’m not oblivious to the downsides of such a system, but there are real upsides around low cost, and no technology to ever go out of date.
Seriously? On hackernews you're acting like a "box where you drop in tickets" would be an adequate description for modern bus/transit fare? Obviously they need a system that integrates with the other transit options in the area (the trains and other localities bus providers), and accept electronic payment.
What about transfers? Transfers between buses are supposed to be free, but how would you track that? There is also a reduced price from going from train -> bus. How would you track that? Obviously the system is significantly more complex than "drop some change in a bucket."
I'm not claiming it's modern, I'm just saying that it worked for decades, and it's not like it's a system that's started working less well now that more modern systems exist.
This is literally how my city of ~1.7 million operates now, and it seems... fine? Like it's obviously worse than free transit or a snazzy FeLiCa-based system, but it clearly works to collect fares and move people around.
> What about transfers?
The bus driver tears off a paper slip with a time on it that's good for 90 minutes.
> There is also a reduced price from going from train -> bus. How would you track that?
You don't, all routes/transfers are the same cost.
Again, I'm not saying this is the best system, but it's a false dichotomy to assume that "expensive new fare system" and "no fare system" are the only options. For some cost-value analysis, a basic/cheap fare system beats an expensive system even if it has fewer capabilities.
> Yeah comments like the parents are typical from people that don't use public transit. The people who can't/aren't going to pay that some people "don't want" on public transit are always going to not pay and still use it, so why not make it free for everybody?
Huh? I never owned a car and taken public transport all my live, and it's never been much of a problem kicking non-paying people off. What kind of lawless hellholes are you guys living in?
(I lived in Germany, Turkey, Britain, Singapore and Australia.)
The bus driver's union doesn't want drivers engaging in fare enforcement -- they're hired to drive, not to get into physical altercations. This was especially after a bus driver was stabbed to death in 2008 in a fare dispute.
There are fare enforcement teams that partner up with cops to catch people evading the fare, that are trained for this kind of thing. But obviously the chances are miniscule you'd ever encounter them on any single bus trip, and all that's going to happen is you get a summons with a $50-100 fine. So it's quite rational not to pay.
And I mean, as a bus rider, the last thing I want is my bus being delayed by 15 minutes while the driver stops and waits for the cops to come to evict someone who didn't pay. I just want to get to where I'm going.
So how do they handle it in the cities you've lived in? How do they kick them off without putting the driver in danger and without massively delaying the bus for everyone else? (And to be clear, we're talking about buses, not trains where monitoring entry and exit turnstiles is vastly more realistic.)
In the subway in NYC I see some people go out the emergency exits (alarm sounds but who cares?) while other people are queued up waiting for somebody to come out the emergency exit so they can come in. It’s a kind of antisocial social behavior like torrenting pirate files.
No it's not, because the cops get there and the bus already left. Or the cops wait around but the bus is stuck in traffic and another call comes in so the cops give up and leave. Trying to pick some arbitrary bus stop somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes ahead based on how fast they think the bus is going and how long some cop (and which one?) will take to get from where they are to that bus stop depending on traffic is just a recipe for missing each other. And cops are a scarcer resource than buses.
Like, if there's a serious crime is being committed in a moving vehicle then sure they'll have someone constantly monitoring and redirecting in order to intercept. It's possible, with high enough priority. But someone not paying a fare does not have that priority.
And the point is the person refuses to get off the bus right away. They stay on it till they get to their destination and then get off.
The most visible enforcement I’ve seen was in Rome. They have people issuing tickets on the bus at random.
It was noticeable in that as a tourist, it seemed like a chill place, but there are lots of police of various stripes and they seemed very serious when enforcing things.
I live in Italy and this is common on the trains and busses. I ride the train a lot and have my ticket checked maybe 1:10 times. The tickets are cheap (~2 euro) and the fines are high (50-200 euro), so it makes sense to buy them. I have seen people get fined though.
What level of punishment should somebody who is trying to move between place to place receive for their lack of paying $1-3? The service was already going to operate, regardless of their lack of payment.
Some public transit has a much more rigid fare collection structure - trains are typically much more controlled entry points. But buses? It's in their best interest to get everyone on as quickly as possible and get everyone off as quickly as passive. Are you going to have gates that block you if you don't scan your card/phone from exiting? Same for boarding. Do you dedicate policing resources to ensuring the collection of what is certainly less than the cost to employ the police officer? Seems wasteful until you hit a very high ridership.
I suspect people want fare enforcement basically because it helps keeps the aggressive/crazy/assholes off. Not because they want to collect more money.
Anecdotally, the bart gates seem to have improved the riding experience.
Some data from LA:
> Of the 153 violent crimes perpetrated on Metro between May 2023 and April 2024, 143 of them — more than 93% — were believed to be committed by people who did not pay a valid fare and were using the transit system illegally.
> I suspect people want fare enforcement basically because it helps keeps the aggressive/crazy/assholes off. Not because they want to collect more money.
Well, it's also a matter of fairness: I'm a law-abiding citizen, and I pay for my bus fare. It's the Right Think to do. But if I'm paying, I want the other guys to pay as well.
I get that; the cost of enforcement makes that likely negative (possibly even very negative) to the system.
My claim is letting trash act like, well, trash and street people wild out on the system drives lots of commuters off. And ime, the worst riders are disproportionally fare thieves.
> What level of punishment should somebody who is trying to move between place to place receive for their lack of paying $1-3? The service was already going to operate, regardless of their lack of payment.
In Germany it's typically something like max(2 * regular fare price, 60 Euro).
I know you asked a 'should' question and this is an 'is' answer, but I hope it's still useful.
It's fascinating seeing your questions about something that's an everyday thing in all of the places I lived.
So in Germany it's typically the (public) companies running the transit systems that have teams that check that you've paid. Gates are almost unheard of for neither bus nor train. (I couldn't name one place in Germany that has gates for public transport at the top of my head.) The police would only get involved, if a passenger is getting violent or threatening to get violent, or won't get off the bus.
In Britain (and Singapore etc) you board the bus at the front, where the bus driver checks your ticket and otherwise will kick you off the bus. The bus driver itself won't get into a physical fight with you. But the bus driver can definitely call for backup and will (presumably) stop the bus and refuse to drive until a recalcitrant passenger has been dealt with. The social contract seems to that all the other passengers will blame the would-be fare evader for the stoppage and back up the driver. But I've never actually seen that acted out completely.
Trains in Singapore and many parts of Britain have gates, and there are usually either some people monitoring the gates for jumpers or at least cameras.
> Do you dedicate policing resources to ensuring the collection of what is certainly less than the cost to employ the police officer? Seems wasteful until you hit a very high ridership.
It's all pretty similar to how parking regulations are enforced: there's some dedicated people who write tickets (not police officers), and the tickets are typically a few dozen dollars.
When I was last in London, I took the tube. Officers were at the exit gates, I presume to arrest anyone jumping the gates. I didn't see any fare evaders.
I can't tell if you're feigning not realizing the thread about San Francisco under a post referencing "Iowa City" is probably referring to the US.
Feels like a coy way of getting to say something as inflammatory as "the US a lawless hellhole" on HN: which is fine enough... but there's also a reason YC isn't a Singaporean or Turkish or British or German institution.
It very well might be genuine surprise. Most people from other countries have an extremely hard time understanding why most U.S. cities allow people to openly break the law in front of authorities with zero consequences.
The U.S. is a pretty far outlier in this regard. It's strange how many people in the U.S. don't realize this at all, and become appalled at when foreigners are shocked by the way things are done in U.S. cities.
Well I now I think it might be genuine ignorance because you managed to read my pretty clear comment ("everyone is mentioning US cities, so obviously they're talking about the US") and contort it into whatever you're on about.
Once might be a coincidence, twice might be me overestimating how carefully people read other comments before jumping into conversations.
Main reason normal people do not use public transport is this attitude and police giving up on enforcing basic public order on transport. Personally I am voting against any public transport funding until all homeless/druggies are kicked off public transport (even if they are willing to pay). You have to pass certain very low behavior bar to use public transport (no intoxication, no aggression to other passengers, no smell, no shouting random things).
It's not rocket science and other countries figured out how to do it.
It's not a policing problem, it's a homelessness and mental health problem.
You'll never have enough police for regular enforcement on buses. The numbers don't add up, not even remotely.
Other countries do a better job when they're able to keep people off the streets in the first place. Which then becomes a much more complicated question about social spending and the civil liberties of mentally ill people who don't want to be institutionalized.
Car-related taxes (vehicle sales, gas tax, yearly registration fees, in some cases tolls) have historically covered the majority of roadway infrastructure costs. I don't think free buses are going to be able to maintain the roadways.
A common misconception; usage fees only covered about 50% of highway-related expenses a few years ago. Feel free to find the latest numbers. This is less than the fare box recovery ratio of many transit systems, though not all.
And that, of course, does not include all the unpriced externalities of roads. For example, if you value a life at $1M, then the 40,000 people killed by drivers each year cost us collectively another $40B.
I kind of agree. I grew up with a well-funded, well-staffed railway which has suffered slow managed decline, so I've got pretty good frames of reference.
A big problem now is people playing loud music, loud TikToks, phonecalls and videocalls on speaker phone (almost the default), feet on seats, vaping, bags on seats etc.
There are now no staff who enforce the norms and laws (Yup some of that legally could land you a prosecution if the railway chooses that).
Yes, society was less anti-social 20-30 years ago but IMO with strict enforcement of heavy punishment, the issues could be stamped out.
What's interesting is that one fairly large section of the railway does still have lots of staff who enforce anti-social behaviour (Merseyrail – they operate somewhat independently) and from what I've read and heard is that there tend to be far fewer issues in that network than the rest of the network. It's interesting to have the two areas to compare.
Unfortunately this governments want to continue defunding the railways, and so are happy with the cycle of managed decline and people opting to drive instead.
I used to be extremely pro public transport but it's fighting a losing battle. Trains are overpriced, delayed, cramped and anti-social
> "Normal people do not use public transit... kick all homeless off (even if they are willing to pay)"
At the risk of feeding the trolls, I have to object to this ignorant, callous, brutal bs. Please, read this account^1 of NBA player Chris Boucher staying alive by riding public transit, and try to put yourself in his shoes for a moment.
> Personally I am voting against any public transport funding until all homeless
Statistically you're just a few days of bad luck from being both homeless and carless. What's your plan for getting to work to not be in that situation?
> Statistically you're just a few days of bad luck from being both homeless and carless.
What makes you think so? The poster you replied to might be sitting on a decent nest egg, have supportive friends and family, and insurance against all contingencies.
And some people are willing to bite the bullet and even say: 'Well, in that case, I shouldn't be on the bus, either.
Though it's fairly clear from context that the commenter you replied to doesn't want to check every person's home address before they are let on the bus. They want to ban anti-social behaviour on the bus, and 'homeless' is just a short hand for that, unfortunate as it is.
And a few days of bad luck might make you lose your home, but won't necessarily turn you into a drunk who shouts a lot.
I don't know the commenter specifically - that's why I said statistically.
> Though it's fairly clear from context
Ah, the classic "didn't mean the well presented part of group X when I said X". That's a cliche way to mask prejudice. No, if they didn't actually mean homeless, I'm calling them out on writing "homeless".
> Personally I am voting against any public transport funding until all homeless/druggies are kicked off public transport (even if they are willing to pay).
That's a bit silly. I have sympathies for your views, but you can't have a policy of literally 0. Even spotless places like Singapore don't achieve that, even though they come pretty close.
You clearly haven’t used MUNI. Homeless are already riding the buses without paying, and I’ve rarely seen them camp in them. Most bus drivers know these people on a first name basis and very few of them are actually do anything beyond going from place to place.
And if you’re from San Francisco and use MUNI, you’ll also know that half the people don’t pay anyway. There’s no reason to make people pay.
I see a lot of homeless people on the 14 and they’re just chilling going from place to place. 38 however can have some very mentally ill people on it. My friend saw this guy on the 38 who was yelling about how much he hates the Japanese. Funny enough that guy got off at Japantown.
Rambling aside, I think it’s unfair to give people shit because they’re homeless. The real issue is we don’t commit people to psychiatric care when they’re clearly a problem in our society.
> The real issue is we don’t commit people to psychiatric care when they’re clearly a problem in our society.
I’m old enough to remember when we did that. The homeless population absolutely skyrocketed, after all the mental institutions were closed in the 1980s and 1990s.
That said, many of them were hellholes. It’s sort of arguable as to whether the patients were worse off, but one thing’s for sure; the majority of city-dwellers (the ones with homes) are not better off, now. I’m really not sure who benefited from this.
Here, on Long Island (NY), we have some of the largest psychiatric centers in the world; almost all completely shut down, and decomposing.
The campuses are gorgeous, but can’t be developed, because they would require hundreds of millions of dollars in cleanup.
> The real issue is we don’t commit people to psychiatric care when they’re clearly a problem in our society.
Where do you draw that line though? Are you really okay with committing people, i.e. imprisoning and medicating people, because society seems to find those people inconvenient?
Personally I've never understood any justification for committing a person without their consent. The line between being committed and being extra judicially imprisoned seems indistinguishable to me.
> Where do you draw that line though? Are you really okay with committing people, i.e. imprisoning [...] people, because society seems to find those people inconvenient?
Well, that's what prison is, for some value of "inconvenient".
The problem is that at some point, if someone refuses to abide by laws/social norms, and can't be coerced via fines, etc., then the only options the state, and society has are either imprisonment, or allowing those people to ignore laws/social norms. Clearly some social norms (e.g. serious crimes) we aren't okay with ignoring, so it's really just a question of what the threshold is where we do something vs. allowing people to disregard said laws/norms.
> Personally I've never understood any justification for committing a person without their consent. The line between being committed and being extra judicially imprisoned seems indistinguishable to me.
Presumably the process to commit someone can involve the judiciary, so it wouldn't be extra-judicial.
Prison isn't for people that society finds inconvenient and, if on a jury, I hope you don't view it that way.
Prison is for those convicted of a crime by a jury of their peers. There must not only be a criminal law on the books, you must be found guilt by trial.
Involuntary committal involves no laws being broken and there is no jury. I don't know every detail of that process though I am familiar with the general flow, I know multiple people that work in related roles, and my understanding from them is that it is generally not down through a legal proceeding.
Juries are a just an implementation detail of the justice system used by Britain and some of its former colonies.
I'm talking at a higher level - I'm saying that conceptually, "inconvenience" ranges from mild offences to murder, and society has to decide where to draw some line for inconveniences that it will not permit. If someone is determined to re-offend, regardless of severity, the state's only choices are to either let them re-offend, or to use force to prevent it.
In the earlier discussion of involuntary commitment, there is often little or no judicial process offered at all. Its more akin to extra judicial detention than a criminal case.
Part of the surge of mass incarceration was that people who would have been hospitalized in an earlier time now get warehoused in a place that isn’t equipped to treat them.
What scares me about deinstitutionalization is that there are ways that people can ‘exit’ as in: move to the suburbs, drive instead of take public transportation, order a private taxi for your burrito instead of go to a restaurant. If public spaces can’t protect themselves we’ll have nothing but private spaces.
> Part of the surge of mass incarceration was that people who would have been hospitalized in an earlier time now get warehoused in a place that isn’t equipped to treat them.
Puts a different spin on the System of a Down lyrics, "The percentage of Americans in the prison system (prison system) has doubled since 1985" (Prison Song, Toxicity, 2001).
This further reinforces the other complaints (in the song) about drug offences landing people in jail, some of them from self-medicating a mental illness they can't or won't get treatment for
More fear mongering about the 'other'. Not immigrants or religous groups or racial groups this time, but unhoused and addicted people.
The dangerous people are the ones spreading fear - that leads to horrible things. I've had no problem with unhoused people who I am around almost every day. Why would I?
All the fear mongering is wrong. You have nothing to fear but fear itself.
> Example: the City has been trying to get rid of the RVs parked illegally on the streets, dumping their effluents and engine oil all over the City streets. To get these RVs off the streets, the City is spending $36M+ (and counting). So money can be found for the homeless, the RV dwelllers, etc. but not for the city's lawful residents and taxpayers.
I'd have to assume that the ones who are driving the political political pressure for this money to be spent as it is are the so-called "lawful residents and taxpayers"; I'm sure the groups you mention facing extra scrutiny would be happy for that money to go towards the buses instead. It's not hard to imagine that certain issues like RV parking get outsized attention pretty much for the exact same reason that the buses don't.
SF's budget doesn't contain $15B of money it can use for whatever it wants. Most of it isn't discretionary, either because of voter mandates or by federal/state government requirements and has to go to specific programs. A good chunk is actually city businesses (hospitals, airport, utility, port, etc.) which mostly break even.
SF was able to spend money trying to getting rid of RVs because it was living on emergency money from the state and shifting capital expenditure priorities around (capital expenditures costs are offset mostly by the asset you're buying, at least in the short term).
That emergency money is gone now, so now we're living in an era of budget cuts, though given SF's history, I full expect it to spend money recklessly and hope revenue turns around, but even they aren't so far gone to add $300M in operating expenditures to make MUNI free with no plan for a source of revenue to make up the difference.
The net revenue would be lower than $200M. There are substantial costs associated with ticket revenue collection, from the % payment gateways charge, the maintenance and replacement cost the devices and turnstiles hardware, all the software and people who have to manage and enforce the system.
The issue with SF (unlike Iowa city) is that free for all everybody is going to be harder sell to voters when there is large amount of out of city traffic -travelers and greater Bay Area residents who do not pay city taxes.
What is more realistic is extend subsidies to all residents of the city beyond the current programs for youth/seniors/homeless/low income etc.
SF Muni is literally so deep in a financial hole, service may be cut in half next summer if they don't pass a sizable spending measure (the last two both failed). SFMTA faces a deficit of about $320 million starting next year... and that will grow. The system has already been bailed out by the state. We now going to get a $750 million loan is just to keep the system functioning until the measure has a chance to pass.
This platitude of "Muni should be free" has no bearing on reality when the system is literally collapsing as we speak.
> That means, 5/6th of the budget is subsidized by the taxpayers of SF. There is no reason why Muni can't be free.
You'd still want to charge for congestion. Ie when a particular bus (or rather bus route) is reliably full at a particular time of the day, gradually raise prices until it's just below capacity.
Basically, you want to transport the maximum number of passengers while making it so that any single person who wants to get on the bus (at prevailing prices) still can.
Instead of a bespoke dynamic system that adjust prices dynamically, you might want to keep it simple and just have a simple peak / off-peak distinction.
If you add so many buses that there's no congestion at all during the worst rush hour, you'll have enormous extra capacity just uselessly sitting around the rest of the day.
Obviously you'd want both: charge for congestion, and use the price signals you get to help you decide where (and when) to add capacity.
Resources are limited, and buying yet another bus and hiring an extra bus driver just to shave the last tiny bit of congestion off Monday morning might be a noble ideal, but you might be better off using those funds to pay for another free school meal (or whatever other do-goodery is the best use of the marginal dollar).
> So money can be found for the homeless, the RV dwelllers, etc. but not for the city's lawful residents and taxpayers.
But it's those lawful residents and taxpayers paying for it if you make it free anyway. They're just paying through their taxes rather than through fares. So still all taxpayer money, just non-riding taxpayers subsidizing riding taxpayers. Why is that better?
In Brisbane, Australia they run a 6-month trial to make all public transport trips to be 50c (that includes buses, metro, ferries). It was so successful and widely loved that it was a no-brainier for it to be extended indefinitely
Kansas City added a single light rail line through downtown and made it, initially, free.
It has been so wildly popular, bringing happy Kansas Citians to the restaurants and clubs downtown that the business owners begged KC to keep it free.
Still free and I believe they are extending it.
I would love to see K.C. bring back some of the jazz nightlife that once charged downtown. (Though it might have been the availability of liquor there during Prohibition too.)
All I see in this thread are people saying it won't work and then people giving examples of it actually working quite well. The scientific method is telling us something here...
Yes, the scientific methods suggest that 99.9% of all systems and almost all of the very best highest performing systems have fares. 'Light rail' in the US are barley even transportation systems. At best they are property value plays by cities. Running a single line in a city full of cars isn't really interesting data.
And in other places they had light year that gets paid that had effects that were much the same.
Once you are talking about an actual working transportation system and not the occasional line here and there. Where it is actually real then there is a clear scientific question. Lets assume 500M to operate the system:
Should you A: Invest 500M in service improvements every year
Should you B: Invest 500M in giving away free transport
(The irony though of once having had a fantastic trolley system throughout Kansas City in the early part of the 20th Century and having ripped that all out by the time I was born.)
If this impedes progress in the future is this really good? We already have a good situation with fares, we should make it better - and when you look at the data (as opposed to what people say) it consistently shows that the main reason most people don't use transit more is lack of service and not the cost. Optimizing on cost helps a few really poor people (which everyone against this plan has already said we need some program to just help them), while it does nothing for everyone else who need service.
Or to put it a different way, it costs money to run transit. So what if we take the money you are proposing to add to cover the loss of fares and give it to the transit agency but retain fares: they could afford to add more service and I contend that this would do far more for ridership. (assuming we are smart about what service we add)
Between Green Lady Lounge, the Black Dolphin, the Phoenix, and a couple of cool spots on 18th and Vine, Kansas City’s jazz nightlife is becoming increasingly popular again among younger crowds. KC also just finished extending their street car system down past the Plaza to UMKC’s campus as well, mostly in preparation for hosting the World Cup.
I moved from Iowa City to Kansas City after college so I have been spoiled with public transit.
I think the cost saving will be realised by not having to expand the road network as quickly if they convince people to use public transport. The cost of land acquisition/resumption along with the improbability of widening some central bottlenecks like Coronation Drive, the SE Arterial and the hell-hole that is Hale Street.
Personally, the $1 commute from the Sunshine Coast has been very good. I occasionally drive in but the Bruce Hwy has been a constant process of widening each section as they barely keep up with the traffic increases.
I think what you will see is a lot more people moving out to residential areas north of Brisbane seeking cheaper housing as they can take advantage of the almost free travel. Especially if they eventually build the Rail/Light Rail through South Caloundra to Maroochydore.
While I have never lived in a place with free transit, I have lived in places where it was possible to board trains without passing through fare gates and certain busses through the rear exit. It is amazing how much faster boarding is. They probably face some lost fares, but the benefit of faster travel times outweigh the cost.
I also think that those criticizing free fares are disingenuous. None of those cities had problems with (insert stereotypical undesirable group) using public transit. If anything, there were fewer issues because everyone was more inclined to behave since there were more eyes on the trains and busses.
EDIT: it's also worth noting that collecting money costs money. That's especially noticeable when upgrading to (or to new) electronic fare systems, but it's also true when using things like tickets and cash. It probably doesn't mean such in the cities I've lived in ($3+ fares), but I'll bet it accounts for a lot more in cities that charge $0.50 or $1 fares.
IIRC the 50 cent fares allow them to still charge ridiculous fines for fare evasion, keeping the Queensland Rail rentacops in business.
Most non metro stations only have tap on pillars and no fare gates anyway, and I think the inner city fare gates that still exist are on the list for removal.
The 50 cents also allowed them to track the changing usage profile and justify it by the explosion of use. Its basically self reporting that you used the system, and the origin and destination of your trip. Otherwise they would need to install foot traffic counters at train and bus stations and still end up with incomplete data.
It wasnt just super popular, it was that the data showed such a dramatic uptick in usage, which carried over to numbers of cars removed from the roads etc.
Probably took 5 minutes out of my normal commute, and that's in reduced vehicle traffic, I don't use the system at all except to take my kiddo to the museum on weekends. Benefits tracked to all punters results in an absolutely untouchable policy change.
When you have the electronic ticketing system already in place like Brisbane it makes sense to use it to monitor usage, so you can precisely see each journey, and better plan scheduling and expansion. For example, you would be able to see how many people pass through the two CBD stations crossing the North/South divide in the network. The new Cross River Rail expansion for example will be the first line that doesn't pass through Central.
Bit of a bugbear of mine, but the cross river rail project is mostly a stopgap. Brisbane really needed standard gauge and double decker trains before it became so built up. We are already at trains per minute capacity for some of the inner city bridges, and duplication in the inner city is highly destructive. If we could increase the capacity of the vehicles themselves we would be way better off. But the cheap/compromise position is to just bypass the problem entirely.
Whats worse is that, theres a certain perspective, one of declining CBD use, where cross river rail makes a mountain of sense. But in that case we should be bypassing the CBD with a lot of room for expansion, ie, 8 lines worth of track. But this isnt being done either.
>When you have the electronic ticketing system already in place like Brisbane it makes sense to use it to monitor usage
This and being able to continue charging fines is why it was left in place 100%
> None of those cities had problems with (insert stereotypical undesirable group) using public transit.
Austin. Tried it and rolled it back.
It was before my time here but I’ve heard: Homeless camped on the buses. Bored teens hung out on the buses riding nowhere and making trouble. Bus drivers demanded the change back.
I’m an economist and YIMBY activist. Only 10% to 15% of the Austin bus system budget comes from fares. (Most is a 1% sales tax.) I’d love to make the buses free. But it has negatives.
> I also think that those criticizing free fares are disingenuous. None of those cities had problems with (insert stereotypical undesirable group) using public transit.
I’ve lived in two cities with free fare zones: Subsections of public transport where no fares are collected, but if you want to go outside of the zone you need to buy a ticket.
The free fare zones were far more likely to have people causing problems. It’s not just “undesirable groups”. It’s people stealing your stuff if you aren’t paying attention, stalking women, creating messes, or just harassing people who want to be left alone.
Then you’d leave the free fare zone and see almost none of that. It was night and day different. This was within the same city, same mode of transport. The only difference was that one vehicle had someone maybe checking your fare 1/10 times and writing a ticket if you didn’t have it, while the other you were guaranteed not to encounter anyone checking tickets and could ride as long as you wanted.
I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss anyone concerned about this. Unless you have sufficient enforcement to go along with it and the enforcers are empowered to deal with people who are causing problems, having free fares can be a real problem.
It was nice to not have to deal with ticket purchases when going to a sporting event or meeting up with friends at a bar, but this was mostly before apps came along anyway. I don’t go out as much now that I’m older but using the apps to buy tickets is trivially easy. Even the tickets by stations will accept tap to pay from phones making it much more convenient than my younger days.
> It’s not just “undesirable groups”. It’s people stealing your stuff if you aren’t paying attention, stalking women, creating messes, or just harassing people who want to be left alone.
This seems to be a symptom, not a cause. The free zone, let me guess, more densely populated, city center area, and the not free zone, a bit less urban? Smells like income disparity zoning.
I mean if you think about, doesn't it seem a bit off to suggest that the prevalence of crime would be affected by whether a bus is free or not? My instinct is to get further into why there's crime happening at all, on or off bus. Why does it happen there, and not e.g. here in Taipei? Or other places with tons of public transit going on and very low crime, like Japan? The PRC?
> This seems to be a symptom, not a cause. The free zone, let me guess, more densely populated, city center area, and the not free zone, a bit less urban?
The free fare zone was only included a subset of the city and only applied to certain modes of transportation.
> Smells like income disparity zoning.
Not really. I don’t see why it’s hard to believe that areas with no enforcement are a draw for people who want to e.g. ride a warm train than the areas with enforcement.
> I mean if you think about, doesn't it seem a bit off to suggest that the prevalence of crime would be affected by whether a bus is free or not?
No? It’s not just crime, it’s harassment, antisocial behavior, and other things that are not strictly crimes but you don’t want to be around. A lot of crimes are crimes of opportunity where someone strikes because they’re in the same place as you and see an opening. The more time they’re in the place, the more opportunities for those crimes.
> No? It’s not just crime, it’s harassment, antisocial behavior, and other things that are not strictly crimes but you don’t want to be around. A lot of crimes are crimes of opportunity where someone strikes because they’re in the same place as you and see an opening. The more time they’re in the place, the more opportunities for those crimes.
Isolating people from each other is a really dystopian "solution" to reduce crime and antisocial behavior. Things naturally tend to happen more when people come together – in both good and bad. The good usually outweighs the bad by a wide margin.
In most systems, fares just about cover the cost of collecting fares. They contribute little if anything to operating expenses. Their effect is to limit usage. That could be desirable, but usually not.
I've tried to calculate this for the New York City Metro, but they spend about $1 billion per year collecting $5 billion per year, out of a budget of $20 billion per year. Year so they would need to make up about $4 billion per year if they were to eliminate fare collection, or increase the budget by 20%.
In my mind it would be a no-brainer for all the benefits you would get from free service, but 20% increase in cost is not an easy sell - especially when a lot of people paying tax on it never go to NYC
While we should never expect public transit to be self funding removing fares removes the ability for transit funds to scale with ridership, there is a reason that farebox ratios are correlated with ridership.
It's self funding in places like Japan and Hong Kong, but these places also engage in value capture. Train services in these places are basically real estate companies with trains attached to them. They diversified by making train stations shopping malls.
In any case, cities can engage in value capture for public transportation. Just direct some of the property taxes collected directed to public transit. Even better would be some sort of LVT, ideally but not necessary 100% of the economic rent from land.
In any case, public transit should also engage in value capture on their own property. If they own a train station, they should consider building on top or adjacent to it spaces that they can then rent out to tenants. It's not only efficient but also serve the public and the local economy and making public transit more economical to run due to higher ridership.
NYC also has subway stations with intense commerce, e.g. the Columbus Circle, or some bits around Herald Square. As a regular user, I find this convenient.
Almost every smaller station shows ads on walls, too, and every train carriers ads inside.
I don't see why the subway specifically could not be self-sufficient, or even a profit center. Sadly, this is not so, because of very large expenses, not because of low revenue.
Brick and mortar shopping really seems to be struggling in the US since covid, though. It’s possible some transit systems could add malls above some of their stations, but a lot of cities still have persistently high retail vacancies, and even suburban malls aren’t what they were a few decades ago.
And urban malls and chain stores are frankly often depressing — awkward layouts translated imperfectly from suburban sprawl, along with obviously underpaid and burned out staff.
Selling food works well though. I won't mind grabbing some bagels right past the turnstiles, especially if it means not standing by a food truck outside when it's cold and drizzling.
What do you mean by employer subsidy here? Are you referring to the system where employers reimburse the costs of transit fees for commutes?
Many companies in Tokyo prevent their employees from commuting by car (legally commute is covered by workers comp insurance, and many companies do not elect the more expensive car coverage option) - so even in the absence of workers paying for the commute, public transit (or bike/walk) would be the only realistic option.
> They diversified by making train stations shopping malls.
Like airports in America. We should pursue a similar path for our rail stations and, frankly, ensure they are heading toward locations that are walkable and connected.
Sure, yet it also established a double standard. In my neck of the woods, most busses operate on municipal roads. Municipal roads are funded by municipal taxes, and the municipality does not have the right to charge fuel taxes. The revenue that they collect from drivers is from parking and parking permits in a tiny fraction of the city, as well as property taxes on the low value land used for parking lots. City council would face a bloodbath if they tried to increase revenues for road maintenance directly from road users. Never mind asking those users cover the cost of appropriating land and new road construction, which is being driven by the excessive use of vehicles that are occupied by one or two people. Yet transit users are typically expected to fund about half of transit operations. If they're lucky, the provincial or federal government will throw some money their way for new busses.
It's hard to draw a direct comparison because people who never drive still benefit significantly from the existence of the roads. It might be possible to drill down far enough so that it was charged directly to every use case for the road, but I bet it would end up in about the same place in the end but with a lot more bureaucracy.
Perhaps, but with more transit options that means fewer people on the road which is good for those who have 2+ children to lug around.
On a side note we should drop the public bit of this because it implies a bus is “publicly funded” but highways aren’t. Both are subsidized by the taxpayer.
Why are you equating busses to roads and not cars? Cars are not subsidized and in fact car-related taxes (vehicle sales, gas tax, yearly registration fees, in some cases tolls) have historically covered the majority of roadway infrastructure costs. Without car related taxes, we would absolutely need to charge bus fees to subsidize roadway costs, and they would probably need to be pretty steep.
Most states fail to collect enough in user fees to fully provide for roadway spending. This necessitates transfers from general funds or other revenue sources that are unrelated to road use to pay for road construction and maintenance.
Only three states—Delaware, Montana, and New Jersey—raise enough revenue to fully cover their highway spending. The remaining 47 states and the District of Columbia must make up the difference with tax revenues from other sources.
The states that raise the lowest proportion of their highway funds from transportation-related sources are Alaska (19.4 percent) and North Dakota (35.1 percent), both states which rely heavily on revenue from severance taxes.
that's about what I expected. And that's not even including sales tax from car purchases, and maintenance related spending. Suffice to say, without cars, a year bus pass would need to run ~ however much the average person spends per year on all car related taxes.
Well it wouldn’t because we wouldn’t have as many people driving cars, so there wouldn’t need to be as many roads so costs would be much lower.
In Ohio we just spend $2bn on about 2 miles of road to effectively temporarily ease congestion. That’s $2bn paid for by taxpayers regardless of how it’s paid, that we didn’t necessarily need to spend.
I’d also like to add, yes that “bus ticket” (I’m no fan of busses for short term travel) might be a little more expensive but consumer costs overall would’ve likely to go down. Why? Well in addition to already paying for highway infrastructure you’re paying $30,000, $50,000,
&c . on a vehicle, plus insurance, gas, repairs, tires, maintenance, interest on loans, &c. So while I think it’s hard to compare apples to apples, I think it’s good to have this information in mind as well when discussing this topic broadly.
Thanks. Yea also not accounting for other social costs - obesity, teen deaths, first responders and police spending time rescuing people who are maimed in car crashes.
There are benefits too and all, just saying we don’t really have a full cost readily available for comparison because it’s hard to measure, never mind the literal dollars and cents that go into funding.
> On a side note we should drop the public bit of this because it implies a bus is “publicly funded” but highways aren’t. Both are subsidized by the taxpayer.
Arguably, neither of them should be. Give poor people money, instead of giving free highway access (and bus transit) to rich and poor alike. Rich people don't need our help, and poor people would rather have the money to spend as they wish instead of other people deciding for them what alms they should consume.
Individual cars have worse externalities than busses, so that means we should tax them more than busses. Though I suspect once drivers of cars and busses are paying non-subsidised prices for road access and fuel, busses will naturally look better in comparison, no extra tax differential needed.
The poor I want to help the most are not mentally able to handle money. I know someone who gave money to 'nigerain prince' scams several times - a nice guy but he has no idea scams exist even after that.
Not exactly because as soon as you realize it doesn't solve the most important problems the a side effect of giving to well-off people as well becomes easier to argue against as well. If we need to identify those who cannot handle money then we may as well use that same effort to identify who doesn't need help in the first place. Not that your point doesn't stand, but it isn't as powerful.
Note that I don't know how to identify people who cannot handle money. I know individuals, but how to you fairly do this in a way that doesn't get abused or abuse someone - both have been major problems with every plan to help the poor in the past.
> Note that I don't know how to identify people who cannot handle money. I know individuals, but how to you fairly do this in a way that doesn't get abused or abuse someone - both have been major problems with every plan to help the poor in the past.
Welfare (nor any other undertaking) doesn't have to be perfect. Good enough is good enough. And you can always optimise over time, as you learn. There's plenty of programmes out in the real world and throughout history to learn from: the good programmes as examples to perhaps imitate, the bad programmes as illustrations of what to avoid.
> If we need to identify those who cannot handle money then we may as well use that same effort to identify who doesn't need help in the first place.
Isn't that perfectly compatible with what I'm suggesting? (Though I'm not quite sure they are actually the same kind of effort. Looking at eg people's taxable income is rather different from judging their mental state.)
I'm making two points:
(A) Don't bother giving welfare to the well-off.
(B) Prefer cash payments over in-kind provision, where possible.
You convinced me to add the 'where possible' clause, because there are some cases were people can't handle money. Though I hold that these spendthrifts should be dealt with as a special case, and not be the default template for how we treat everyone else.
> You convinced me to add the 'where possible' clause, because there are some cases were people can't handle money.
I'm not really in favor of or against UBI, but I think that your assessment here isn't quite right. It's not that there are some cases where people can't handle money, it's actually the norm that people can't handle money, at least in America. And when you expand your scope to include folks with steady jobs and such and "can" handle money, they don't really make enough money such that their better handling of money will make a difference either. UBI kind of rests on this assumption that people will "spend their money wisely" or spend their money efficiently - but people will spend their money in obviously stupid ways and then we'll deal with the consequences anyway because as a society we are not willing to let people die on the street. To be fair, not all who would make use of UBI would do so in a poor fashion, and like you said don't let perfect become the enemy of good.
Most people who are competent and kind enough to look at these kinds of problems and want to provide a great solution for them out of the kindness of their heart, in my estimation, just do not have experience dealing with the target population and understanding the true limitations of just giving a little bit of help.
If you grew up in a roughly middle class environment, went to college afterward, etc. and you didn't know any crackheads in your family, you probably should stay far away from trying to find solutions for these problems because you're just going to wind up frustrated and wrong about worthwhile solutions for the rest of your life which will distract anyone from actually making progress. I'm not suggesting this about you or anything, just speaking broadly. Most of the time people working on these issues are like product managers who just care about what the data says instead of having a really good intuition for the "customer" or the "problem".
Back to UBI itself I actually think it should go to everyone, because at the end of the day those who are high earners are just going to net out paying for it, and it'll be simpler to administer if "everyone gets it" and there's less room to complain about it and less hand-wringing and adjustments for whatever excuse people come up with for who gets some and who gets more. If everyone gets it, there's much less arguing about that stuff.
The best part about a potential UBI implementation is that we can replace all of the government workers administering and declaring who is eligible for benefits whether that's SNAP or Welfare and one dude can be sitting at home and push the big red "send checks" button with an offshore team in India in case that guy is too drunk to do his job.
Maybe just providing free healthcare and dental care, job training and education, and a sack of fresh produce is the way to go too. I'm not sure.
I'm not sure why you bring up UBI? Government welfare for poor people in eg Germany (and many other countries) is mostly handed out as money, but it's not a UBI. Whether a UBI is a good idea is indeed a wholly separate discussion.
> If you grew up in a roughly middle class environment, went to college afterward, etc. and you didn't know any crackheads in your family, you probably should stay far away from trying to find solutions for these problems because you're just going to wind up frustrated and wrong about worthwhile solutions for the rest of your life which will distract anyone from actually making progress.
I grew up on welfare in the place formerly known as East Germany. Bleak times. Not sure that will get me past the gate you are keeping here.
(As late as 2006 a government spokesman warned foreign football fans coming for the world cup of no-go areas that they should avoid, if they want to survive. Compared to the 1990s, the late 2000s were the Good Times.)
> Back to UBI itself I actually think it should go to everyone, because at the end of the day those who are high earners are just going to net out paying for it, and it'll be simpler to administer if "everyone gets it" and there's less room to complain about it and less hand-wringing and adjustments for whatever excuse people come up with for who gets some and who gets more. If everyone gets it, there's much less arguing about that stuff.
Someone has to pay the taxes to finance the redistribution. The average person can't get more out of the system than they pay in (by definition of how averaging works).
I would suggest to pay attention to the net effective marginal tax you charge people across the spectrum of incomes. Basically, for every level of income ask: taking account of welfare phase-outs and marginal income tax, how many cents of net income would a person get for an extra dollar in gross income?
This effective marginal tax rate matters a lot more than how you split the rate between welfare phase-outs and other taxes. Yes, for simplicity you could have no welfare phase-outs (aka UBI) and create the whole shape of the taxation graph simply with progressive income tax rates. Or you could merge both systems, and call your UBI a negative income tax.
In any case, what you want to really avoid are sudden cliffs, where an extra dollar in gross income costs you more than a dollar in net income. And ideally, you also want to avoid unduly high marginal rates (even if they are still below 100%) from phasing out multiple, uncoordinated welfare payments.
> The best part about a potential UBI implementation is that we can replace all of the government workers administering and declaring who is eligible for benefits whether that's SNAP or Welfare and one dude can be sitting at home and push the big red "send checks" button with an offshore team in India in case that guy is too drunk to do his job.
Well, as described above at the moment we have (at least) two arms of the government that assess how much you earn: the tax people and the welfare people. My suggestion would be to streamline that into one organisation. At least, if you want to keep an income tax around at all.
In the American context that's the generally agreed upon "alternative". There's no appetite for, say, all of the existing welfare programs and also handing out cash. I don't think there's a meaningful distinction between "handing out cash" and "UBI", but of course I want to acknowledge that cash paid or services rendered (healthcare, etc.) can be a mix in an overall scheme and that UBI typically refers to a specific program. To me it's all the same thing with just a mix of how you want to do it but it's not fair of me to suggest that you think of it the same way so I apologize for that.
> Not sure that will get me past the gate you are keeping here.
If you haven't personally deal with or lived with crackheads, homeless, hustlers, etc. you have little to no insight into how to effectively work with people who are experiencing those issues or lifestyle challenges and you just make the problem worse in general while also wasting money.
It's not gatekeeping to suggest one must have more experience with something in order to make informed decisions or create helpful and fair programs. But if you want to call that gatekeeping I'm happy to gate-keep.
Last Tuesday I called the local police because a homeless guy was standing on the side of the road with a good chunk (the size of an average hand or so) of his leg missing, out in the rain at night, in 40 degree weather. He's not doing that because he just needs some UBI or healthcare, and there's no clinic or pamphlet that will "fix" that person's problems.
The ivory tower will tell you we just need to get that person help, a safe place to live, etc. but they're wrong. I'm sure you see a lot of that in Germany too? What do you guys usually do when you see a homeless person in such circumstances? Do you give the money and does that fix the issues?
> Someone has to pay the taxes to finance the redistribution. The average person can't get more out of the system than they pay in (by definition of how averaging works).
That doesn't make any sense at all. Plenty of people in the United States at least get more than they pay in, even if it's not exactly a cash reimbursement. Not that I have a problem with that.
> In any case, what you want to really avoid are sudden cliffs, where an extra dollar in gross income costs you more than a dollar in net income. And ideally, you also want to avoid unduly high marginal rates (even if they are still below 100%) from phasing out multiple, uncoordinated welfare payments.
Right and we can just avoid those by not having restrictions on the income. It doesn't matter if Bill Gates gets a $2,000 UBI check, he's going to more than make up for it in overall taxes (ideally, unfortunately our government is all too happy to tax anyone but the ultra wealthy). I think the same is true for many other folks too and don't think it's a worthwhile concern.
but not completely - and this is only even talking about maintenance. The initial investment is absolutely not "paid for", because the economic returns from them are privatized, and the tax collection of those private benefits aren't really up to par imho. If it was a private business who did this road/highway investment, they'd be losing money (due to the cost of capital, and the lack of returns from collected tolls/taxes, not to mention the maintenance outlay that comes as a big lumpsum).
> In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good)[1] is a commodity, product or service that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous [...]
That's because roads are rather excludable (see toll roads), and if you've ever been in a traffic jam, you'll notice that road use is rivalrous.
When I had a solar-charged EV, taking transit to SF only made sense if I was going by myself and didn't need to do any transfers. Any additional people or modes and it was always better to drive.
This is misleading. How far is your drive from home to your destination in SF? I bet the total cost of ownership per kilometer driven far exceeds the BART fare.
Like many households, they probably have a car already for other reasons.
To me this is big reason why transit has to be basically free to attract riders. It has to compete with marginal cost per kilometer of private car use, not total cost.
Marginal cost of driving is much higher than people think, because they don't count depreciation, maintenance, and insurance. There's a reason the IRS reimbursement rate is $0.70/mi.
True, though it depends quite a lot on the car. If you're driving a second-hand civic or prius, the marginal cost per mile will be much lower than a Mini or a truck. I don't know what it's like for EVs.
Where I live and with what I drive, once there is a single passenger, the car breaks even on the milage. But parking can shift things back in favor of public transit. It's close enough that traffic is always the deciding factor for which mode I take.
If transit were free, I would probably just take it most of the time.
This. No matter what is said to drivers in HN (and the "Real World"), they always have a good reason to drive instead of take transit. No worries about them. We, transit riders, can be productive (read, work, sleep, etc.) during our commutes.
Very much so. When I was younger I assumed fares were for the cost of the public transport, but after following some local budgeting discussions I was stunned by how little the fares covered operating costs.
Small amounts of cost sharing are a useful technique for incentivizing people to make wise decisions in general, so there’s some value in having token small fares. It’s the same difference that shows up when you list something for $10 in your local classifieds as opposed to listing it as FREE. Most people who use classifieds learn early on that listing things for free is just asking for people to waste your time, but listing for any price at all seems to make people care a little more and put some thought into their decisions. I’ve often given things away for free after listing them for small amounts in classifieds because it filters for people who are less likely to waste your time.
That ignores the massive amount of parking and highway subsidies that make the car-first model in the US viable at all. The absurd amount of space given away for free (or below value) in the city to support cars is actually insane. Its just not properly account for.
In a sane world you would either not have any public parking spots, or parking spots that cost so much that about 10-20% of them are empty, and you would have a road use tax (like Singapore).
And American transit systems are uniquely bad at fare recovery because they are just uniquely bad at everything.
Fares income isn't insubstantial -- just as an example I'm familiar with, King County Metro (Seattle area) was ~33% funded by fares before Covid (which destroyed both ridership and percent non-stealing riders). It is material; not "token."
More or less the same thing as patio11's "pathological customers" premise[0]. People who are unwilling to pay a few dollars to ride the bus tend to be extraordinarily antisocial in other ways. Public transit is for the masses; it's not a homeless shelter.
"While private passenger vehicles contribute 90% of the mileage in the U.S. transportation sector, their emissions share is only 58%. The remaining emissions come from public transit (27%) and other modes including airplanes (13%)."
Diving in, that research is less against public transport in general, more about how the US is just not very good at it:
Our measure of environmental performance is a transit agency's average carbon dioxide emissions per passenger-mile or vehicle-mile.
During the period of analysis, the sector's carbon dioxide emissions declined by 12.8%, while vehicle-miles travelled increased by 7.1% and passenger-miles increased by 10.5%.
Thus, the emissions intensity of public transit has shrunk since 2002 using both measures.
Yet, compared with public transit emissions in the United Kingdom and Germany, we document that the U.S. bus fleets had the highest carbon emissions per mile and the smallest efficiency progress.
ie. US public transport was inefficient and polluting to begin with, and while it improved somewhat when a prior administration finally applied some funding to the task, US public transport stills woefully lags in comparison about the glone.
strong towns is not honest about it though. Urban areas have been maintaining roads for a long time. They seem to think that if you ammortize a road over 20 year you have to replace it in year 21 but most roads are good for 40+ years
Models are typically smaller scale/scope... So a "real urban center" could probably easily provide service that smaller cities can't.
As to why Iowa City doesn't run on Sundays and Federal Holidays:
The University is about half the population of the city. The University runs a separate "Cambus" system[1] (that the community can also use) and after-hours routes for students[2].
We're also still in relatively early days of finding out how Iowa City residents use public transit when there's no barrier. For instance, they stopped running the downtown shuttle and reduced the number of stops downtown[3] because downtown is relatively dense, walkable, and student-heavy (i.e. mostly young, healthy, ambulatory people) and served by the University.
There's also a growing interest in adding service to nearby towns and adding Sunday service, even if it's in a limited capacity.
Everybody loves to complain about their own city, but compare it to US cities and its fine. I just listed a bunch of European cities that I have visited and seemed fine. My point is that if you want to 'learn' there are lots of places that you can take a look at.
Are about being serious? Its not 'Anti-American' to point out basic facts that literally everybody knows.
Let's just look at some basic comparison between Iowa City and my own city of the same population (mine is somewhat larger in metro city):
about 1.05 million trips
about 50.1 million trips
Its not even close. Why would you look at some tiny US city that doesn't even have actually good results if you compare it to anybody even halfway competent. Why not look for evidence in systems that are better by LITERALLY EVERY METRIC?
That's the basic issue with looking to the US cities for evidence. Their baseline is so pathetic that 'improvements' isn't really that significant.
So maybe its time to start giving a fuck, and not cherry-picking examples to confirm your bias. Actually learn from the systems that achieve the best results.
Iowa City is in Johnson County. A 2024 point-in-time count of the chronic homeless population--the highly visible population noticeably encountered in public spaces--in Johnson and Washington Counties combined is less than 200 people. See https://opportunityiowa.gov/media/5390/download?inline#page=... There are also only 13 bus routes, and it's a college town with a significant percentage of price-sensitive student ridership (i.e. highly elastic demand) that either wouldn't qualify or wouldn't bother applying for fare subsidies or passes (common in major metro regions). The context is incomparable to major coastal cities.
We know free transit works in many cases. There are plenty of examples. But it's rare to compare and contrast the contexts. (But, see, e.g., this 2012 National Academy of Sciences report: https://cvtdbus.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/2012-07-TCRP-...) It's far easier to promote free transit than it is to address underlying issues, like regulatory barriers to housing production and infrastructure projects, that limit organic improvements to social welfare and which are likely to cause free transit to fail long-term in large, diverse metro areas.
I live there in that city. There are hardly any homeless at all here. Not like other cities at least. I could see it being a major problem in other places.
It does seem that it should be possible to offer "free buses" without having to also offer "free hotels inside of the free buses". As an example, I can go to a local store and experience free parking or go to my nearby town and park for free downtown. I can't, however, park and sleep overnight in my car in that shopping centre or in that town.
Who’s supposed to enforce it? Is the driver supposed to pull over and wake up a sleeping person who has a small but real chance of stabbing them? Any situation where they call the police could be quite a hassle for the other passengers.
Because you can’t make a subjective judgement with regard to the worthiness of a particular passenger of a public resource. A car on private property eventually becomes trespassing.
Can you please not post in the flamewar style here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are?
It's always possible to make your substantive points thoughtfully, so please do that instead. You may not owe people who are wrong about use of buses by the homeless better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
> also offer "free hotels inside of the free buses".
Is the inciting flamewar style spark. There is nothing in the article about this specific part. Is it not bad faith argument to insist that all buses every where are used as hotels just because of a few bad experiences? The way the commenter discusses all homeless as either dangerous, addicted drugs, smelly, etc. is incredibly flamewar intending to push stigma on the topic.
If the people who are pushing unfound truths can’t be called out for it, then I guess the FUD spreaders win. The community doesn’t need me. Please scramble this username to something random. I’m out.
I hear you that there was a provocation in that bit. But it's a matter of degree. From my point of view, the GP comment may have been wrong and even bad (let's assume that's so), but by itself that doesn't break the site guidelines. People are allowed to be wrong in comments; it's up to the community to debate what's right vs. wrong and sort that out.
The way to respond to wrong comments is to refute them with better arguments and better information. This can be done without breaking the site guidelines. Of course there are downsides to this approach—it's a lot more time-consuming to patiently refute wrongness than to post it in the first place. But the downsides of breaking the site guidelines are much greater—that path basically leads to conflagration, and we'd like to avoid having this place burn to a crisp. Scorched earth is not interesting (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
I would be in favour of (for example) someone who is attempting to “reside” on a bus being referred to a social worker that then sees to it the person ends up referred to an appropriate shelter.
We are not. I don’t believe homeless people are “using the bus as a hotel” because I actually ride buses unlike the commenter who is afraid and probably has never volunteered or talked to someone less fortunate in their community in their life.
Their username is literally trollbridge! I mean come on.
Last time I visited New York I was lucky to have a companion who knew all the ways to get around including the free bus lines. The people using these buses were no different from those using buses and other public transportation that charged fares.
Ipso facto, eliminating fare collection eliminates crime. Fare evasion as a crime amounts to make-work for cops. Not all value, and often least of all value in public goods, is derived from charging at the point of use.
Everyone, but especially the working poor deserve a civilized way to get to work. Without screaming, smelly, sleeping, druggies taking up the seats. Or worse.
Bus drivers don't seem too excited to enforce the fare either. They're not exactly law enforcement; it might be dangerous and it would delay everyone else on the bus.
This is just an anecdote, but I got the sense from living in North Liberty, near Iowa City, that the police didn't have much to do. That is, I was pulled over for minor things like going 5 over the speed limit and running a yellow light (when I could have conceivably stopped).
So when I see stories like this I compare it to people suggesting we adopt a Scandinavian public school policy, it worked for them why not us, proposal.
Whenever I hear about this criticism of free public transit I always wonder why the question isn't "how do we keep homeless people from living on our busses" and is instead "why don't these homeless people have some place to live that isn't a bus?"
> I always wonder why the question isn't "how do we keep homeless people from living on our busses"
Similar questions get asked often enough. The problem is that there aren't any easy answers or solutions. Cities have tried different things but none that appear to work for medium to large sized cities.
If you see a city employ a workable solution that can used as a model and be deployed everywhere, that would be awesome.
>Whenever I hear about this criticism of free public transit I always wonder why the question isn't "how do we keep homeless people from living on our busses" and is instead "why don't these homeless people have some place to live that isn't a bus?"
Exactly. and asking the wrong question is nothing new either. there were plenty of folks wondering aloud about how to "get rid of" the homeless people back in the 1980s in NYC (then the homeless population there was ~50,000).
Usually it was some sort of "arrest/detain them all, then reroute them to shelters." The shelters being places where they can be warehoused and victimized over and over again without disturbing the normies or, heaven forfend, the tourists!
Only once did I see the right question being asked. I've searched and searched but have been unable to find the article online. It's an op-ed piece from the Village Voice, circa 1987 by Nat Hentoff or Dan Ridgeway entitled" What Do Homeless People Want?"
Fortunately the question posed in the title is answered in the very first sentence of the body: "Homes, mostly."
Why is it that we're not asking (or acting upon the obvious answers to) the right questions? That's not really rhetorical, although the answers will likely be pretty ugly.
Here in the US we can* do better, and we should do better. This is not a new issue that requires new solutions. Give homeless people, you know, homes.
But that's evil and wrong and absolutely Stalinism that will end up with tens of millions dead, right? Please.
I don't live in Iowa City but do live in Iowa; the (visible) homelessness population is still nearly zero. I have to imagine that anyone who finds themselves homeless for long enough will eventually find a way to move indoors (couch surfing, shelters) and become less visible or, if possible, leave the state entirely for warmer climes. Winters just aren't survivable here for the "traditional" homelessness we think of when we envision camps of people in California metros.
There's nothing "made up" about it. It actually happens. There are areas of this country with endemic homelessness and absolutely no strategy to address it. So, you get the obvious:
Yeah but what are the actual problems? It shouldn’t be a crime to not have a house. We should probably focus on actual problems like peeing or being intoxicated on the bus which are the actual harms.
Falling asleep on a bus is a great way to get victimized. The homeless are most likely to be victimized by other homeless. It almost never gets reported to the police.
It's not a shelter and it's not meant to be converted into one. To me it's an indication of an overworked and failing system that leaves people in bad situations because it has nowhere else for them to go.
Sure, you could argue that because there's currently no obvious major problems, that you could just leave it as is and be entirely unconcerned with it, or even go so far as to suggest that anyone who does want to fix it is doing so in bad faith. I think that's cruel and lazy.
The actual problem? These people need _real_ shelter.
Whilst it's not a crime not to have a house, providing housing via free buses is a very poor way to address people who don't have houses, and it has an unfortunate side effect of pushing people who would otherwise use public transportation away from using it.
You see this in public libraries in major cities. They're open to everyone, so they become shelters of last resort for homeless folks. The large presence of homeless people discourages the public at-large from using the library as a library. That in turn weakens the political will to continue funding libraries.
I live in an area where the homeless by and large are well served (lots of halfway houses), so despite being a generally impoverished area in terms of bottom quintile of income or percent of population on food stamps and so forth, public facilities like buses and libraries get to be used for their intended purpose.
A library levy recently passed despite being in a deep-red political jurisdiction. If families couldn’t use the library without contending with people using it as a residential facility, it wouldn’t have passed.
It must not have anything to do with free fares, then, so it seems like an irrelevant thing to bring up here. There are no major west coast cities with free buses.
Homeless already often get access to free or cheap passes, often that allow unlimited rides.
Insisting that we charge everyone a bus fare because we think otherwise it might make it eaier to homeless people to use the bus is not only uninformed, but also heartless.
If you have problems with homeless people on buses, then figure out why those people aren't in a better shelter and solve that problem.
which is all low income housing on top of a conference center with maybe 1/4 of the units for people who had been unhoused. I think most of the people there are not criminally minded and keep to themselves but there are a few people there who are starting fires, dealing drugs, and causing damage. (Note a few windows in that image are busted out) Many homeless people have dogs that are important to them and wouldn’t be housed if they couldn’t bring their dogs, but… last year they had an outbreak of parovirus because dogs were having puppies and the puppies weren’t getting shots. A friend of mine got bit by a dog across the street from that place and thought it belonged to someone who lived there.
Some of it is people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder can be almost impossible to live with if they aren’t getting treatment and I’m worried that deinstitutionalization will have a even more profoundly negative legacy seen 50 years from now than it already does. Not least, a 20 year old today spent many years of their life in a classroom where a ‘special’ kid sucked all the air out of the room and will probably be highly receptive to the notion that if we ‘get rid’ of 5% of people we can live in a utopia. If being in public means being in a space dominated by someone screaming at the demons they hallucinated then people will move to the suburbs instead of the downtown, they will not support public transit, they will order a private taxi for their burrito instead of eating out. They’ll retreat to Facebook.
I didn't claim it would be easy. I do claim that it will be more effective than pretending that charging people to get on the bus will have any real impact.
Alternate institutions that turn the 5% into productive members (but not necessarily CEOs) would probably get Lasch's stamp of approval)
EDIT to atone for the snark:
Good candidates for such alt institutions already exist; "just" need to test their policies on an expanded student body. Bonus, some (myself included?) consider these "conservative":
U.S school admin acted like the kind of "manager" who judges you by the lines of code you produce and the number of commits you make. DOD school admin were the kind of people who judge you by the impact you made.
What do you mean made-up problem? This is an extremely common problem in many areas. Sketchy characters will definitely stay on the bus and create unsafe environments for the bus driver and the customer unless there are systems in place.
They're not, and it's not really an HN thing to respond like you did. The guidelines ask you to assume best intent and engage in good faith.
Here good faith curiosity would have led you to where peer replies are pointing you: that free transit in big metros tends to come with loitering issues, and if they become too extreme, it can make the transit system pretty inhospitable and uninviting for the families and working people meant to be using it, undermining the purpose of making it free.
It's a genuine challenge that metros of a certain scale need to address, although the OP is maybe (or maybe not) wrong in assuming that it would be an issue in a fairly small/high-trust college metro like Iowa City. But, in best interpretation of their comment, that's why they were asking it as a question.
So you advocate for executing all homeless? Thats more then 800,000 people.. What about homeless adjacent to? If you dont earn more then the median income what we get to enter you into some sort of hunger games elimination match?
>So you advocate for executing all homeless? Thats more then 800,000 people.. What about homeless adjacent to? If you dont earn more then the median income what we get to enter you into some sort of hunger games elimination match?
Absolutely! But don't stop there! There are billions of useless subhumans out there who require a final solution[0] .
Kill those subhuman scum dead! Hell we should just set up gas chambers, that would be even cheaper than bullets, guns and people to shoot them!
That's a great suggestion, westpfelia!
Yes. We should kill every undesirable. The real trick is figuring out who decides which people are undesirable. You wouldn't want to be considered "undesirable" would you? That could be dangerous and unhealthy (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).
[0] Poe's Law[1] strikes again, eh? I'm tripling down on it as you seem pretty gullible. It's almost a shame I'm copping to the satire. Heck you might start foaming at the mouth and try to doxx me. Calm down, chief! You're gonna give yourself an MI.
Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture which says that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views.
Homeless people aren’t living in the bus. Cool your stigmas. It’s weird your biggest concern is the people who need the most help. Life must be pretty good for you to attack those in need.
I did for a year in DC. There were some folks who were struggling - talking to themselves, intoxicated, fragrant. I sort of liked it. Made me feel alive.
At the IMF suggested rate of €65 per tonne of CO2, a liter of fuel that produces 2.3 kg CO2 would cost €0.15 per liter, while European excise taxes on fuel average around €0.55.
Irish Rail wants to charge me €15-€20 for a single trip from Wexford to Dublin, a 150km trip that would cost roughly €5 when taking my EV and can be an hour quicker with nice traffic. Buses aren't much better.
Sure, parking and wear/tear on my car needs to be factored in, but the moment I'm not travelling alone, the public transport costs are completely blown out the water. A trip to the big city for me and my wife will be €60 when taking the train, and with the car it will be about €20-€30 depending on where I park.
It's crazy frustrating, because I would LOVE to take public transport more.
Not only that, it can be infeasible for a single-passenger as well. There's only the train available here, and I need to be ~400km away every couple months. Most of the time tickets are ~40€, but sometimes they're 200€+ one-way, even if you book weeks in advance. It makes it infeasible to plan anything when prices may fluctuate so wildly.
As a comparison, my 2009 diesel gets me there at around 4,7L/100km, but let's round it to 5, at average cost of fuel 1,65€/L that's 33€, for a single passenger, and I can leave whenever I want, have any sort of holdup and just go.
In my country, the elderly used to ride for free on busses and trams. 15 years ago I was involved in this problem where some decided to get on a bus or tram in the morning, go back and forth all day, bring a lunchbox, and go home just in time for the favorite soap series. They got free heating and some social contact.
It turned out, in my region, about 1/3 of public transport capacity was lost on them on peak hours. Also, some decided a specific seat was 'theirs' and started verbally abusing 'seat thiefs', throwing their stuff around, or even hitting them with canes. They also drove everyone bonkers by begging drivers to speed up or change routes so they would be home in time for their favorite soap series.
At the time, not much was done about it. The busses and trams forced everyone off at the terminus, made a round, enforced being empty while pausing a bit, and then the elderly were allowed back on, but at least places got shuffled and others got a chance for a seat. There was great gnashing of teeth about this decision.
I still feel double about it. It is very sad how this was a great life quality improvement for these people, but public transport is not the right medium for fixing this.
In a country like the US there are many opportunities like this to improve the overall status but other than small hyper local changes nothing will happen at a large scale because the powers be will not let it happen.
Problem is politcians and aspiring politicians/media influencers have figured out that the money is not in solving problems but keeping it in the news and agitating people. They will never do anything to solve problems but keep throwing wrenches and never let it be solved. Well, if it’s solved they need to find a new problem, worse still, what if people now expect things to be actually solved!
I read an old study that claimed driving a mile cost society 20 cents and cycling a mile had 20 cents of societal benefits.
I'd imagine public transport is similar so we should move the Overton window towards bus and train tickets entering you into a lottery funded by charging cars for entry to, and for parking in, downtown areas.
I seriously long for a free transit solution in my city, Memphis. We already pay for 90% of the operating cost anyway via various taxes, and fareboxes frequently cost more than they bring in. If I am a citizen paying property taxes in the city, why charge me $1.75 to hop on a bus?
However- it shouldnt be simply "free".. it should be "free with a pass, which is free" and a pass is easy to get, tied to your ID, and easy to revoke. No pass? thats fine, pay the $3 to ride. bus driver yanked your pass because you were peeing on the seat or intimidating other riders? You can ride again, for $3. Concerned about security or privacy? No problem, Pay $3.
Before the majority of law abiding citizens and travelers, passes are easy and free to get.
Fares end up being a trade off between service area and ridership. Eliminating fares tends to mean cuts to service for the same budget, so your service area would drop. Alternatively, having fares will allow for some more service, to cover more area but some people might not ride. Becomes dependent then on the goals of the transit system.
Moving from Iowa City to Kansas City I can say that free public transit works quite well. In Iowa City the campus bus system (Cambus) has all of its busses operated by students who go out and get their CDL and get great job experience, on top of it being one of the highest paid campus jobs for students.
Kansas City’s street car system is an incredible testament to this as well. It’s clean, safe, and for the most part quite efficient. And with its recent extension down to UMKC’s campus it’s now a viable transportation method for a lot of people in the heart of Kansas City. Keeping it clean and safe after more than doubling the size of its route might be a bigger lift now, but as long as the city sticks with it post-World Cup I see it continuing to grow.
The MVTA in Minnesota operates with 90% subsidies, so only 10% of revenue is from fares.
It feels like there could be some societal benefit to similarly reducing the number of busses and just making them free. (Today most busses are only at 10-30% capacity). This seems to support that idea.
> ... It feels like there could be some societal benefit to similarly reducing the number of busses and just making them free. (Today most busses are only at 10-30% capacity). ...
Public transit systems need to consider a lot of trade offs when they plan how to use the resources they have.
Optimizing for cost like this can make the busses less practical to use and less attractive to potential riders.
If a bus stop is only visited by a bus once an hour, then the average amount of time someone needs to wait for a bus to visit that bus stop is 30 minutes (assuming a uniform distribution for when that person arrives at the bus stop). If the bus stop is visited by a bus every 20 minutes, then that person would only need to wait at that bus stop for an average of 10 minutes.
The average time of a trip on this bus will be roughly equal to: the time to walk to the bus stop + the time spent waiting for the bus + the time the bus takes to reach the closest stop to the destination + the time to walk to the destination.
From that, reducing the number of busses that visit that bus stop increases the average amount of time for trips which originate from that bus stop.
A factor which impacts usage of public transit system is how quickly it can get someone to some arbitrary destination.
So, cutting the amount of busses a public transit system runs can reduce costs but also reduces how attractive that public transit system is to potential riders because of the increase in the amount of time an average trip takes.
That increases the use of other forms of transportation, assuming that people don't forgo trips entirely (e.g., staying home instead of going to a bar and getting a DUI, or eating at a hotel's restaurant to avoid spending $60-80 on taxis or Uber for a single meal).
IMO the key issue to adoption of public transport is not just the cost (which can be subsidized either for everyone or for lower income riders), but the extent of the network and the frequency of buses/trains. Higher density cities with extensive networks have high ridership, cities that are spread out with endless suburbs and who didn't build a good rail network covering the suburbs (looking at you, LA) don't regardless of whether it's free to ride or not.
Whenever this is discussed where I live, drivers come out of the woodwork to oppose it. And of course they also complain endlessly about traffic. It amuses me to no end.
The claimed increase in ridership is modest (18%) off a low baseline (0 service on weekends) and occurred over a long time period (pre-pandemic to today.) They also expanded service during that period, which probably fully explains the increase in ridership. Certainly the reduction in fare ($1-->0) is nice for some people, but it's hard to imagine that it is actually decisive for a large portion of trips.
The estimates of traffic reduction and CO2 reduction just quote the city's numbers without establishing that "traffic cleared, and so did the air."
Key paragraphs:
> In 2021, the city starting [sic] running more buses, streamlining routes and seriously considering waiving the $1 fares. In 2023, the City Council voted to pay for a two-year fare-free pilot with Covid-19 relief funds.
...
> Ridership eventually grew to 118 percent of prepandemic levels, compared to the average nationally transit ridership-recovery levels of 85 percent.
All public transport should be like $1. You need to charge something to keep the crackheads out, but it should not be enough that people think 'oh I better walk/cycle/drive instead to save money'
This would happen naturally except that most US cities have made it illegal to build anything without gobs of parking attached, so car drivers like myself get a government handout.
In Tokyo, parking is managed by the market, so it’s incredibly expensive. So it’s always cheaper to take public transit without artificially low public transit prices.
Downtown any big city is accessible by car, but parking fees keep most people away. At least, I won't willingly drive to destinations inside downtown of a big city, unless it's something special that can't be managed otherwise.
Which means suburban style businesses have an advantage, and eventually downtown merchants form an association and start pushing for free parking so they can get customers to show up.
Well in the big city I live in, downtown is often very crowded so I don’t think everyone is like you.
And I live in a car centric city. But literally millions of people ride trains in Tokyo everyday, and because of that they have clean air, nice walkable streets, and far few deaths.
Parking is "super short" because there is never enough supply of something that is free. When you make something free, you induce demand for it.
For almost everywhere in LA country (where I live), it is illegal to have a store, coffee shop, gym, restaurant, laundry mat or almost anything else without attached parking. There are pockets where they've allowed parking reform (like Old Pasadena) and beautiful, walkable neighborhoods spring up. But these are rare exceptions.
I just find it genuinely perplexing. A 1-hour commute in LA is absolutely unremarkable. That's 500 hours a year! We have horrible air pollution even though we're right by the ocean. The weather is perfect and yet people need to go drive someplace to be able to walk around in it. Like why do so many people out here think the status quo is so great?
Expensive is a relative term, but if the parking fills up, then it’s probably not market pricing. When market pricing is used, there will generally be a few open spots. Because if day after day there is more demand for something than there is supply, suppliers will increase the cost and continue to do so until the market reaches equilibrium.
From experience, $1 is not enough to keep out the people who spend the whole trip talking about where they want to go to jail for the winter.
And $1 is already expensive enough that if the destination is within 5-10 miles, driving is cheaper if you already have a car and parking, so you are keeping that class of people out.
Though really I find the main reason people don't take the bus is that there aren't enough buses (in time or space) for where/when people really want to go. This is an `m×n` problem.
How are you calculating driving any distance as being cheaper than $1? Surely if you factor in wear-and-tear on the car, you couldn't even get out of the driveway without eating that $1.
Let's say a gallon of gas costs $4 and your car gets 40 MPG. So $1 gets you 10 miles if you only consider gas (which very many people do, even if you think they shouldn't - much maintenance is imagined as time-based, and this is not entirely wrong - cars do decay even if you don't drive them, and insurance only rarely considers your odometer and only coarsely if so).
Wear and tear is generally assumed to be roughly equal to gas costs on well-maintained roads, depending on a lot of varying assumptions of what to include. So, 5 miles.
Adding depreciation, recurring costs such as insurance, parking, perhaps even opportunity cost from capital allocated in a depreciating asset. It starts to not look that cheap.
It really doesn't, though, especially if you've already decide to drive 10 or 20 miles for some other reason. Marginally, the cost of driving 5 miles is quite a bit less than $1.
Upto 0.7 per mile I think? That includes an allowance for depreciation so it's not really a true marginal cost, however for a moment let's assume it is. If the bus was $3 do you think it's wise that it's cheaper to drive a 4 mile journey than take a bus?
That would be amazing and is worth serious effort and resources. However I wonder if you could find one country that's managed to do this successfully (eradication not reduction)? It's often not really about housing and healthcare, it's about addiction, mental health, childhood trauma..
"Homeless" in that sense, however, are not rough sleepers (people who actually sleep outside), which would seem to be what is meant in this context.
It's by no means zero, but in autum 2024, rough sleepers were estimated at less than 4700 in the UK. That might well represent and undercount, but it is certainly nowhere remotely near the people counted as homeless, who would include anyone without a permanent address, such a people e.g. sleeping at friends places on a non-permnanet basis.
What would happen if you had to tap a card/phone to get in to the subway system (and this was enforced, no jumping turnstiles), and then have to tap it to get out too.
Then if someone is habitually in the system for a significantly longer time than it reasonably takes to travel from point A to B, deactivate their access.
> What would happen if you had to tap a card/phone to get in to the subway system (and this was enforced, no jumping turnstiles), and then have to tap it to get out too.
Not sure about the "measure how long the subway rider has been in the subway system for a continuous period of time" feature, but otherwise that's how subway in Japan works. You gotta tap on your way in and out of the current system you are riding on (as there are multiple competing subway system companies running together even within a given city, often enough with their stops being near each other).
Their reason for doing so is a bit different though. In NYC, your ride is a flat fee, as long as you don't exit subway, no matter where you are going. In Japan, your ride cost is determined by your actual route, as some parts of it have different rates. They actually need to know where you exited in order to calculate the final cost of your ride.
This is how it works on the Gautrain in Pretoria/Johannesburg in South Africa.
You scan when you enter the system, and you scan when you exit. Your fare is calculated based on where you enter and exit. If you stay in the system longer than some define period of time, you are automatically charged the maximum fare, regardless of where you got on and off.
You can either scan with a dedicated train fare card, your debit/credit card and also NFC mobile payment.
The buses linked to the train service and the parking uses the same payment system, so you get automatic discounted bus fares and parking fees if you actually use the train as well, but you can park and use the bus without taking the train.
iPhone NFC will work for a while even when “dead”, not sure about the android world.
But in the edge case of the edge case, security can let you out. If it becomes a pattern, they’ll note it somehow.
Seems like the most important thing to do is _anything_. The current approach of doing nothing and shaming people who suggest public transport is a poor option because it’s full of druggies doesn’t seem to work.
>Seems like the most important thing to do is _anything_. The current approach of doing nothing and shaming people who suggest public transport is a poor option because it’s full of druggies doesn’t seem to work.
I don't know, I think it's much worse, in the wealthiest nation that ever existed, to shame those who have no place to live by singling them out for abusive treatment for not leaving the transit system in a (arbitrary) timely fashion.
I'd much rather shame those claiming public transport is a poor option, and even more so those advocating for evicting passengers -- presumably violently -- because they spend "too much" time on public transportation.
DC is tap in tap out. But you can buy a single trip ticket. It would be sort of dystopian if we had to give up anonymous public transit access to prevent homeless folks from staying warm.
The less average people are inconvenienced, the less urgency there is to tackle harder problems. This is a nation that seems to only be able to kick the can down the road.
I'm pro paying for them to get whatever housing and healthcare they need via taxes, just like everyone else. It's not like it's that simple though. Giving someone a house and a doctor will not get them off heroin on its own and may not even help them very much at all honestly.
Most heroin addicts can be remarkably close to a normal functioning healthy person if they don't live in precarious conditions without access to a clean supply.
The proportion of heroin addicts who would still be wrecks with healthcare that extends to prescribing what they need is miniscule.
So the first problem is thinking you need to get them off heroin to be able to start dramatically helping.
> Giving someone a house and a doctor will not get them off heroin on its own and may not even help them very much at all honestly.
Giving someone a house and health care will, though.
Every addict I have ever known (I’ve known many) consume drugs in order to escape something. Addressing this while also treating the user will indeed help them. Mental health care + physical health care = “health care” in my opening sentence.
I don’t know what it is about people in the US, but almost all of us completely reject the idea that someone can be held down entirely by their own mind. Large amounts of people are, and those that don’t seem to understand that this is possible are often people whose own mind holds them down, but not so much that they’re homeless.
People in other countries get this. We do not. I don’t understand it.
Do you really think people are homeless because of lack of housing? Have you seen what becomes of a house when homeless people are moved into one? A huge percentage of homeless are homeless by choice.
Free public roads and highways? Free public parking? Good, normal, should be encouraged. Add a lane or two to the highway? Always a good idea! (hint: it never is)
Free public transit? KILL IT WITH FIRE!!! It will never work (those places it did are aberrations)
Go look up:
1. Jevons paradox (induced demand): More road capacity → more traffic.
2. Marchetti’s constant (30-minute city): Average commute time is stable; faster modes → sprawl.
3. Downs–Thomson paradox (transit sets highway speed): Car speeds improve only if transit gets better.
4. Braess’s paradox (network effect): Adding a new road can worsen traffic for everyone.
I'm conservative. I think buses should be free. Then they'll actually get used and all the secondary benefits they were supposed to bring will be much more easily realized.
You need public transport in major cities. Not everyone can or should drive.
You need private transportation almost everywhere. Not everyone should be forced to ride public transport just because it exists.
As long as people have an actual choice that's not manipulated in some way then I think the system is fine. It has a public function and it provides immediate and secondary benefits.
That tracks, it's a situation where most people are going to the same place so public transit has a huge advantage.
I am surprised that the bus wasn't already free; in my college town and the one near it (both had their own bus line), fares are free for all undergraduates.
My experience with bus service in college towns is that the routes between campus and student residential areas get heavy use, while the buses serving the rest of the town drive around nearly empty.
That is a particularly fine line to walk for the modern conservative. Government should not be picking winners, except for the very targeted tariffs that just happen to benefit company X or Y.
I would note that based on my experience in Africa, there were a lot of private buses being operated, ridership was high, and the buses were cheap.
In America we have very few private intra-city buses, ridership is low, and the buses are very expensive when you consider how much goes to them in the way of subsidies.
The woman who got gasoline poured on her and lit on fire in Chicago last week isn't helping either. It doesn't make people like my wife, for example, excited about the idea of going and riding public transportation alone.
We did this in the seventies too. I get that it’s infuriating but I don’t get how the solution is to charge $3.00. I’ve seen guys on street corners get more in one handout. Meanwhile we’re letting one guy ruin it like Bin Laden did air travel.
It's all probability distributions. A bus driver will usually stop the bus and refuse to move if someone refuses to pay the fair. People who skip fairs are more likely to commit other crimes. If you put these together, you improve the probability that a subhuman doesn't get to commit acts of violence on public transit.
Actually, it was, given that many right wingers who benefit from a sense of unease from existing in society boosted the video to make it seem like more than an a random act of crime, done by a schizophrenic man who wasn't treated properly.
> [The suspect's] mother told ABC News that [the suspect] was diagnosed with schizophrenia [...] and displayed violent behavior at home. His mother said that she had sought involuntary commitment, but that it was denied.
> Elon Musk criticized judges and district attorneys for allowing "criminals to roam free".
> U.S. President Donald Trump called the attacker a "madman" and "lunatic", and said that "when you have horrible killings, you have to take horrible actions. And the actions that we take are nothing", before blaming local officials in places like Chicago for failing to stop crime and denounced cashless bail.
> On the same day, the White House released a statement criticizing "North Carolina's Democrat politicians, prosecutors, and judges" for "prioritizing woke agendas that fail to protect their citizens".
> On September 9, the White House released a video in which Trump said that Zarutska was "slaughtered by a deranged monster".
> On September 24, U.S. Vice President JD Vance discussed the killing in a visit to Concord, North Carolina, blaming it on "soft-on-crime policies" and stating he was "open" to deploying the North Carolina National Guard to Charlotte if requested by Governor Stein and Mayor Lyles.
> The U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary held a field hearing in Charlotte on September 29 on safety in public transit systems and the treatment of repeat offenders.
See, that’s something I would never say to anyone.
A one-time event of a black person killing a white person is not enough for me to hate black people. For you it seems to be the topical reference you care to type out; just one of a library of events you pay attention to while ignoring everything else.
You are the problem here. Not anyone that’s black. People like you are who I’m afraid of. And I’m confident you’re the most violent demographic in the US.
You keep exclaiming I have some racial hatred but I really don't. You know who else hates these violent career criminals? Black people just trying to get on with their lives! They're the ones that suffer the most, statistically speaking.
It's white leftists who expose everyone to these threats through their crime-tolerant policies. You will never change until you experience the consequences of such policies first hand, like she did. In the meantime you're happy for everyone else's children to be sacrificed at the altar of progessivism so long as you can keep that Wojak smirk on your face and maintain an heir of (assumed) moral superiority.
Only one of us has blood on their hands. You would never say that (^) to anyone but you're content implementing it through the consequences of your political ideology.
FWIW I'm sorry I said that and I don't wish that for you.
Saying that there are cities with endemic violence and anti-social behavior tolerated by left-leaning DAs, which inevitably leads to someone with dozens of priors committing heinous acts of violence, now qualifies as white nationalism? For real???
There are alternatives to dealing with violence and anti-social behavior aside from the boot of quasi-military police on those that struggle.
Some people and places consistently appeal to greater and greater draconian use of force, other places and people resort first to social policy to take tempretures down and to not regard schizophrenics as "subhumans".
I hope you aren't insinuating this is my position? That man is a subhuman. He is lesser than a rat. I wish him nothing but unending torment and fear for many years to come. In no way is my contempt for him universally applicable to all schizophrenics. I judge the man by his actions not his condition.
The article is dishonest. A better title would be: "Making transit free in Iowa City did not significantly increase the ridership (just 18% over the 2019 level), while imposing more taxes on everyone".
They claim to have removed 5200 cars, out of area of 500000 people ("Iowa City-Cedar Rapids statistical region"). The increase is pitiful, from 6.7% of people using transit to 7.2% with the rest being car commutes.
Neither has it "cleared the traffic". Iowa City is also a well-run city, with just a 17-minute average commute time, indicating that it has no congestion to speak of.
"More taxes on everyone" also is dishonest. Every individual is paying more in "taxes", but the net amount of money collected from the population of the city for the cost of providing transit is decreased. (Since the cost of fare collection disappears. Or if the net amount of money doesn't decrease, they're presumably spending what was formerly spent on fare collection on additional service.)
I didn't imply that fares are taxes, because I don't feel that it's a relevant point either way, it's just a distraction to the actual matter - the cost of transit to society. Whether the cost is collected in taxes or fares is just an implementation detail.
This is one of those NYTimes "solutions journalism" pieces meant to celebrate the program rather than truly analyze it.
You can pick free, or scalable, or financially sustainable (and without sustainability, a political shift will kill it), but you cannot have all three at once. The minute you push on one, second-order effects pop up somewhere else.
It is a classic wicked problem: solving it literally changes the problem.
Big-city transit has an equilibrium point, and it is incredibly stable. Every serious transit city in the world ends up in the same place: charge fares, subsidize low-income riders, and fund the basic system with taxes.
That equilibrium is stable for a reason. Every major city that tries free transit at scale will eventually snap back to it, because it is the only configuration that does not implode under feedback loops. It keeps demand reasonable, service reliable, and the politics tolerable.
> Big-city transit has an equilibrium point, and it is incredibly stable. Every serious transit city in the world ends up in the same place
You're cherry-picking your own examples. It worked in Iowa City.
Y Combinator and much of SV would be out of business if innovators followed that thinking. One reason is that people do come up with new ideas; that's how the world changes. The other is that the world changes, and what didn't work before now works - costs change and value changes, and now it's worthwhile. For example, with congestion pricing and other rapidly increasong costs of NYC car ownership, there's more value in free transit.
Oddly, it's the thinking advocated by many HN posts, denigrating the innovation under discussion as impossible, useless, etc.
> without sustainability, a political shift will kill it
That can be said of many things. A political shift could kill military funding in the US.
> You're cherry-picking your own examples. It worked in Iowa City.
Indeed, it worked in Brisbane (a metro area comparable to Baltimore in the U.S.) and Lanzhou (comparable to Boston-Cambridge-Newton): congestion was reduced, the environment benefited, and usage increased in many cities that dislodged from that equilibrium and switched to a free-of-charge or symbolic-charge model.
I don't think GP's claim stands, for transit cities big or small.
Further cherry picking. Brisbane's free buses are only the "city loop". The rest of the transit system is fare based. It also has not stood the test of time yet.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
That's individualized tracking. You're describing the reason not to do that, and most of the digital payments systems have the same defect.
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.
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?
The fare is a flat au 50c, though. It is basically free.
Basically free is not free.
The point of buses is to replace cars, not short walks.
If you make it so that everybody who could walk 5min takes a bus, the bus will have to stop more often - and for longer - which makes it worse for the people who can't just walk 5min.
The trick is to balance the system so that buses (and other forms of transit) are cheaper - and approximately as convenient - as cars, without making them cheaper and more convenient than walking (for those who can still walk).
Fares don't necessarily need to be about financing the system. They can be about setting the correct incentives, and ensuring people value the service they're getting.
Another solution that’s already used to help mitigate increased stop frequency is express routes that connect farther endpoints together.
It's very unlikely people are actually going to take the bus for a 5 minute walk : the wait time for the bus is going to be on that order of magnitude and you'd need your route to be perfectly aligned and have perfect stop placement for that to happen.
Most likely, you will have extra trips because people won't feel the need to justify the fare.
That's not true on a major avenue that serves 10 different routes, which combined have a frequency of one every couple of minutes.
Also, it doesn't help to make bus stops more spaced, and you may not want a bunch of express routes that skip most stops, because another purpose of buses is to help people with difficulty moving (like the elderly), for whom it's not a 5min walk.
You just want to make the service available, and as good as possible, without incentivising people who could just walk to use it.
Because the actual goal is to displace cars (not walkers, or cyclists, or…)
> If you make it so that everybody who could walk 5min takes a bus, the bus will have to stop more often - and for longer - which makes it worse for the people who can't just walk 5min.
... Eh?
I often hit the leap card weekly cap (24 eur) in Dublin. This absolutely does not lead me to take a bus instead of walking for five minutes, because that would be _insane_. Like, maybe there are a few people who despise walking to an unreasonable extent and do this, but it would not be common. If it was, you'd see people doing it anywhere which has a fare cap (ie. most cities, these days).
It also hasnt worked in other places. Like Estonia. The data for "invest in capacity and speed" is much better then the for "reduce fares". So if you have extra money, the evidence on what to do is 100% clear.
If you're looking for return on investment, then cycle infrastructure is the way forwards. Each mile travelled by bike actually benefits society (less illness etc) whereas each mile travelled by car costs society.
> For every £1 invested, walking and cycling return an average of around £5-6
> A study of New York concluded that, in terms of health: “Investments in bike lanes are more cost-effective than the majority of preventive approaches used today.”
From https://www.cyclinguk.org/briefing/case-cycling-economy
People that walk or bike are also more likely to do small shopping locally. This benefits the local economy and gets less money to international big box retailers, which generally pay less taxes.
If you drive by a small market you often won't park your car to go there. Cars and trucks destroy streets fast. Having less of them keeps repairs less frequent. Infrastructure for walking and biking can exist for multiple decades or even millennia
So you’re saying that people should do shopping locally, spend more, and waste more time to prop up inefficient businesses who don’t benefit from economies of scale? Tell that to voters and then try to win an election. Society exists to make our lives easier, not to prop up as many businesses and employees as possible as a make-work make-taxes program.
Oh my god the obsession with 'economics of scale' is such narrow minded nonsense.
Shopping locally is more efficient, because the distribution network distributes things locally much more efficiently then a bunch of housewives in their SUVs.
Sure its cheaper for the shop providing the food, but for the society its more expensive. What you are completely missing is the massive cost of all the infrastructure and the massive subsidizes therein to create these centralized stores. And then the massive cost in time and capital investment for every users to buy a car to pick that stuff up.
You are also ignoring the massive waste this creates because people only go shopping every 1-2 weeks. And you are ignore the lack of fresh foods in the food system because of this behavior. That of course Americans eventually pay in their medical systems.
If you actually do some research you will see the systematic bias that is in the zoning code, infrastructure cost calculation and services. Walmart often consumer more in just police services then they pay in taxes. Walmart is systematically gaming the property rights system to pay almost no taxes. And yet Walmart uses a huge amount of land and requires a huge amount of public infrastructure to sustain itself.
If you really need to do some massive pickup of stuff for a party or something there are still larger stores you can go to as well, just not for everyday stuff.
Actually having a shop where I can locally pick up fresh food every day or every other day is actually much more convenient and saves far more time. And I know this is crazy for Americans to consider, but as a society it would be nice if people without a car could also buy food sometimes. This video points this out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYHTzqHIngk
Cities only exist because of economies of scale! Public transit, road maintenance, utilities delivery, public recreation facilities, and the plethora of small and large businesses are more efficient in a city because of economies of scale.
What people don’t benefit from is laws to artificially benefit small businesses at the expense of the consumer. Here in New York, we have this stupid law that one corporate entity can only have one liquor retail license. This law was created at the “behest” of the lobby of liquor store owners. The end result of this is that liquor is more expensive than my hometown of Vancouver, despite NYS collecting a significantly lower tax rate than BC province. That money all flew into private coffers, and the consumer still gets bent over in the end.
I also take issue with the implication that Walmart incurring policing costs is bad for society. The implication is that Walmart should either have private police or be a shoplifting free for all. The former is a bad idea because Walmart police don’t have the same responsibility or accountability to the public as public police. The latter is a bad idea because society will collapse without property rights.
What you quote is for "walking or cycling".
I would favour walking. Its far easier to get people to do it and most people can do it. A lot of infrastructure already exists and its cheaper and easier to improve.
If you provide reasonably public transport its far easier to walk. I drive into town, then park and walk, where I currently live because busses are infrequent. I never even owned a car in London because it has good public transport (to be fair, I probably would have if I lived in a suburb and had kids).
It's not XOR; you can do both. Most people who cycle also walk at times.
Why exclude cycling? You're range is ~5x walking - in the time and effort required to walk a mile, you could easily cycle 5 miles.
It doesn't have to be a universal panacea to be valuable. Walking isn't possible for everyone, including some who can cycle, and it's not useful for longer distances like 5 miles, ~2.5 hrs walking or 30 min cycling slowly.
Are you walking on hands? 5 miles is 8 km, that's 80 minutes of fast walk. I routinely walk 5 miles for transportation: I consider it time well-spent.
16 minutes per mile (3.75mph) (5 miles in 80 minutes) is basically my 'fast walk' time in the city. My wife who is shorter has a hard time keeping up with that.
Unfortunately stop lights/etc. will also make this longer. My "best" pace where I actually do get tired is about 15 minutes per mile. Few can keep up a 4mph pace even on a dedicated walking trail with no elevation changes for any material length of time.
Most folks average probably greater than 20 minutes per mile, especially for longer walks. 2.5 hours is definitely on the extreme end, but close to 2 hours is probably more realistic for most.
> It's not XOR; you can do both.
The quote I was replying to was about return on investment. Money spent on cycling infrastructure is money not spent on walking and public transport. Spending money is definitely XOR.
I am arguing that walking for shorter distances and providing public transport for longer distances is a better use of money in most places.
> Why exclude cycling? You're range is ~5x walking
Your range for walking plus public transport is far greater.
One big problem I see with cycling is low uptake in most places - in most (not all, to be fair) places I know cycles lanes are mostly empty.
> Walking isn't possible for everyone, including some who can cycle
People can cycle who cannot walk or use a bus?
A few point.
You are right that money is XOR. But cycling takes people of roads and improves the overall system while being very cheap. Also, you don't need dedicated super dutch style infrastructure to encurrage cycling. Making it safe for walking and cars to interact, ALSO makes it much, much better for cycling. Its a mistake in thinking that 'cycling' infrastructure is only dedicated cycling lanes. Encuriging cycling almost always pays off, in pretty every systematic measurment ever done on the topic. And if you reach Dutch level it pays of a gigantic amount. Its really low investment high return.
Cycle lanes actually look empty often because they are so much more efficent. They have done some studies on paths that were always empty and the threwput is usually not as bad as people think. To be sure the place you are refering to could be totally empty, it happens, but its not the norm even in the US.
Also, of course in a lot of places, specially in the US where they are really bad at cycling infratructure, they believe that all it takes is for one road to have a cycle lane and then magically people on bikes show up. They just want to get in on the 'hype' and were pressured to 'do something'. You need to actually be able to reasonably safely go from A to B between places that are vaguly useful. Dedicate cycling lanes make sense in places where there is no alterantive and you need cars to go resonably fast. But generally its more about your car infrastructure and how fast and dangerous your cars are. Improving cycling always goes hand in hand with making cars less dangerous, and that always pays off.
It takes some up front investment and actual planning, but its not like that infrastructure is worthless after a few years. Cycle lanes once built basically never get destroyed, so putting it in speculatively while having a long term plan makes a lot of sense.
Your summary is incorrect. From link from link:
Cycling doesn't replace cars, it just reduces the cost of cars!Once you're too old, the health benefits are less clear e.g. my mother dangerously broke bones after falling off her bike (I think cause was overloading herself with a grubber in a backpack).
> Cycling doesn't replace cars, it just reduces the cost of cars!
The quote doesn't support that. It says decongestion is most of the savings, and decongestion is fewer cars, implying bikes replace cars.
Is there something else in the article that supports it?
Someone on a bike isn't driving - it seems like a clear substitute, though it also substitutes for public transit.
Yes I know. I'm a huge, huge fan of cycling infrastructure. And I agree that it is the highest value.
But even if you have that you still need high quality public transport. Its not either or. And if you are going to invest in public transport, investing in capacity, speed and convenience. Is a better investment then not making people pay.
[dead]
> a metro area comparable to Baltimore in the U.S.
That doesn't make it a serious transit city
Odd hill to die on, but if you wish to argue that Iowa City is a serious transit city, but Brisbane and Lanzhou are not, feel free to state your definition of serious transit city. These cities are bigger than Iowa City and their public transport share of journeys to work is higher than any similarly-sized U.S. metro area.
Beware: if there are no true Scotsmen left, and your definition of serious transit city excludes everything apart from ~10 European cities, the conclusions that one can draw from the policies of serious transit cities will be so limited that they will in fact be useless.
I was just pointing that out from the post you replied to, I don't agree with the author.
However, I think that Iowa City isn't doing the symbolic fare, and that Brisbane's 50 cent fare would make some kind of a difference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translink_(Queensland)#Fares
Thanks.
> However, I think that Iowa City isn't doing the symbolic fare, and that Brisbane's 50 cent fare would make some kind of a difference
A reasonable point. That very well might be the case, and if everybody thinks symbolic-fare is better than no-fare, I won't be the one to oppose it.
It's an order of magnitude larger than Iowa City, though.
> Oddly, it's the thinking advocated by many HN posts, denigrating the innovation under discussion as impossible, useless, etc.
A significant fraction of HN has been raised with the idea that “natural” innovation can only arise from the private sector competing on a market, and every attempt at public-funded out-of-market innovation is seen as “unnatural” and doomed to fail.
And like all religion, it's pretty hopeless to refute it with rational arguments.
I find this attitude less common than it used to be. (Also, while it doesn't change your point, I find the same response to private-sector innovation: the top post on most threads is how useless/pointless/ridiculous the OP is.)
> hopeless
Here you lose me. I find people respond very well to rational arguments, presented with openness, curiosity, and respect.
I think hopelessness is the religion of this day.
I don't get your comparison to VC model. Sure it's temping to sell $10 for $5 and many VCs fund this business for a while. But the difference is there isn't an infinite backstop. It's not really new or innovative to give things away from "free" and fund it through some other means. But that's the problem. There's a disconnect with the service and what it costs.
You should charge roughly what it costs to operate because that's information. People should ask why it costs so much. People should consider alternatives. Trying to remove prices is like fighting climate change by removing thermometers.
At the moment, we (in the U.S. anyway) don't charge for tht true cost of operating roads and private cars, which makes transit look bad in comparison. If we want to make transit look reasonable, we need to stop pretending cars are so cheap.
> we (in the U.S. anyway) don't charge for tht true cost of operating roads and private cars
Also, the US heavily subsidizes fossil fuels, including with military spending.
That is only true if public transport is supposed to participate in the free market economy, which it doesn't have to.
If it is decided by a city government that we want public transport as a public service, paid for by taxes and other means then removing prices is an option that could make sense in the right situations.
Then it's covered by the government and cost is more or less ignored. It still costs something but now there is no or little visibility as to how much it costs which is obviously bad for incentives and general governance
Bad for who? The incentive is for more people to use the system, since we are aiming for a Greater Good kind of outcome. Cost and efficiency becomes a government problem, which we manage through policy and voting.
The road system doesn't have a price tag per trip, yet it's costs are managed through policy and governance. No difference here in my opinion.
I don't meant to compare the VC model specifically (though I can see the givaway comparison now that you mention it), just innnovation generally.
I think your point about economic signals is very good - I wonder if any locality charges at cost; does NYC do it now? - though 'charging at cost' undermines the goals: universal mobility, reducing climate impact, reducing congestion, and (I think) increasing economic liquidity and competition (e.g., in the labor market, in retail, etc.).
We need another solution: Maybe vouchers for people based on income? That becomes much more complex.
Also, I would gues it impacts ease of use and adoption - imagine being able to just hop on any passing bus, as opposed to finding your payment, going only through the front door, paying, etc.
Maybe the military should pillage all the places it goes to self-fund?
The moment the military pillages an area, its ability to fight insurgency in that area vanishes. And since most of the US's wars have been of the anti-insurgency variety (barring the first few days, or possibly hours, that it takes for the full might of the US military to topple a middle-eastern govt), that would be a fundamental strategic failure.
Why is this being down voted?
This worked well in Iraq.
?
> A political shift could kill military funding in the US.
and lose the very thing that keeps the US top dog. You're implying that political shifts could happen to shift _anything_.
That's not true for things of fundamental importance. So is transit of fundamental importance?
> and lose the very thing that keeps the US top dog. You're implying that political shifts could happen to shift _anything_.
It was the USD as reserve currency that enabled the US to fund it's military to a point that should have bankrupted the US. The US military hasn't won a war outside the Americas since WW2.
With a budget half or a quarter of the current, the US would remain secure behind two oceans. I do agree that politically the military budget will remain high due to the relationship between the MIC and US government.
> The US military hasn't won a war outside the Americas since WW2.
The Gulf War and the war with ISIS. But yes, lots of bad results in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.
> With a budget half or a quarter of the current, the US would remain secure behind two oceans. I do agree that politically the military budget will remain high due to the relationship between the MIC and US government.
The US can't be a self-sufficient island. It's not even close to plausible. Also, people do care about freedom for others everywhere; it's not just Americans who deserve it.
> You're implying that political shifts could happen to shift _anything_.
Of course it could!
One of the key lesson of the twentieth century is that, with political will, a modern state can do almost anything and political power can change the world dramatically very fast, for the better or the worse…
Yes. Transportation is of fundamental importance for the economy.
For what it's worth, the New York Times has spent most of this year actively trying to dissuade people from voting for the mayoral candidate in New York that had free buses as one of the more widely known parts of his platform. I'm not saying there's not an agenda in them publishing this article, but I suspect it has a lot less to do with a predilection for "solutions journalism" as much as trying to backtrack their pretty noticeable opposition to the incoming mayor that ostensibly came from them not being as far leftward as he is.
> the New York Times has spent most of this year actively trying to dissuade people from voting for the mayoral candidate in New York that had free buses as one of the more widely known parts of his platform
The Times editorial board repeatedly wrote anti-Mamdani opinion pieces. But speaking as a non-NYC New York Times reader I never saw it unless it was sent to me by a New Yorker--it simply wasn't commentary that was highlighted unless you were specifically trying to follow the NYC election. (And to the extent they criticised his candidacy, it wasn't in rejecting free busses.)
I think that's kind of my point. There's a perception of the NYT as leaning pretty strongly to the left, which isn't necessarily false, but it's missing the important context that being based in New York and mostly run by people living in New York, it's arguably a lot less left leaning relative to the city itself. This likely isn't going to be obvious to someone outside of the the city, but I think it's useful information for the wider audience to understand. It's leftward leaning compared to the nation as a whole, but not its local audience, and those dynamics both come into play for its editorial policy.
In the case of this specific story, there's an extremely straightforward potential explanation for why you story might have the bias that the parent comment describes, but for almost the exactly opposite reason that someone might think without that additional context.
You are making a lot of assertions. Meanwhile, I travel globally for work and my preferred mode of transportation is walking and public transport(ideally tram).
There are BIG DIFFERENCES between how well different cities handle this. There is no "equilibrium", only wise(or unwise) governance.
How do you explain Luxembourg? They've had free public transport for 5 years now.
Luxembourg is an outlier and more of an edge case, then something that can be dissected and applied to other countries/cities.
Free transit: IMPOSSIBLE!!!
Free roads and highways: GOOD AND NATUAL
The political class are not typically utilizers of public transit: hence even the best attempts are structurally challenged from the outset.
If that isn’t factored into your analysis, you are missing a huge reason why it sometimes fails and sometimes succeeds.
Of course the rhetoric is such. One of those things helps poor folks more than the others.
>Free roads and highways: GOOD AND NATUAL
Every time you fuel up a vehicle you are paying a "fare" to use the road. The fare is subsidized (just like with the bus), but it is very much there and not zero.
What if I drive an electric vehicle? Sure, my registration is possibly pricier, but I'm in no way paying a usage fee.
You're being subsidized because the .gov decides they want more of you so they make what you do artificially cheap compared to the baseline.
That's what we're suggesting be done for public transit
Every time you earn money/spend money you are paying taxes.
I guess busses run on fairy dust too?
>Every time you earn money/spend money you are paying taxes.
>I guess busses run on fairy dust too?
Every vehicle on the roads is basically paying to be there via fuel tax (which in whole or large part is spent on the roads). Busses pass some of this cost on to their riders who's fare may be then subsidized in part or full.
I don't see why you're being so hysterical.
The funniest thing about Luxembourg is that it is a known tax haven for American corporations. So American corporations will lobby against social programs in the US, but will make Americans fund Luxembourg's free public transport.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jun/17/walmart-hid...
Why?
Luxembourg has insane tax revenue per capita because of its status as an international tax haven. A program that might be hardly noticeable on Luxembourg's budget could put a big dent into the budget of an American city.
Actually, they said fare revenue was like 10% of public transport spending anyway.
It's very possible it's the same in Iowa City.
That’s true in NYC today
“The truth about Zohran’s free busses” by Breaking Points:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P275SobdE-s
clickbait headline (of course) but gives a lot of facts about the proposal and talks about other places they’ve tried it.
What about Estonia?
Because many people commute to Luxembourg from Germany/Belgium/France. AFAIK the cross-border commute complicates things.
> charge fares, subsidize low-income riders, and fund the basic system with taxes.
Car traffic is also expensive. Highways, parking, and maintenance are massively subsidized through taxes, and they consume far more space per traveler making cities more congested and polluted.
Cities with good public transport also tend to be more walkable, which has health benefits and could provide significant impact to healthcare costs.
According to this article, every $1 invested in public transit generates about $5 in economic returns:
https://govfacts.org/housing-infrastructure/transportation/p...
I mostly agree.
> You can pick free, or scalable, or financially sustainable (and without sustainability, a political shift will kill it), but you cannot have all three at once.
Real polities are of finite size, so you don't need (infinitely) scalable.
Here in Singapore we could sustainably afford to make public transport free, if we wanted to.
However I agree with you that charging for public transport is the right thing to do. (And to charge users of government provided services in general for everything, and to give poor people money.) If nothing else, you at least want to charge for congestion at peak hours, so that there's always an epsilon of capacity left even at rush hour, so any single person who wants to board the train at prevailing prices can do so.
In Singapore there is no MRT congestion prices only for private cars, right? Trains get crowded but still workable. It’s not clear if people would start working 6am to 3pm or something if you did. Overall I think charging money made more sense when there were more private, profit seeking companies involved as it’s the name of the game… buts it’s cheap enough that it’s hard for someone with an ok job the get bothered about it
> In Singapore there is no MRT congestion prices only for private cars, right?
Singapore charges for MRT rides, but it's not explicitly a congestion charge. Every once in a while they experiment with discounts for off-peak train usage, which can sort-of be interpreted as a congestion charge.
> Trains get crowded but still workable.
At the peak of rush hour you sometimes have to wait three or four trains before one comes that still has standing room. (It's not as bad as it sounds, because during rush hour trains come every three minutes or so.)
IMHO, varying train charges more with congestion would make a lot of sense; but the system as it is works well enough that it's probably not worth for any technocrat to spend the political capital to seriously do anything about it.
Charging more for publicity transit during peak hours won’t make people use it less, there’s a reason why so many people commute during peak hours
> Charging more for publicity transit during peak hours won’t make people use it less, there’s a reason why so many people commute during peak hours
You don't necessarily need all people to use it during peak hours, just "enough" people. There are people who do have flexible schedules, but they may simply may not have had enough motivation to change old habits (yet).
I actually think riding on a crowded train would be more deterrent than a fare increase, so I feel like that would be needlessly punishing people already suffering the full trains because they have to.
See sibling comment by eru: they said there isn't a fare increase congestion charge; instead "Every once in a while they experiment with discounts for off-peak train usage"
No, no, just the opposite.
The point of a congestion charge (whether on driving or on public transport) is to alleviate the congestion 'punishment'.
As a mental model: congestion works a bit like an auction. Getting from A to B during rush hour brings people some benefits (otherwise, they wouldn't bother). Benefits differ between people. But that travel also costs, both in terms of fares and in terms of annoyance and perhaps delays.
So We can imagine every prospective commuter weighs their benefits against the costs. I say it works like an auction, because there's limited capacity, and the people who are willing to endure the most price + annoyance are going to 'win' the auction and will commute. Everyone else shifts their commute around or stays home.
The people you mention who 'have to' travel during rush hour are just the ones willing to bear the highest costs in our model, and thus they 'win' the auction. (Winning an auction isn't necessarily good..: after all, you have to pay the price.)
Having a congestion charge means different people can bid not just with their tolerance for annoyance and delay, but also with actual money.
So now people compare fare + congestion charge + annoyance against their benefits. Assuming benefits on the right side of the equation have stayed about the same, the breakeven point for 'annoyance tolerance' is going to be lower, just because the other part of the left side grew.
A similar example: if tomorrow your local Walmart was handing out free 20 dollar bills with every purchase, you can bet your hat that pretty soon the queues for the cashier at that shop would grow until the wait-in-line for the marginal customer cancels out the free 20 dollars. Keep in mind that the marginal customer isn't the average customer: the queue would mostly be made up of people who have more time than money.
Conversely, in our congestion charging scenario the winners of our auction will tend to shift towards the crowd that has more money than time (or tolerance for packed trains).
The nice thing about letting people bid with money is that afterwards someone else has the money and can spend it. When you bid with your capacity to endure frustration and delay, no one else gets any benefit from that. It's just a poor waste of society's resources.
If that were the case, you found yourself an infinite money glitch.
In that situation I suggest, you hike the price up to near infinity and pay off the public debt first and then buy up the entire world's assets.
In London they charge more for peak travel, especially trains. It definitely causes people who are flexible to travel at cheaper times.
on the other hand. gdp is ~200 days of work. 1 day is 0.5% gdp. 1 hour (assuming 8hr day) is 0.06% gdp. gdp/capita is nearly us$90k. 1hr of work is >us$5k!
it might be more cost effective to expand public transport to transport every singaporean to where he/she needs to be on time, than to make them wait..
> 1hr of work is >us$5k!
Not all GDP is created by work. See https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPSGA156NRUG to learn that our labour share of GDP is roughly 50%.
And, of course, the average hides a lot of information about the distribution.
Though even given all the caveats, your numbers still seem wrong to me. 90kUSD / 200 / 8 ~ 57 USD, not 5kUSD.
I’m guessing the comment you replied to confused 0.06% with 0.06.
> charging for public transport is the right thing to do
It's a simple matter of supply and demand so even if the transit system operates on tokens but those tokens are given away for free, my weird brain would still want to the system to exist to track how the system is being used.
There are plenty of different survey techniques that will tell you how different routes are being used. You don't need tickets or tokens for that.
Consider the case of roads as a system of transit. Fuel taxes and licensing costs don't remotely cover the infrastructure costs, and roads predated them by decades. They're obviously scalable. They're not remotely sustainable financially (and effectively free to access) yet they remain stubbornly resilient even in the face of massive political shifts.
Why is that equilibrium impossible for other transportation infrastructure?
> Fuel taxes and licensing costs don't remotely cover the infrastructure costs
In which country? Because they certainly do in the UK - about £10b a year on maintenance vs £33b a year from road taxes. Half that maintenance comes from local property taxation and half from the central exchequer
If you include the societal costs from road accidents it's nearer, with estimates putting all costs from accidents including lost productivity at £35b a year. Throw in global warming and you find drivers only cover about half the costs.
But then people who argue societal costs need to be included never seem to acknowledge the societal benefits of a road network.
Not familiar with the UK and quite surprised if what you say is true, but in the US about half of highway maintenance costs are covered by the various dedicated taxes. The rest come from general funding. In Canada, the dedicated taxes go to general funding, but fuel taxes and such suffice to cover around 1/3rd of costs. Australia is a bit better at around 2/3rds.
The point about social costs is valid, but there's no need to even consider them. The direct costs already need heavy subsidies in many countries.
Unlikely in Europe given that fuel prices across the continent are roughly the same (if anything the UK is cheaper)
Fuel taxes raise £25b a year (there's also a "sales tax" on top of that which raises another c. £10b a year)
Car taxes (VED - an annual tax to have your vehicle on the road legally) raise £8b
This revenue goes to the national budget. The national budget spends about £5b a year on maintaining and building major new roads.
Local roads are funded from local property taxes, and the total expenditure on those is under £5b a year.
The government has been trying to wean itself off fuel taxes over the last 20 years -- in 1999 it accounted for 2% of the GDP, it's now down to 1%. As more and more people shift to Electric vehicles the fuel revenue drops. There have been discussions on moving to a per-mile charge, but in any case, drivers subsidise other government funding priorities.
Rail on the other hand is massively subsidised -- on average it's about the same amount of subsidy as the fare revenue. The price charged per mile is far lower for regular long distance commuters (typically those with high wages), occasional use is peanalised. If I go to London at peak time tomorrow, I'll be paying about 90p a mile. If I lived in Brighton and travelled every day I'd pay under 20p/mile. The average rail user pays about 29p/mile (£3.1b and 17b km) and the subsidy is a similar amount.
Roads are cheaper than busses.
The thing about public bus systems is that none of them are financially sustainable. If they were, you wouldn't need a government to run them.
My local system collects about 1/3rd of the annual operational costs and none of the (sizable) capital & infrastructural costs in fares.
The choice to collect insufficient fares versus collecting no fares at all, has secondary effects - fewer people choose to ride, spending any money is a psychological nudge against taking the trip, especially if you're not sure how much money you're going to have to spend. The car historically appears to be ~free, while the bus demands exact change in an impatient voice. You can solve the change issue with cards, but you could also just not charge fares.
Let's say you double ridership by taking away fares. This doubling adds approximately nothing to your considerable costs, but you get twice as much direct social benefit, and the price you pay for it is having to cover ~100% of the program cost using taxes instead of ~90%. On top of this you get secondary social benefit - buses move people so much more efficiently than cars that traffic speeds up dramatically, and you don't need to perform continuous expansion of the road network to accommodate ever-growing traffic problems. The labor value of those hours stuck in traffic alone covers the whole program, even if that value isn't something you can practically "capture" for some kind of profit.
IIRC the Flemish bus system is profitable. So is the public train company, even if marginally so.
What I dislike about GP's comment is that it obfuscates that mostly it's the lower classes that ride the bus, and paying it with fares takes away from the potential to redistribute tax money that harmonises the way we all live together.
Like you've said: buses move people more efficiently, and once they're on the road they're better off being closer to full since that won't dramatically change the fuel they're burning. Plus less cars, etc.
> Big-city transit has an equilibrium
Iowa City isn’t a big city. Most American cities aren’t.
I lived in New York. We had paid subways and busses and that didn’t stop them from being abused like park benches—enforcement did. (And to be clear, the minority creating a mess for others were all over the place. Homeless. Hooligans. Mentally ill who got lost.)
I now live in a small Wyoming town. We have free downtown rideshare. (It’s just slower than Uber.)
I visited NYC and San Francisco. It's appalling and unacceptable in this day and age.
My small northern Minnesota town is far from perfect, but we don't let our neighbors and kids become fent zombies on the main drag. That's not a lifestyle that we want to enable or perpetuate. I do not understand the mental hurdles that Berkley-educated 'scholars' jump through to rationalize letting people suffer the most potent and deadly forms of addiction. The penal system is the last net to catch these people before they die from OD or blood-borne pathogenc or the consequences of criminal activity. And the "empathetic" west coast intellectuals say "legalize the drugs". Absolute lunacy
we don't let our neighbors and kids become fent zombies on the main drag
Nope, you'll take homeless folks right to jail, promptly, where they can be zombies out of sight. It isn't like folks in small towns are gonna help the person with treatment. As long as they stay out of view most times, they'll just be gossip. If they are lucky, someone will invite them to church. Small towns will absolutely let folks suffer if they just stay somewhere out of sight.
> homeless folks right to jail, promptly, where they can be zombies out of sight
The best option is treatement. But the worst is leaving them on the streets. They're hurting themselves as much as they could otherwise. But they're also hurting bystanders.
Once they're arrested that screws up their chances of recovery though. Even if an officer formally books someone and puts them in the drunk tank until the methamphetamine wears off so they don't scratch their own face down to the bone, they were still arrested. That arrest follows them around, and it severely reduces their chances of finding employment that will actually motivate them to work towards financial goals instead of merely just getting by. A lot of former drug addicts end up working in construction or commercial sailing not because they're too dull to be hydronautics engineers or factory logistics overseers, but because those are two of the few well paying industries who will hire regardless of your arrest record.
The U.S. has one of the highest re-offense rates out of any developed nation because an arrest is something employers, banks, and even privately run welfare programs all see as a permanent red flag. It's like someone figuratively puts walls in the way so the person with the arrest on their record is confined to a tiny square, cut off from viable opportunities. What makes it even worse is the combination where some states don't expunge records of juvenile offenses when you turn eighteen if they're federal offenses, and records of arrests aren't differentiated by how long ago they happened. If you got thrown in juvie at sixteen for mail fraud for using your uncle's name to scam magazine subscriptions then in some places like New Jersey that'll still be there when you're forty and will be treated as if it happened yesterday.
From a macro view there's more harm done when you arrest an addict than if you had left them to teeter on the edge of an overdose, which is just really messed up. All because of zero tolerance policies from organizations that have nothing to do with law enforcement.
Arrests do not follow you around if you do just a little effort to legally fight it. Until you are convicted you are innocent, you just need to follow the process to ensure that you are never listed as guilty by no contest (which is sadly often the default if you don't ask for a court hearing).
I wouldn't expect a drug addict to know the above, but it still needs to be stated. If anyone happens to be arrested in the US make sure you don't accidentally get listed as guilty and served time (that night in jail counts as time served so if the judge would sentence you to one night in jail)
Classic American Scarlet Letter thinking, ostrasize and shun.
There's a heavy need for rehabilitation shelters, but the public at large looks down on addicts and refuses to fund them. That leaves organizations like the Salvation Army to take up the slack, and the results can negligible. There's very little support on the private shelter's side other than providing a roof, a cot, and some basic directions to nearby organizations. Meanwhile the addict is meant to improve their behaviour almost immediately, fight the shelter itself to maintain their cot, and facilitate setting up their own recovery. Many of them choose to be homeless rather than put up with the ridiculous standards of these privately run shelters. Meanwhile on the public side it's a problem we started working on in the 1970s after the Vietnam War created a large wave of drug users, but Reagan gutted psychiatric care in the U.S. in 1982 and that meant that any progress towards making those shelters a reality was smashed into shards. What we were left with is people being put into psychiatric facilities that don't have the type of structure needed to rehabilitate an addict.
There's no way up from the bottom other than having another person take your hand. And nobody wants to be the one to reach down their hand. They rely on broken organizations and inappropriate tools to do that because their proximity to that ruin makes them uncomfortable. Either the addict gets screwed by the police or they get screwed by the rehabilitation facilities. So the addicts decide to turn away from both, and the public decides to turn away from the addicts. As you said, those in the public ostracize and shun them.
> there's more harm done when you arrest an addict than if you had left them to teeter on the edge of an overdose
Do you have a source for this?
I can provide some, specifically the section on probation in [1] and "drug war logic" in [2], though it's not really something you need a source for. If you arrest someone it affects them for the rest of their life. Drug abuse is a terrible affliction, but it's still temporary. The abuse stops when access is revoked. Revoking that access can be a difficult and sometimes even dangerous process, but it marks the end. It can begin again if it's induced by an addiction, but that merely starts another temporary behaviour.
That's not even considering systems, like how a single arrest introduces costs to the state because of the transportation, the provided meals during their stay, the hygiene standards the arrestee must go through, and the required paperwork. Or how it affects total prosperity by almost guaranteeing that someone will be stuck with less productive and less meaningful employment for the rest of their lives, reducing taxes the town/city, county, state, and federal government can take and that person's own contributions to the local economy.
[1] https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/10/12/every-25-seconds/human... [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9302017/
When someone is a danger to innocent people walking by who didn't choose to do any fentanyl, their recovery chances are secondary to the safety of the innocent passers by. The people who advocate for leaving them on the street never want to take responsibility when one of them kills a random kid for fun. That may be something that only a small minority of fentanyl addicts are going to do, but it's not something that we have any obligation to allow in the name of helping drug addicts.
That's the biggest issue. The police aren't the correct solution, at least in their current form, but there are no other solutions. Is it worth it to unfairly limit one person's life in order to protect them and people around them from a short period of harmful behaviour? If that limitation was temporary, yes. But it isn't temporary. Being arrested and having a minor possession charge that will be erased after five years without the person re-offending wouldn't be as bad.
> Is it worth it to unfairly limit one person's life in order to protect them and people around them from a short period of harmful behaviour? If that limitation was temporary, yes
I think the question turns on scale. If one person has the capacity to harm dozens, as one does in a city, the calculus may shift towards incapacitation. If it’s a small handful of non-violent interactions, on the other hand, as would be more likely somewhere less dense, then I agree with you. (Same turn on access to weapons.)
>That may be something that only a small minority of fentanyl addicts are going to do, but it's not something that we have any obligation to allow in the name of helping drug addicts.
Yep. There is no solution except to shoot those filthy addicts, amirite?
I mean who wants to spend $35-50K/annum to keep these scum in prison, right?
In fact, why should my tax dollars pay for any of these subhuman criminals, addicts and other undesirables? A bullet only costs a dime.
That's the way to go, right soerxpso? Pew! Pew! Pew!
Somehow, you believe that jail is the best option for treatment?
So, lets jail the professionals that are addicted too. After all, it is the best option for treatment, right? They are also hurting themselves as much as they could otherwise and probably hurting bystanders and their family. But that's ridiculous - few support that. If it were the best option, it would be recommended treatment for all.
The best option for treatment is actual medical based treatment in a facility that isn't punishing you and with staff trained in caring for you in your state. The best option for not leaving people on the streets is to house them. Housing and feeding folks makes treatment much more likely to work.
If professionals harass people under drugs (or without) we do jail them. It's just the homeless in the liberal cities who have untouchable status and can freely violate all kinds of laws.
That isn't what the poster was saying. They were saying that the best treatment was jail. And that's not the case. Jail is horrible for treatment.
They were not saying such a thing, you can open the post and Ctrl-F for "jail" to 0 results outside the quote.The comment says that treatment would be the best option, but anything else would be better than letting dangerous criminals roam the streets unmolested.
Why is the assumption here that big cities (East/West Coast or otherwise) want to perpetuate addiction? I think a simpler assumption (that involves fewer inferential leaps) is that large, wealthy cities provide more resources for homeless addicts, and so they end up congregating there.
> large, wealthy cities provide more resources for homeless addicts, and so they end up congregating there
There was some bussing of homeless into city centres. But I haven't seen evidence that a majority, let alone significant plurality, of these cities' homeless addicts became homeless somewhere else.
Given that less than half of NYC residents are born in NYC, the null hypothesis would be that the average homeless person is also born outside of the city[1].
(Maybe this demographic skews more towards natives in the case of homeless addicts, but I can’t find a statistic to support that.)
[1]: https://popfactfinder.planning.nyc.gov/explorer/cities/New%2...
There's several programs for bussing them out:
https://hsh.sfgov.org/services/the-homelessness-response-sys...
Although, many cities do this, and everyone leaving is just arriving somewhere else.
For what it's worth, the San Francisco programs supposedly only send them away if they have someone they're going to.
"These three programs all help people relocate outside San Francisco to reunite with family or support networks." (Emphasis mine).
Small town America has an overdose rate 48% higher than big city America, despite the fact that many drug users move from small town America to the big cities.
Do you have source for that?
I made an easily falsifiable, google able statement, that should be enough. If you want the cheap Internet points, you can do it yourself.
I tried to google it. I did NOT found anything that would confirm your claim.
It seems to be untrue, but I wanted to ask first.
> My small northern Minnesota town is far from perfect, but we don't let our neighbors and kids become fent zombies on the main drag.
You can search for more articles, but small town America has been hit very hard by opioids and now fentanyl.
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us-politics/unbudgeted...
Thinking that it is only a city problem is itself part of the problem.
I visited a couple of West Virginia towns that _shocked_ me with the rampant and obvious drug addiction this summer. And I live in a big city (Chicago) that suffers from homelessness.
My take away from that experience is that we normalize the misery around us but seeing it, even in a nearly identical form, in another context is shocking.
The dirty secret about NYC's, SF's, and LA's homeless are that more than 3/4ths of the homeless aren't local, or even regional.
George Lopez at the LA Times used to be a huge advocate of the homeless. And then he tried to do a series of articles about the homeless in Hollywood to highlight their plight and get more people to think like him. When he went out to do his research, it took him over a day interviewing dozens of homeless people to find one who was actually from LA. Less than a quarter were even from California. Needless to say, he's no longer a huge advocate for the homeless.
So yes, it's easy for small towns to talk about how they don't have a homeless problem, because they've shipped their homeless off to the big cities to deal with.
I lived in Los Angeles for years and in that time got to know exactly one person who was from Los Angeles (well, Beverly Hills, if you're local). Melting pot cities just simply have people from all over. Including the ones who made a conscious decision to leave small towns in Minnesota that the original commenter thinks are perfect; I knew several.
I don't think people in these cities want to legalise fentanyl. That's a strawman.
They may want to decriminalise it and treat it as a health problem because empirically this has been shown to actually make a difference in outcomes.
Police brained Americans.
OK, but do you realize that the worst cases from places like yours get exported to SF, NYC and other hubs, for them to deal with?
And you're out here bragging about what you "let" your neighbors and kids do. And bragging about visiting two US cities.
> the worst cases from places like yours get exported to SF, NYC and other hubs, for them to deal with?
Source? (I genuinely know nothing about this. But would appreciate hard data.)
Not GP and I don't know anything about this either, but I found this:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
Anecdotally, I used to take the Greyhound a lot and everyone on them is either a student or somewhat homeless, e.g. they just lined up another friend's couch to sleep on for a little while.
Exact same argument was made against the interstate highway system.
Now it is lauded as one of the highest ROI investments the US govt ever made.
If you really want to do the math: if we value all urban land equivalently, what is the subsidy provided by free parking? In NYC, it’s astronomical.
Free transit is trivial to fund if you actually care about humans being productive.
Not everyone does: harder to capture rents that way.
You are objectively wrong. Public transit scales the same way free and paid (i.e. based on demand). The cost for free countrywide public transport in a country with very high quality public transportation (so not the US) is about 8k per person, per year. This isn't some insurmountable amount of money - it's not even particularly costly when you compare it to what the infrastructure costs are for cars (mostly related to accident mitigation. Especially bad in the US).
As somebody who grew up in the area, Iowa City has a near-nil homelessness problem.
It's 23 deg F in Iowa City in a few days. It's not even winter yet. I think this has everything to do with it.
Meanwhile it's 70 deg F here in Atlanta. California and Florida have even warmer temps.
I live just down the road in des moines and there is a homeless problem. It is mostly out of sight but it is there.
Have delivered food to those homeless. This thread makes me sad.
The homeless do make me sad (except for the one rich guy who chooses to live that way - but he is an outlier - 1 in 1000 perhaps)
What is your point? The assumed demonization of people because they lack homes is a false assumption. I've spent plenty of time around people who apparently lack housing (I don't ask), including on public transit. I don't find they behave better or worse than others, on average.
Homeless people have higher rates of substance and mental-health issues, and, unsurprisingly, less access to showers and laundry facilities.
>Homeless people have higher rates of substance and mental-health issues, and, unsurprisingly, less access to showers and laundry facilities.
As someone who was homeless (for less than a year, thankfully!), my experience was that many people with nowhere to go (myself included) become incredibly despondent that they have no roof, no shower, no place to keep (let alone wash) their clothes and turn to drugs as a way of (temporarily) ameliorating their suffering.
Those with mental health issues often can't hold a job as they're suffering from debilitating mental illness (duh!) and those with no place to shower or keep clean clothes have a hard time getting, keeping jobs too.
The latter group mostly just needs the opportunity to present themselves for job inquiries bathed, reasonably well rested and in clean clothes.
The former group needs the same plus mental health services including supervision and treatment.
Don't forget that more than half of Americans are an unexpected $600 emergency away from being unable to pay for food, rent, utilities, etc.
But most folks ignore that and instead just want them gone. They don't care where -- in jail -- in another city -- just as long as they don't have to look at them. It's disgusting.
> less access to showers and laundry facilities.
Really, the land of the free is going to enforce showering laws? If our standard for freedom is that low, I'd lock up all the people spreading fear - they do far more damage.
I didn't suggest that. I was only addressing the question of whether "they behave better or worse than others, on average," and the evidence clearly leans toward "worse."
Honestly, I’m not sure I have one.
> You can pick free, or scalable, or financially sustainable (and without sustainability, a political shift will kill it), but you cannot have all three at once. The minute you push on one, second-order effects pop up somewhere else.
What is your basis for this assertion? One could simply increase the tax rate on high income earners and large property holders and readily fund fare free transportation in a financially sustainable and scalable way.
I believe the unstated mechanism of failure here is "it will piss off the wealthy and they will kill it" - which, at some point, needs to stop being true about literally everything in our society, or some extremely unpleasant consequences will manifest.
> Every serious transit city in the world ends up in the same place
If we look to Asia, we see that's not the only way things can work. Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, Tokyo, Osaka, are serious transit cities in my book, and their way is to have property development, diversified business models, or operating in extremely dense corridors where demand is high enough to cover costs through fares alone.
But you're right that "just run trains and collect fares" doesn't work and has to be subsidized everywhere else. The question is, how do you account for the subsidies that cars get. The cost to invade Iraq isn't usually accounted for when screaming about how much it costs to fund public transportation out of tax money.
Here in Czechia, I lived in two cities with a great public transport system. Prague and Ostrava. Ostrava, despite being much poorer, is actually often voted to have the best system in CZ, because the management is really creative and diligent here and they often pull off miracles with a relatively small purse.
That said, yes, it is a major burden on municipal finances. The taxpayer here is mostly OK with it, but compromises have to be done, such as fixing sidewalks when they really fall apart and not a day sooner. Maths cannot really be wished away.
Important factors that plague the entire system:
* fluctuations in cost of energy. The Russo-Ukrainian war, European Green Deal etc. Getting a multi-year contract for electricity that can be used as a basis for budgeting has become impossible,
* driver wages. Drivers can move around the EU and they indeed often do, being a wandering folk almost by definition. Thus every city in the EU competes with Stockholm, Amsterdam or Milan on wages, while having half or less the economic power of those metropolises. So you have to find a precarious balance between "paying your drivers so little that they leave for greener pastures" and "paying your drivers so much that the budget cannot tolerate it".
Full self-driving could alleviate the second problem. Robots don't eat and don't pay any rent.
Paved roads fails your test but we have those in abundance. I'm not sure this is a useful way to dismiss things.
The answer is transactions costs, many countries charge for roads where it's practical (not in the city).
What do you mean "not in the city"? Are you saying that NYCs congestion pricing is not practical?
> You can pick free, or scalable, or financially sustainable (and without sustainability, a political shift will kill it), but you cannot have all three at once.
You can't name three things, rule out any combination that includes more than two things, and call it a day.
The gas saved is less resources wasted, savings which to a large part are taxable. Etc.
Bangalore(+State of Karnataka) is currently having free transit, but only for women.
Which seems to have drawn anger from Meninist circles.
People who support this say, it gives more mobility to women from poor and lower middle class households, and hence better employment opportunities, increased family incomes and by the effect taxes as well.
People who criticise this say, the expenses for free rides are offloaded to already burdened tax payers, who quite honestly in the Indian system get nothing in return. These forever increasing free perks for sets of people who won't contribute anything back, at the expense of ever increasing burden on people who are expected to pay without expecting anything in return, won't end well.
Why are women considered to be people who "wont contribute anything back"?
But also, why are women specifically traveling for free? What was the original argument?
>>Why are women considered to be people who "wont contribute anything back"?
Not women in specific, but India has a huge informal economy sector, where payments, salaries, spending are done outside of the tax system. Most people who take these buses work in that economy. So you end up enabling that part of the economy. At the expense of people paying taxes. It wouldn't be any different, if men got free rides as well.
>>But also, why are women specifically traveling for free? What was the original argument?
Women as a vote bank, has been a growing trend in Indian politics. In a lot of states far more generous perks are given to women. For eg- https://cleartax.in/s/ladli-behna-yojana
By offering these perks, you are basically buying votes from 50% of the net voting population. So a lot of states offer these perks.
> financially sustainable (and without sustainability, a political shift will kill it)
Fiscally sustainable is a BS excuse often put forward by conservatives to not fund the things they don't want funded. Most things the government runs are not fiscally sustainable on their own, but they provide some sort of societal value. See things like the military, police, fire departments, etc...
A political shift could certain still kill it, but let's not pretend it has anything to do with fiscal policy.
[dead]
> Every major city that tries free transit at scale will eventually snap back to it, because it is the only configuration that does not implode under feedback loops.
Less Jevons Paradox and more Theory of Constraints...
Five million people are not going to descend on Iowa City because buses are free. Luxembourg has full free public transport from buses to trains, with no feedback loops. Same in Tallinn, Estonia capital where is free for residents.
It didn't work out well when the NYC MTA tried fare free rides. https://www.mta.info/document/147096 Dwell time and customer journey time decreased. The bus speeds were lower on the fare free routes.
If public transport provides value to people, they should pay for some of it. 30 day unlimited ride pass in only $132.
why highlight bus speeds being 2.2% slower but not that ridership went up 30%? which, to me, feels like an obvious correlation to dwell time.
Because some reasoning is motivated
If ridership went up 30% then there is demand for more busses, which would decrease dwell time caused by higher use per bus.
> only $132
If you don't know that's a lot for some people ...
> they should pay for some of it
They do. It must be paid for, and all government money comes from the citizens.
Median income in NY is 100k. That's 1.5% of their income. There's ~3M people with less than 50k income tho. Remaining 17M earns more than that.
i will gently point out that new york state and new york city are not the same thing
> Under that metric, the poverty threshold for a couple with two children in a rental household in New York City is now $47,190. The study found that 58 percent of New Yorkers, or more than 4.8 million people, were in families with incomes below 200 percent of the poverty line — about $94,000 for a couple with two children or $44,000 for a single adult. Poverty rates among Black, Latino and Asian residents were about twice as high as the rate for white residents, according to the report.
[1] https://archive.is/ygvck#selection-773.0-773.490
So you need 2% of your income to generate 100% of your income (assuming you need to get to work).
Sorry I just can't take these arguments in good faith. $100 in the richest city of country of the richest country in the world is basically nothing. If you can't allocate that towards your mobility then IDK what to say to you.
You're not exposed to how many people live. There are people, for example, who must choose to budget between food and medication. Those are also people without other forms of transit.
"Only $132"
That is 16 hours of work if you make $8 an hour. You obviously make more than that if you can say "only $132"
Minimum wage in NYC is $16.50/hour and there's a 50% discount on fares for low income people.
That's great. It's only around 8 hours of work instead of 16.
Its still a lot of money at $16.50. 12 days a year you labor just for the opportunity to labor. Your point only makes it slightly better and doesn't really take away from my point - it's a lot of money for a good number of folks. You know, the folks that could really benefit.
A 50% discount is probably pretty hard to get - and you are still asking the poorest folks to pay 4 hours of labour for busses.
Minimum wage is only a reliable way of looking at this if it is linked to cost of living. I'd argue any sum is a lot for those on minimum wage.
To get the reduced rate many municipalities will require you to visit an office, somewhere you likely have to take transportation to, during office hours (aka working hours), and provide documentation to prove this.
This isn't really unknown either. There's a very good story anyone can look up about Dr. V in India and what it took for him to actually get the eye care he wanted to provide to the people who needed it.
In the digital world many of us know you want to deeply understand your user and design with them in mind. Same thing here in the meat space.
You can apply through the ACCESS HRA Mobile app in NYC.
I dont' know how you reached the "didn't work out well" conclusion, both metrics you mentioned were commensurate with systemwide metrics, meaning fare-free didn't have much of an impact on these routes. Ultimately, ridership increased
Ridership increasing doesn't make it a success. I read that New Yorkers who frequently used the bus system were asked what the city could do to make their experience better. Among those who were polled the top two complaints were that the buses were too crowded and often late. The free bus trial program made these two metrics worse - 30% more riders (aka even more crowded) and longer dwell times (aka more delays). The bus fare being too high was like number five or six on their list of things that riders cared about.
So add more buses?
There are just a lot of people in New York. The roads are packed, and the public transit is packed. More transit would help solve both problems.
We rarely apply this principle to roads, and I never see anyone clamoring to change that.
Where can you drive without having to pay registration fees or gas taxes?
Pretty much everywhere allows some sort of vehicle on the roads without registration, such as bicycles.
Registration fees are usually time-based, not usage-based.
We’re a quarter of the way through the 21st century, gas taxes have been optional for driving for quite a while now.
> We’re a quarter of the way through the 21st century, gas taxes have been optional for driving for quite a while now.
States mostly take the equivalent of those taxes out of vehicle registration fees for electric vehicles.
And bicycle usage is nearly a nil cost on the existing public roads, so the costs here would be appropriate to come out of the general sales/property taxes that fun the city/county. If anything you might argue to try to subsidize bicycle ridership more in urban areas, whether with bicycle paths or otherwise, to reduce the number of cars on the roads and reduce congestion for those still on the roads.
The cost of adding one more car to existing public roads is also essentially zero, as is the cost of adding one more rider to an existing bus route. Until you hit some tipping point and need to add more capacity, then it costs a lot. Bicycles can do that too, if a significant number of them shows up.
In any case, the point is that public transit riders pay fares. Not taxes, not registration fees, but fares. The equivalent for roads would be tolls. And it’s pretty uncommon to see any advocacy for charging tolls for all roads.
I pay far in excess of what I would pay in gasoline taxes to drive an EV. The state still gets paid.
Me too, but I pay it whether my car sits in the garage all year or whether I drive it 100,000 miles.
If roads provide value to people, they should pay for some of it. Right?
Right. That's why we have to pay vehicle registration fees and gas taxes.
Registration is like $100 a year for "unlimited" access to roads. Quite a bit cheaper than a yearly unlimited transit pass.
And electric cars don't pay a gas tax.
EVs pay a gas tax in the form of enormously more expensive registration in almost all states. I pay way more for my EV registration than I would have paid in gas tax.
> Registration is like $100 a year for "unlimited" access to roads. Quite a bit cheaper than a yearly unlimited transit pass.
But that's still "some of it".
> And electric cars don't pay a gas tax.
Electric cars' registration fees are much higher to make up for that, e.g., in New Jersey, you owe an extra $260 per year for an EV (which automatically goes up by $10 every year) vs. a gas car.
Since you pay for the vehicle and the fuel, no it's not even close.
Gas taxes don't come close to paying for roads. Roads are massively subsidized out of general taxes.
Fares don't come close to paying for public transit. Public transit is massively subsidized out of general taxes.
And besides, the comment upthread said "some", not "all".
The cars have way way more negative externalities
Congratulations, you have invented taxes
So, in Ireland, which has a historically pretty terrible public transport system, the government has been fairly aggressively cutting fares. A journey which cost me about 6 euro literally 20 years ago (about 9 euro in today's money) now costs 2 euro, transport is free for kids under 8 and extremely cheap for people under 25, and so on. And it has _worked_; public transport utilisation is dramatically up.
Now, maybe there's a point where it stops working as you reduce fares. But it's not particularly _clear_ that that is the case.
>That equilibrium is stable for a reason. Every major city that tries free transit at scale will eventually snap back to it
What about US school bus programs. They have existed in many areas for decades.
I think if you treat the bus including "externalities", the bus problem might be very smart.
What if you include road construction and widening, road repair costs, impact of traffic on commerce and taxes, and more nebulous stuff like pollution, quality of life, noise, etc.?
Civilization figured out how to make water relatively cheap and widespread (at least in developed countries). We can do the same for transportation.
Do you have examples of cities that have tried and snapped back along with reasons it can’t work, since you speak with such certainty?
Just say that you think poor people are gross and that public transit as a concept is beneath your contempt
sounds smart, but this a false premise because its not zero sum and theres this magical thing called taxes that allow you to reap the benefits of a more productive system.
If you have free public transit and that enables more economic activity or more disposable income to be funneled into services that boost the tax rake of the city the gains can offset the cost. This is an equation none of us have the info to do as randos online and its pointless to claim otherwise.
and even if your point was true free buses are a partial subsidy to low income people like you suggest in nyc its busses are a predominantly taken by low income individuals (source https://blog.tstc.org/2014/04/11/nyc-bus-riders-tend-to-be-o... subway nearly everyone, and ride share has their own tax as well.
A transit ride in the US might be $12 of subsidies and a $2 fare. Making the ride $14 of subsidies isn't a big difference. There are even situations where eliminating fares saves money because of the overhead.
That said we'd probably be better off if we eliminated subsidies and introduced competition.
Waiting for Tallinn to collapse. It's been 12 years now.
>politically unpopular
You mean capitalists will stir up a shitfit if they aren't allowed to profit from someones misfortune. The proper amount of traffic on roads should be close to 0. All LA would have to do is offer more and free bus rides and charge for driving in the city and everyone would save hours of their life for no cost.
Milwaukee hop
San Francisco's Muni (light rail + bus) system has a budget of about $1.2B and its ticket revenues are about $200M. That means, 5/6th of the budget is subsidized by the taxpayers of SF. There is no reason why Muni can't be free. Surely a city with a budget of $15B can find $200M (about 1.5% of budget) to make up for the shortfall?
It would directly help the taxpayers of the City. But obviously nobody wants that (sarcasm)!
Example: the City has been trying to get rid of the RVs parked illegally on the streets, dumping their effluents and engine oil all over the City streets. To get these RVs off the streets, the City is spending $36M+ (and counting). So money can be found for the homeless, the RV dwelllers, etc. but not for the city's lawful residents and taxpayers.
Without nominal costs, buses turn into mobile benches for unhoused people and druggies. It’s the same story as what happens with libraries.
Here is an idea: Fix your homelessness problem and don't let other policies be guided by the best way to keep homeless people out of sight.
The problem is that the transit agency doesn't have a lot of agency over its city's homeless population.
The transit agency also doesn't have a lot of agency about the budget they receive from the city either
It's not "our" homelessness problem.
Most of the homeless in SF and LA aren't from California. Red states love to "deal" with their homeless by buying them bus tickets to the West Coast (something that Texas used to openly brag about).
If SF and LA shipped the homeless back to where they originally came from, we'd all be talking about the Midwest homelessness crisis.
Do you have proof of this? Can you link to a budget from a red state with a line item of "Homeless bus tickets to California"?
You can’t unless were willing to forcibly put these people in shelters. Many of the persistent ones are hardcore drug users waiting to die, they don’t give a damn about being rehabilitated.
The number of people who can afford a home is very strongly correlated with how affordable homes are. I therefore propose that if we can make homes more affordable, homelessness will decrease.
Most people here don’t realize how much the homeless are hated and how willing trump voting Americans are to literally let them die on the streets or worse.
Schadenfreude is the dominant feeling of the times, and many if not most Americans would basically celebrate a “purge” of the homeless.
This is just not true generally. It might seem stupid or incredibly obvious, but homelessness is mostly caused by housing prices.
In places with less affordable housing, there is more homeless people. The solution to homelessness is to build more housing.
That's the solution a 5 year old would come up with, too, but it's correct.
Nice Faith based argument there. Requiring "free" citizens to care about a problem they didn't have anything to do with. No different than saying "if everyone went to church/temple/mosque and and adhered to $DEITY all problems would vanish"
Weird. You didn't just move the goalposts; you built new ones and declared it was what your opponent was kicking towards.
I take the bus a lot in DC. People get on without paying all the time. If someone just wants to sit on the bus, the fee is not what's stopping them.
The fee gives a reason to kick them off. Portland's trimet recently made it a policy to not allow sleeping which means the transit police can now intervene when the opioid addict does his dose on the train. Meanwhile the tired professionals are left alone. As it should be
It seems like the more straight forward version of that policy is 'no drugs on the train'. Allowing selective enforcement is a sure path to unintended consequences.
Nah the consequences are more riders. That's a great consequence.
> no drugs on the train
Nonsense. I'd rather have people carry their illegal drugs on the train and take them at home. The issue is people experiencing the effects of the drug on the train and often times making it unsafe for women, children, and men too (it doesn't really matter what your sex is when the drugged out man vomits on you). I honestly don't care if you carry your illegal drugs everywhere, as long as you make sure the effects of said drugs are dealt with privately. I have major issues with people making the consequences of their drug use other people's problem
Pretty sure GP meant "no doing drugs on the train" not "no possessing drugs on the train"
They will just get on another bus. Meanwhile the entire bus will be slowed down by the inspectors asking everyone to leave the bus so they can check for payment or by holding up passengers exiting at connection stations.
You think it's presence of a fare that prevents homeless people from getting on a bus?? Even the light rail has ways to get on without paying, and the homeless know them.
You can have enforcers kicking people out?
I’ve only seen them do this once in my 18 months living in the city.
Some countries have cameras on public transport with security people watching the footage live. If someone misbehaves ever so slightly (like drinking alcohol) the doors wont open until enforcers arrive. With modern AI you can have one person monitor countless cameras. They could even retract before the doors open so that you cant smash or spray them and run away.
Assuming a perfect system this still fails because you have now locked in all the law abiding citizens with someone who has proven they are ready to break the rules, effectively inventing a hostage situation out of thin air whereby a miscreant can terrorize their fellow passengers for the duration of the police response time.
The spiel is to do things you can get away with. You don't know if the other passengers are law abiding citizens. There is no way to tell how they respond when locked up with you.
No need to lock the doors. If you have facial recognition anyway, can just nab the misbehaver later.
I believe they don't keep the recordings for long if no arrests are made. It certainly seems like a good idea to not create data sets that are open for abuse later.
this… can’t be a serious suggestion, can it? have you ever had to rely on public transit in a major city?
Oh which continent? Is it possible that what you assume it's normal and default is colored by your personal experience and not representative of the world at large?
> Oh which continent?
what answer could i possibly give to you that would change your response? antarctica?
> Is it possible that what you assume it's normal and default is colored by your personal experience and not representative of the world at large?
of course this is true. what are you going for here. my objection is to standing up a Train Security Panopticon with "modern AI" and locking commuters (in north america) on a train (in north america) who might depend on a schedule (using a north american time zone) stuck at a station until the (north american) cops can come and pull someone (who statistically, but not for sure, would be north american) off of the car for being drunk (off of beer i've had in my personal experience, coloring this example, which may not be the beer that is representative of the world at large) and napping on the seats
I'm going for, "it could be a serious suggestion."
In other cultures, being rude and disrespectful to other passengers is simply not done, and transgressors are actually punished.
Americans have a problem with public transportation, but the problem isn't public transportation, it's Americans.
which cultures? which public transportation? is it possible that what you assume is the problem is colored by your personal experience and not representative of members of a country at large?
They would have to make the choice depending on how long the service takes vs the size of the offense. Usually they can wait for the train to arrive.
lol, what? You’re gonna hold 20 people hostage on the bus until some enforcers navigate a busy city to ticket a person who is likely to wipe their ass with the ticket? What country is that exactly?
Seriously, other than law enforcement what else can you do to someone who brazenly refuse to follow the rules? Even law enforcement (at least in the US) highly depends on where you live. In left leaning states and cities, DAs are not very likely to prosecute such small crimes like not paying a bus fare because they know it’ll make them unpopular next election. I live in a very left leaning county and state and it swings between center and left every 4 years or so. The swing is always “look how awful that guy was. He prosecuted vulnerable people for petty crimes for no reason”. Cops don’t wanna have to deal with all the paper work to book a guy for a couple of nights before they get released and do it all over again. If they know the person will not get prosecuted because there is no political capital to do so, why bother with the theatrics and all the paper work of arresting them? Brazenly refusing to pay the bus fare and getting in a verbal altercation with the driver and everyone on the bus is a fun afternoon for some people.
> hold 20 people hostage on the bus until some enforcers navigate a busy city
Where this happens they arrive promptly. And it doesn’t happen often.
>> hold 20 people hostage on the bus until some enforcers navigate a busy city
>Where this happens they arrive promptly. And it doesn’t happen often.
Where, other than inside your mind, does this happen? Please, do be specific.
The homeless person will just get back on?
Repeat offenders can be handed over to the police.
I'm sure the trip to the police station and immediate release is a real setback for these people. Unless they're breaking more serious laws, no one is paying to put these people behind bars for any length of time.
I mean, you're right in theory, but in the real world things are very different.
I don't know, all the places I lived in (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46029488) manage just fine. Must be some crazy black magic rocket science they are doing over in Germany or Britain or Turkey or Singapore or Australia to keep non-payers off their public transport.
And in many places I haven't lived but only visited, too.
You end up with an outcry from the rich “liberals” (for lack of a better word), who never take the bus in the first place, complaining about how enforcing fares on buses is harming the poor who can’t afford transportation and pushing people away from public transportation.
It’s pretty infuriating. I started biking to work 2 years ago and try to bike almost anywhere I can. Mostly to lose weight but also put my money where my mouth is. I voted for every levy and prop to improve bike-ability and public transportation of the city in the last 10 years and figured I’m a hypocrite if I expect others to bike and take the bus and I never do. My tolerance for the homeless on buses has been dropping as I have to deal with them more and more. I was always “It’s our failure in not helping them. If I can’t help, least I could do is let them be” kind of person. Now every other week I end up with a negative interaction with someone on the bus or at a bus stop. Every time I air my grievances with people I know (who never take the bus) I always have to find myself on the defensive somehow.
In my third world big city, a lot of people sleeping in the streets are the ones who don't have money to pay public transport for their far way homes. The jobs are downtown. It's perverse.
Have you ever ridden Muni? The fares are mostly dodged. This would change next to nothing.
This is completely false - a drug addict will simply get on the bus without paying. The fine for fare evasion won't even change the calculus one iota.
They're already mobile benches for unhoused people and druggies. They just get on anyways already and don't pay the fare. And the driver does nothing because they don't want to get in a fight. (Unless a passenger threatens others, then they get the police involved.)
Making the buses free isn't going to produce any more of it.
Yeah comments like the parents are typical from people that don't use public transit. The people who can't/aren't going to pay that some people "don't want" on public transit are always going to not pay and still use it, so why not make it free for everybody?
I live in an area that had outdated payment systems on their bus network. They determined that the cost to upgrade the payment systems would be higher than the revenue of fares, so they just made the buses free.
Edit: A lot of replies associate fare payment with behaviors (and smell?) of riders. I think that it's important to recognize that ones ability to pay a fare does not inherently indicate that they are "undesirable" in some way. Could their be a correlation? Possibly. But dedicate the policing to things that actually matter - an unruly passenger should get policing efforts, not a non-paying one (or smelly, really? Obviously homeless people can be putrid but seriously people smelling bad is not a crime).
I use public transit (mostly SF BART) on a regular basis. It's not a matter of "don't want," it's a matter of public safety. People won't use public transit if they have to deal with mentally ill people or hucksters.
This is very basic economics of public transit. I completely agree with the comment about having a minimum payment and enforcement.
> People won't use public transit if they have to deal with mentally ill people or hucksters.
Do they also not use the streets in that case? There's nothing preventing "mentally ill people or hucksters" from being there.
Yes, they avoid streets too. That's one of the reasons that San Francisco shopping around Union Square has collapsed. [0] There were other reasons like COVID as well.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/san-franciscos-union-square-...
Nah, I’ve rode a bus to work most days forever. It’s my calm place when I go home.
Tragedy of the commons is real, even a nominal stake in a service, thing or place impacts behavior. If you’ve ever shopped at Aldi, they make you put a quarter in each shopping cart. Most people wouldn’t pick a quarter up from the ground, but they almost always put their carts back at Aldi.
Personally, I could care less if a dude smells or is poor. We’re all the same. But I have tolerance for boorish behavior that scares people who are trying to go about their business.
> The people who can't/aren't going to pay that some people "don't want" on public transit are always going to not pay and still use it, so why not make it free for everybody?
Why? We are excluding non-paying passengers from planes just fine. Why not busses and trains?
And over in many other parts of the world, they also manage this just fine, too. It's not exactly rocket science.
It's because the fare and boarding latency on planes is much higher, which funds the cost of having security guards around and amortizes the check-in time penalty.
Maybe. But in any case, you don't need to re-invent the wheel to check that passengers on busses and trains pay their fare. Just learn from any of the countless successful systems around the world today, or in the US's own past: streetcars used to be widely profitable, and that only worked because they actually managed to collect fares.
(Careful: I'm not suggesting that collecting fares would make streetcars widely profitable again. I am merely suggesting that whatever mechanisms they used to enforce fares can be learned from.)
See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
It's a tradeoff you can make. The US is far from the only country in the world where fare evasion is a problem. I've lived in countries with similarly high inequality and homelessness where fare evasion was such a problem despite enforcement that the bus drivers would simply refuse to pick up certain passengers, and conversely people would then hitch a hike on roller skates behind the bus.
I don't doubt that there are countries worse than the US (in this regard). But that doesn't mean you can't learn from the success stories. Especially since they are really common in a variety of places that don't have much in common otherwise, so it can't be too hard to clamp down on most fare evasion.
> [...] and conversely people would then hitch a hike on roller skates behind the bus.
I assume there's not much overlap between the really problematic passengers (often loud, drunk, aggressive and/or mentally ill) and the skaters? Mostly just because you need a minimum level of physical fitness to pull this feat off, and you need to be organised enough to both have skates and have them at the ready?
In most places I lived in, the traffic police (if nothing else) would nab you for trying to pull this stunt.
> I live in an area that had outdated payment systems on their bus network. They determined that the cost to upgrade the payment systems would be higher than the revenue of fares, so they just made the buses free.
I'm strongly in favour of free transit, but this boggles my mind. If your payment system is just a box where people drop in tickets/change, it's pretty low cost, never gets outdated, and pretty high compliance.
Selling tickets and collecting change from thousands of boxes is actually quite expensive in terms of manual labor and machines. The boxes themselves are expensive, as they have to be able to sort and count coins. And then the vending machines for the tickets.
And it doesn't raise compliance at all. Why would it?
> The boxes themselves are expensive, as they have to be able to sort and count coins.
The boxes in my city of ~1.7 million don't do this. They're just boxes. Presumably they have some big box at the bus HQ they dump them in to sort the change.
> And it doesn't raise compliance at all. Why would it?
I'm not saying they raise compliance over other systems, I'm saying that observationally, compliance is pretty good. When I take the bus, I see basically everyone either put something that looks like a fare/ticket in the box or show a transit pass to the driver.
Who counts that the coins all add up to the fare then?
Do you have to show the coins to the driver that they add up to the fare, before putting them in the box?
I've only ever seen systems that count and display the amount of coins dropped in, until it adds up to a fare, and then there's an indication that it's sufficient and it beeps and then resets for the next person.
The box is clear, the driver can see what people drop in.
There’s nothing stopping you from putting half the fare amount in nickels in, but really, there’s nothing stopping you from putting nothing in and just taking a seat - bus drivers aren’t equipped to police fare evasion in either case.
In practice, 80-90% of riders have monthly passes that are just pieces of paper that you wave in front of the driver as you get on.
I’m not oblivious to the downsides of such a system, but there are real upsides around low cost, and no technology to ever go out of date.
Seriously? On hackernews you're acting like a "box where you drop in tickets" would be an adequate description for modern bus/transit fare? Obviously they need a system that integrates with the other transit options in the area (the trains and other localities bus providers), and accept electronic payment.
What about transfers? Transfers between buses are supposed to be free, but how would you track that? There is also a reduced price from going from train -> bus. How would you track that? Obviously the system is significantly more complex than "drop some change in a bucket."
I'm not claiming it's modern, I'm just saying that it worked for decades, and it's not like it's a system that's started working less well now that more modern systems exist.
This is literally how my city of ~1.7 million operates now, and it seems... fine? Like it's obviously worse than free transit or a snazzy FeLiCa-based system, but it clearly works to collect fares and move people around.
> What about transfers?
The bus driver tears off a paper slip with a time on it that's good for 90 minutes.
> There is also a reduced price from going from train -> bus. How would you track that?
You don't, all routes/transfers are the same cost.
Again, I'm not saying this is the best system, but it's a false dichotomy to assume that "expensive new fare system" and "no fare system" are the only options. For some cost-value analysis, a basic/cheap fare system beats an expensive system even if it has fewer capabilities.
> Yeah comments like the parents are typical from people that don't use public transit. The people who can't/aren't going to pay that some people "don't want" on public transit are always going to not pay and still use it, so why not make it free for everybody?
Huh? I never owned a car and taken public transport all my live, and it's never been much of a problem kicking non-paying people off. What kind of lawless hellholes are you guys living in?
(I lived in Germany, Turkey, Britain, Singapore and Australia.)
Just New York City.
The bus driver's union doesn't want drivers engaging in fare enforcement -- they're hired to drive, not to get into physical altercations. This was especially after a bus driver was stabbed to death in 2008 in a fare dispute.
There are fare enforcement teams that partner up with cops to catch people evading the fare, that are trained for this kind of thing. But obviously the chances are miniscule you'd ever encounter them on any single bus trip, and all that's going to happen is you get a summons with a $50-100 fine. So it's quite rational not to pay.
And I mean, as a bus rider, the last thing I want is my bus being delayed by 15 minutes while the driver stops and waits for the cops to come to evict someone who didn't pay. I just want to get to where I'm going.
So how do they handle it in the cities you've lived in? How do they kick them off without putting the driver in danger and without massively delaying the bus for everyone else? (And to be clear, we're talking about buses, not trains where monitoring entry and exit turnstiles is vastly more realistic.)
In the subway in NYC I see some people go out the emergency exits (alarm sounds but who cares?) while other people are queued up waiting for somebody to come out the emergency exit so they can come in. It’s a kind of antisocial social behavior like torrenting pirate files.
I actually had a dude yell at me and basically say “are you stupid? Why would you pay?” While holding the gate open.
I told him my boss is an asshole and was paying. That made him happy, he said “f that guy” and wished me a good day.
> And I mean, as a bus rider, the last thing I want is my bus being delayed by 15 minutes while the driver stops and waits for the cops
There's absolutely no need to wait for the cops. They can drive to a stop in front of the bus.
You have an extremely optimistic view of the level of timely and accurate communication and coordination required for that.
Not to mention, you know, the person might have gotten off by that point since they got to their destination already.
It's about the same level of coordination as waiting, just deployed differently.
If they get off the bus right away then no big deal in the first place.
No it's not, because the cops get there and the bus already left. Or the cops wait around but the bus is stuck in traffic and another call comes in so the cops give up and leave. Trying to pick some arbitrary bus stop somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes ahead based on how fast they think the bus is going and how long some cop (and which one?) will take to get from where they are to that bus stop depending on traffic is just a recipe for missing each other. And cops are a scarcer resource than buses.
Like, if there's a serious crime is being committed in a moving vehicle then sure they'll have someone constantly monitoring and redirecting in order to intercept. It's possible, with high enough priority. But someone not paying a fare does not have that priority.
And the point is the person refuses to get off the bus right away. They stay on it till they get to their destination and then get off.
The most visible enforcement I’ve seen was in Rome. They have people issuing tickets on the bus at random.
It was noticeable in that as a tourist, it seemed like a chill place, but there are lots of police of various stripes and they seemed very serious when enforcing things.
I live in Italy and this is common on the trains and busses. I ride the train a lot and have my ticket checked maybe 1:10 times. The tickets are cheap (~2 euro) and the fines are high (50-200 euro), so it makes sense to buy them. I have seen people get fined though.
See my answer to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46031217
What level of punishment should somebody who is trying to move between place to place receive for their lack of paying $1-3? The service was already going to operate, regardless of their lack of payment.
Some public transit has a much more rigid fare collection structure - trains are typically much more controlled entry points. But buses? It's in their best interest to get everyone on as quickly as possible and get everyone off as quickly as passive. Are you going to have gates that block you if you don't scan your card/phone from exiting? Same for boarding. Do you dedicate policing resources to ensuring the collection of what is certainly less than the cost to employ the police officer? Seems wasteful until you hit a very high ridership.
I suspect people want fare enforcement basically because it helps keeps the aggressive/crazy/assholes off. Not because they want to collect more money.
Anecdotally, the bart gates seem to have improved the riding experience.
Some data from LA:
> Of the 153 violent crimes perpetrated on Metro between May 2023 and April 2024, 143 of them — more than 93% — were believed to be committed by people who did not pay a valid fare and were using the transit system illegally.
https://ktla.com/news/local-news/metro-violence-largely-perp...
> I suspect people want fare enforcement basically because it helps keeps the aggressive/crazy/assholes off. Not because they want to collect more money.
Well, it's also a matter of fairness: I'm a law-abiding citizen, and I pay for my bus fare. It's the Right Think to do. But if I'm paying, I want the other guys to pay as well.
I get that; the cost of enforcement makes that likely negative (possibly even very negative) to the system.
My claim is letting trash act like, well, trash and street people wild out on the system drives lots of commuters off. And ime, the worst riders are disproportionally fare thieves.
> I get that; the cost of enforcement makes that likely negative (possibly even very negative) to the system.
Depends on prevailing social norms, I guess?
Oh it certainly does. America has let the requirements for behavior in our larger cities decay to openly allowing criminal behavior. It's wild.
> What level of punishment should somebody who is trying to move between place to place receive for their lack of paying $1-3? The service was already going to operate, regardless of their lack of payment.
In Germany it's typically something like max(2 * regular fare price, 60 Euro).
I know you asked a 'should' question and this is an 'is' answer, but I hope it's still useful.
Google Translate on https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bef%C3%B6rderungserschleichung... might be useful.
It's fascinating seeing your questions about something that's an everyday thing in all of the places I lived.
So in Germany it's typically the (public) companies running the transit systems that have teams that check that you've paid. Gates are almost unheard of for neither bus nor train. (I couldn't name one place in Germany that has gates for public transport at the top of my head.) The police would only get involved, if a passenger is getting violent or threatening to get violent, or won't get off the bus.
In Britain (and Singapore etc) you board the bus at the front, where the bus driver checks your ticket and otherwise will kick you off the bus. The bus driver itself won't get into a physical fight with you. But the bus driver can definitely call for backup and will (presumably) stop the bus and refuse to drive until a recalcitrant passenger has been dealt with. The social contract seems to that all the other passengers will blame the would-be fare evader for the stoppage and back up the driver. But I've never actually seen that acted out completely.
Trains in Singapore and many parts of Britain have gates, and there are usually either some people monitoring the gates for jumpers or at least cameras.
> Do you dedicate policing resources to ensuring the collection of what is certainly less than the cost to employ the police officer? Seems wasteful until you hit a very high ridership.
It's all pretty similar to how parking regulations are enforced: there's some dedicated people who write tickets (not police officers), and the tickets are typically a few dozen dollars.
When I was last in London, I took the tube. Officers were at the exit gates, I presume to arrest anyone jumping the gates. I didn't see any fare evaders.
That was definitely an exception. Enforcement is low. You will occasionally see a team deployed to hot spots but they are spread thin
I see fare evasion almost every time I take the tube
I can't tell if you're feigning not realizing the thread about San Francisco under a post referencing "Iowa City" is probably referring to the US.
Feels like a coy way of getting to say something as inflammatory as "the US a lawless hellhole" on HN: which is fine enough... but there's also a reason YC isn't a Singaporean or Turkish or British or German institution.
It very well might be genuine surprise. Most people from other countries have an extremely hard time understanding why most U.S. cities allow people to openly break the law in front of authorities with zero consequences.
The U.S. is a pretty far outlier in this regard. It's strange how many people in the U.S. don't realize this at all, and become appalled at when foreigners are shocked by the way things are done in U.S. cities.
The US is pretty average I'd say, not an outlier at all.
It's obvious nowhere near e.g. Switzerland or Singapore, for example.
But then on the other hand, people obey the rules a ton more than in places like Brazil or India.
Just as many foreigners are shocked at how polite and orderly Americans are, compared to back home.
The world is a vast and diverse place.
I suspect the US is an outlier amongst rich countries. Especially amongst the richest countries (as measured by GDP per capita).
Well I now I think it might be genuine ignorance because you managed to read my pretty clear comment ("everyone is mentioning US cities, so obviously they're talking about the US") and contort it into whatever you're on about.
Once might be a coincidence, twice might be me overestimating how carefully people read other comments before jumping into conversations.
Shit HN says....
American exceptionalism is just as silly when it’s “America bad.”
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Main reason normal people do not use public transport is this attitude and police giving up on enforcing basic public order on transport. Personally I am voting against any public transport funding until all homeless/druggies are kicked off public transport (even if they are willing to pay). You have to pass certain very low behavior bar to use public transport (no intoxication, no aggression to other passengers, no smell, no shouting random things).
It's not rocket science and other countries figured out how to do it.
It's not a policing problem, it's a homelessness and mental health problem.
You'll never have enough police for regular enforcement on buses. The numbers don't add up, not even remotely.
Other countries do a better job when they're able to keep people off the streets in the first place. Which then becomes a much more complicated question about social spending and the civil liberties of mentally ill people who don't want to be institutionalized.
Same here -- except for roads. I'm opposed to all road funding until all drivers follow the letter of the law.
Car-related taxes (vehicle sales, gas tax, yearly registration fees, in some cases tolls) have historically covered the majority of roadway infrastructure costs. I don't think free buses are going to be able to maintain the roadways.
A common misconception; usage fees only covered about 50% of highway-related expenses a few years ago. Feel free to find the latest numbers. This is less than the fare box recovery ratio of many transit systems, though not all.
And that, of course, does not include all the unpriced externalities of roads. For example, if you value a life at $1M, then the 40,000 people killed by drivers each year cost us collectively another $40B.
I kind of agree. I grew up with a well-funded, well-staffed railway which has suffered slow managed decline, so I've got pretty good frames of reference.
A big problem now is people playing loud music, loud TikToks, phonecalls and videocalls on speaker phone (almost the default), feet on seats, vaping, bags on seats etc.
There are now no staff who enforce the norms and laws (Yup some of that legally could land you a prosecution if the railway chooses that).
Yes, society was less anti-social 20-30 years ago but IMO with strict enforcement of heavy punishment, the issues could be stamped out.
What's interesting is that one fairly large section of the railway does still have lots of staff who enforce anti-social behaviour (Merseyrail – they operate somewhat independently) and from what I've read and heard is that there tend to be far fewer issues in that network than the rest of the network. It's interesting to have the two areas to compare.
Unfortunately this governments want to continue defunding the railways, and so are happy with the cycle of managed decline and people opting to drive instead.
I used to be extremely pro public transport but it's fighting a losing battle. Trains are overpriced, delayed, cramped and anti-social
> "Normal people do not use public transit... kick all homeless off (even if they are willing to pay)"
At the risk of feeding the trolls, I have to object to this ignorant, callous, brutal bs. Please, read this account^1 of NBA player Chris Boucher staying alive by riding public transit, and try to put yourself in his shoes for a moment.
[1] https://www.theplayerstribune.com/chris-boucher-nba-boston-c...
Thank you to share that article. It is chilling.
> Personally I am voting against any public transport funding until all homeless
Statistically you're just a few days of bad luck from being both homeless and carless. What's your plan for getting to work to not be in that situation?
> Statistically you're just a few days of bad luck from being both homeless and carless.
What makes you think so? The poster you replied to might be sitting on a decent nest egg, have supportive friends and family, and insurance against all contingencies.
And some people are willing to bite the bullet and even say: 'Well, in that case, I shouldn't be on the bus, either.
Though it's fairly clear from context that the commenter you replied to doesn't want to check every person's home address before they are let on the bus. They want to ban anti-social behaviour on the bus, and 'homeless' is just a short hand for that, unfortunate as it is.
And a few days of bad luck might make you lose your home, but won't necessarily turn you into a drunk who shouts a lot.
> What makes you think so?
"In effect, more than half of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and one crisis away from homelessness." https://www.usich.gov/guidance-reports-data/data-trends
I don't know the commenter specifically - that's why I said statistically.
> Though it's fairly clear from context
Ah, the classic "didn't mean the well presented part of group X when I said X". That's a cliche way to mask prejudice. No, if they didn't actually mean homeless, I'm calling them out on writing "homeless".
> "In effect, more than half of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and one crisis away from homelessness."
They say that, but they don't really substantiate that on the page you linked to.
If only we could follow links and had some form of search for similar text to find multiple studies published on that topic...
> Personally I am voting against any public transport funding until all homeless/druggies are kicked off public transport (even if they are willing to pay).
That's a bit silly. I have sympathies for your views, but you can't have a policy of literally 0. Even spotless places like Singapore don't achieve that, even though they come pretty close.
If the fares aren't enforced, then yes, the buses are free.
Sadly, there's very little enforcement of fares on SF buses.
You clearly haven’t used MUNI. Homeless are already riding the buses without paying, and I’ve rarely seen them camp in them. Most bus drivers know these people on a first name basis and very few of them are actually do anything beyond going from place to place.
And if you’re from San Francisco and use MUNI, you’ll also know that half the people don’t pay anyway. There’s no reason to make people pay.
I see a lot of homeless people on the 14 and they’re just chilling going from place to place. 38 however can have some very mentally ill people on it. My friend saw this guy on the 38 who was yelling about how much he hates the Japanese. Funny enough that guy got off at Japantown.
Rambling aside, I think it’s unfair to give people shit because they’re homeless. The real issue is we don’t commit people to psychiatric care when they’re clearly a problem in our society.
> The real issue is we don’t commit people to psychiatric care when they’re clearly a problem in our society.
I’m old enough to remember when we did that. The homeless population absolutely skyrocketed, after all the mental institutions were closed in the 1980s and 1990s.
That said, many of them were hellholes. It’s sort of arguable as to whether the patients were worse off, but one thing’s for sure; the majority of city-dwellers (the ones with homes) are not better off, now. I’m really not sure who benefited from this.
Here, on Long Island (NY), we have some of the largest psychiatric centers in the world; almost all completely shut down, and decomposing.
The campuses are gorgeous, but can’t be developed, because they would require hundreds of millions of dollars in cleanup.
If we want to reopen them we owe it to the patients to make them a nice place to be.
> The real issue is we don’t commit people to psychiatric care when they’re clearly a problem in our society.
Where do you draw that line though? Are you really okay with committing people, i.e. imprisoning and medicating people, because society seems to find those people inconvenient?
Personally I've never understood any justification for committing a person without their consent. The line between being committed and being extra judicially imprisoned seems indistinguishable to me.
> Where do you draw that line though? Are you really okay with committing people, i.e. imprisoning [...] people, because society seems to find those people inconvenient?
Well, that's what prison is, for some value of "inconvenient".
The problem is that at some point, if someone refuses to abide by laws/social norms, and can't be coerced via fines, etc., then the only options the state, and society has are either imprisonment, or allowing those people to ignore laws/social norms. Clearly some social norms (e.g. serious crimes) we aren't okay with ignoring, so it's really just a question of what the threshold is where we do something vs. allowing people to disregard said laws/norms.
> Personally I've never understood any justification for committing a person without their consent. The line between being committed and being extra judicially imprisoned seems indistinguishable to me.
Presumably the process to commit someone can involve the judiciary, so it wouldn't be extra-judicial.
Prison isn't for people that society finds inconvenient and, if on a jury, I hope you don't view it that way.
Prison is for those convicted of a crime by a jury of their peers. There must not only be a criminal law on the books, you must be found guilt by trial.
Involuntary committal involves no laws being broken and there is no jury. I don't know every detail of that process though I am familiar with the general flow, I know multiple people that work in related roles, and my understanding from them is that it is generally not down through a legal proceeding.
Juries are a just an implementation detail of the justice system used by Britain and some of its former colonies.
I'm talking at a higher level - I'm saying that conceptually, "inconvenience" ranges from mild offences to murder, and society has to decide where to draw some line for inconveniences that it will not permit. If someone is determined to re-offend, regardless of severity, the state's only choices are to either let them re-offend, or to use force to prevent it.
In the earlier discussion of involuntary commitment, there is often little or no judicial process offered at all. Its more akin to extra judicial detention than a criminal case.
Part of the surge of mass incarceration was that people who would have been hospitalized in an earlier time now get warehoused in a place that isn’t equipped to treat them.
What scares me about deinstitutionalization is that there are ways that people can ‘exit’ as in: move to the suburbs, drive instead of take public transportation, order a private taxi for your burrito instead of go to a restaurant. If public spaces can’t protect themselves we’ll have nothing but private spaces.
> Part of the surge of mass incarceration was that people who would have been hospitalized in an earlier time now get warehoused in a place that isn’t equipped to treat them.
Puts a different spin on the System of a Down lyrics, "The percentage of Americans in the prison system (prison system) has doubled since 1985" (Prison Song, Toxicity, 2001).
This further reinforces the other complaints (in the song) about drug offences landing people in jail, some of them from self-medicating a mental illness they can't or won't get treatment for
Those mental institutions weren’t equipped to treat them either. They were just awful places full of abuse and other cruelty.
There may be a better option, but the status quo of closing our eyes and waiting for them to physically harm someone isn’t just either.
What if busses are a solution for the carless people. (un-carred?)
More fear mongering about the 'other'. Not immigrants or religous groups or racial groups this time, but unhoused and addicted people.
The dangerous people are the ones spreading fear - that leads to horrible things. I've had no problem with unhoused people who I am around almost every day. Why would I?
All the fear mongering is wrong. You have nothing to fear but fear itself.
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> Example: the City has been trying to get rid of the RVs parked illegally on the streets, dumping their effluents and engine oil all over the City streets. To get these RVs off the streets, the City is spending $36M+ (and counting). So money can be found for the homeless, the RV dwelllers, etc. but not for the city's lawful residents and taxpayers.
I'd have to assume that the ones who are driving the political political pressure for this money to be spent as it is are the so-called "lawful residents and taxpayers"; I'm sure the groups you mention facing extra scrutiny would be happy for that money to go towards the buses instead. It's not hard to imagine that certain issues like RV parking get outsized attention pretty much for the exact same reason that the buses don't.
SF's budget doesn't contain $15B of money it can use for whatever it wants. Most of it isn't discretionary, either because of voter mandates or by federal/state government requirements and has to go to specific programs. A good chunk is actually city businesses (hospitals, airport, utility, port, etc.) which mostly break even.
SF was able to spend money trying to getting rid of RVs because it was living on emergency money from the state and shifting capital expenditure priorities around (capital expenditures costs are offset mostly by the asset you're buying, at least in the short term).
That emergency money is gone now, so now we're living in an era of budget cuts, though given SF's history, I full expect it to spend money recklessly and hope revenue turns around, but even they aren't so far gone to add $300M in operating expenditures to make MUNI free with no plan for a source of revenue to make up the difference.
The net revenue would be lower than $200M. There are substantial costs associated with ticket revenue collection, from the % payment gateways charge, the maintenance and replacement cost the devices and turnstiles hardware, all the software and people who have to manage and enforce the system.
The issue with SF (unlike Iowa city) is that free for all everybody is going to be harder sell to voters when there is large amount of out of city traffic -travelers and greater Bay Area residents who do not pay city taxes.
What is more realistic is extend subsidies to all residents of the city beyond the current programs for youth/seniors/homeless/low income etc.
SF Muni is literally so deep in a financial hole, service may be cut in half next summer if they don't pass a sizable spending measure (the last two both failed). SFMTA faces a deficit of about $320 million starting next year... and that will grow. The system has already been bailed out by the state. We now going to get a $750 million loan is just to keep the system functioning until the measure has a chance to pass.
This platitude of "Muni should be free" has no bearing on reality when the system is literally collapsing as we speak.
https://www.sfmta.com/project-updates/sfmtas-financial-crisi...
https://sfstandard.com/2025/09/10/routes-eliminated-trains-o...
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/politics/bay-area-transit-ba...
> There is no reason why Muni can't be free. Surely a city with a budget of $15B can find $200M (about 1.5% of budget) to make up for the shortfall?
How many other $200M projects should they just "find" budget for? Only the one you like?
> That means, 5/6th of the budget is subsidized by the taxpayers of SF. There is no reason why Muni can't be free.
You'd still want to charge for congestion. Ie when a particular bus (or rather bus route) is reliably full at a particular time of the day, gradually raise prices until it's just below capacity.
Basically, you want to transport the maximum number of passengers while making it so that any single person who wants to get on the bus (at prevailing prices) still can.
Instead of a bespoke dynamic system that adjust prices dynamically, you might want to keep it simple and just have a simple peak / off-peak distinction.
Oh, hear me out, add more buses so that those people don’t have to get into a car and create traffic.
If you add so many buses that there's no congestion at all during the worst rush hour, you'll have enormous extra capacity just uselessly sitting around the rest of the day.
Obviously you'd want both: charge for congestion, and use the price signals you get to help you decide where (and when) to add capacity.
Resources are limited, and buying yet another bus and hiring an extra bus driver just to shave the last tiny bit of congestion off Monday morning might be a noble ideal, but you might be better off using those funds to pay for another free school meal (or whatever other do-goodery is the best use of the marginal dollar).
With what money? Your fares are a good sign of value for riders
Overfull buses is also a good sign of value for riders.
> So money can be found for the homeless, the RV dwelllers, etc. but not for the city's lawful residents and taxpayers.
But it's those lawful residents and taxpayers paying for it if you make it free anyway. They're just paying through their taxes rather than through fares. So still all taxpayer money, just non-riding taxpayers subsidizing riding taxpayers. Why is that better?
In Brisbane, Australia they run a 6-month trial to make all public transport trips to be 50c (that includes buses, metro, ferries). It was so successful and widely loved that it was a no-brainier for it to be extended indefinitely
Kansas City added a single light rail line through downtown and made it, initially, free.
It has been so wildly popular, bringing happy Kansas Citians to the restaurants and clubs downtown that the business owners begged KC to keep it free.
Still free and I believe they are extending it.
I would love to see K.C. bring back some of the jazz nightlife that once charged downtown. (Though it might have been the availability of liquor there during Prohibition too.)
All I see in this thread are people saying it won't work and then people giving examples of it actually working quite well. The scientific method is telling us something here...
Yes, the scientific methods suggest that 99.9% of all systems and almost all of the very best highest performing systems have fares. 'Light rail' in the US are barley even transportation systems. At best they are property value plays by cities. Running a single line in a city full of cars isn't really interesting data.
And in other places they had light year that gets paid that had effects that were much the same.
Once you are talking about an actual working transportation system and not the occasional line here and there. Where it is actually real then there is a clear scientific question. Lets assume 500M to operate the system:
Should you A: Invest 500M in service improvements every year
Should you B: Invest 500M in giving away free transport
And the science on this is perfectly clear.
(The irony though of once having had a fantastic trolley system throughout Kansas City in the early part of the 20th Century and having ripped that all out by the time I was born.)
it could work much better.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good? (Or whatever the saying is.)
If this impedes progress in the future is this really good? We already have a good situation with fares, we should make it better - and when you look at the data (as opposed to what people say) it consistently shows that the main reason most people don't use transit more is lack of service and not the cost. Optimizing on cost helps a few really poor people (which everyone against this plan has already said we need some program to just help them), while it does nothing for everyone else who need service.
Or to put it a different way, it costs money to run transit. So what if we take the money you are proposing to add to cover the loss of fares and give it to the transit agency but retain fares: they could afford to add more service and I contend that this would do far more for ridership. (assuming we are smart about what service we add)
Between Green Lady Lounge, the Black Dolphin, the Phoenix, and a couple of cool spots on 18th and Vine, Kansas City’s jazz nightlife is becoming increasingly popular again among younger crowds. KC also just finished extending their street car system down past the Plaza to UMKC’s campus as well, mostly in preparation for hosting the World Cup.
I moved from Iowa City to Kansas City after college so I have been spoiled with public transit.
I think the cost saving will be realised by not having to expand the road network as quickly if they convince people to use public transport. The cost of land acquisition/resumption along with the improbability of widening some central bottlenecks like Coronation Drive, the SE Arterial and the hell-hole that is Hale Street.
Personally, the $1 commute from the Sunshine Coast has been very good. I occasionally drive in but the Bruce Hwy has been a constant process of widening each section as they barely keep up with the traffic increases.
I think what you will see is a lot more people moving out to residential areas north of Brisbane seeking cheaper housing as they can take advantage of the almost free travel. Especially if they eventually build the Rail/Light Rail through South Caloundra to Maroochydore.
The real benefits come from eliminating fares.
While I have never lived in a place with free transit, I have lived in places where it was possible to board trains without passing through fare gates and certain busses through the rear exit. It is amazing how much faster boarding is. They probably face some lost fares, but the benefit of faster travel times outweigh the cost.
I also think that those criticizing free fares are disingenuous. None of those cities had problems with (insert stereotypical undesirable group) using public transit. If anything, there were fewer issues because everyone was more inclined to behave since there were more eyes on the trains and busses.
EDIT: it's also worth noting that collecting money costs money. That's especially noticeable when upgrading to (or to new) electronic fare systems, but it's also true when using things like tickets and cash. It probably doesn't mean such in the cities I've lived in ($3+ fares), but I'll bet it accounts for a lot more in cities that charge $0.50 or $1 fares.
>The real benefits come from eliminating fares.
IIRC the 50 cent fares allow them to still charge ridiculous fines for fare evasion, keeping the Queensland Rail rentacops in business.
Most non metro stations only have tap on pillars and no fare gates anyway, and I think the inner city fare gates that still exist are on the list for removal.
The 50 cents also allowed them to track the changing usage profile and justify it by the explosion of use. Its basically self reporting that you used the system, and the origin and destination of your trip. Otherwise they would need to install foot traffic counters at train and bus stations and still end up with incomplete data.
It wasnt just super popular, it was that the data showed such a dramatic uptick in usage, which carried over to numbers of cars removed from the roads etc.
Probably took 5 minutes out of my normal commute, and that's in reduced vehicle traffic, I don't use the system at all except to take my kiddo to the museum on weekends. Benefits tracked to all punters results in an absolutely untouchable policy change.
I’ve lived in civilized places, but uncivilized is probably more common: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-14/horror-t...
It's shockingly easy to scare some people away from public transit. Same city, private transport:
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-08-13/carjacki...
Personally, I would rather be on a bus with someone high on drugs than be carjacked at gunpoint.
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Here in Portland, riders can get high just by licking the windows.
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/health/trimet-max-fentanyl-...
When you have the electronic ticketing system already in place like Brisbane it makes sense to use it to monitor usage, so you can precisely see each journey, and better plan scheduling and expansion. For example, you would be able to see how many people pass through the two CBD stations crossing the North/South divide in the network. The new Cross River Rail expansion for example will be the first line that doesn't pass through Central.
Bit of a bugbear of mine, but the cross river rail project is mostly a stopgap. Brisbane really needed standard gauge and double decker trains before it became so built up. We are already at trains per minute capacity for some of the inner city bridges, and duplication in the inner city is highly destructive. If we could increase the capacity of the vehicles themselves we would be way better off. But the cheap/compromise position is to just bypass the problem entirely.
Whats worse is that, theres a certain perspective, one of declining CBD use, where cross river rail makes a mountain of sense. But in that case we should be bypassing the CBD with a lot of room for expansion, ie, 8 lines worth of track. But this isnt being done either.
>When you have the electronic ticketing system already in place like Brisbane it makes sense to use it to monitor usage
This and being able to continue charging fines is why it was left in place 100%
> None of those cities had problems with (insert stereotypical undesirable group) using public transit.
Austin. Tried it and rolled it back.
It was before my time here but I’ve heard: Homeless camped on the buses. Bored teens hung out on the buses riding nowhere and making trouble. Bus drivers demanded the change back.
I’m an economist and YIMBY activist. Only 10% to 15% of the Austin bus system budget comes from fares. (Most is a 1% sales tax.) I’d love to make the buses free. But it has negatives.
> I also think that those criticizing free fares are disingenuous. None of those cities had problems with (insert stereotypical undesirable group) using public transit.
I’ve lived in two cities with free fare zones: Subsections of public transport where no fares are collected, but if you want to go outside of the zone you need to buy a ticket.
The free fare zones were far more likely to have people causing problems. It’s not just “undesirable groups”. It’s people stealing your stuff if you aren’t paying attention, stalking women, creating messes, or just harassing people who want to be left alone.
Then you’d leave the free fare zone and see almost none of that. It was night and day different. This was within the same city, same mode of transport. The only difference was that one vehicle had someone maybe checking your fare 1/10 times and writing a ticket if you didn’t have it, while the other you were guaranteed not to encounter anyone checking tickets and could ride as long as you wanted.
I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss anyone concerned about this. Unless you have sufficient enforcement to go along with it and the enforcers are empowered to deal with people who are causing problems, having free fares can be a real problem.
It was nice to not have to deal with ticket purchases when going to a sporting event or meeting up with friends at a bar, but this was mostly before apps came along anyway. I don’t go out as much now that I’m older but using the apps to buy tickets is trivially easy. Even the tickets by stations will accept tap to pay from phones making it much more convenient than my younger days.
> It’s not just “undesirable groups”. It’s people stealing your stuff if you aren’t paying attention, stalking women, creating messes, or just harassing people who want to be left alone.
This seems to be a symptom, not a cause. The free zone, let me guess, more densely populated, city center area, and the not free zone, a bit less urban? Smells like income disparity zoning.
I mean if you think about, doesn't it seem a bit off to suggest that the prevalence of crime would be affected by whether a bus is free or not? My instinct is to get further into why there's crime happening at all, on or off bus. Why does it happen there, and not e.g. here in Taipei? Or other places with tons of public transit going on and very low crime, like Japan? The PRC?
> This seems to be a symptom, not a cause. The free zone, let me guess, more densely populated, city center area, and the not free zone, a bit less urban?
The free fare zone was only included a subset of the city and only applied to certain modes of transportation.
> Smells like income disparity zoning.
Not really. I don’t see why it’s hard to believe that areas with no enforcement are a draw for people who want to e.g. ride a warm train than the areas with enforcement.
> I mean if you think about, doesn't it seem a bit off to suggest that the prevalence of crime would be affected by whether a bus is free or not?
No? It’s not just crime, it’s harassment, antisocial behavior, and other things that are not strictly crimes but you don’t want to be around. A lot of crimes are crimes of opportunity where someone strikes because they’re in the same place as you and see an opening. The more time they’re in the place, the more opportunities for those crimes.
> No? It’s not just crime, it’s harassment, antisocial behavior, and other things that are not strictly crimes but you don’t want to be around. A lot of crimes are crimes of opportunity where someone strikes because they’re in the same place as you and see an opening. The more time they’re in the place, the more opportunities for those crimes.
Isolating people from each other is a really dystopian "solution" to reduce crime and antisocial behavior. Things naturally tend to happen more when people come together – in both good and bad. The good usually outweighs the bad by a wide margin.
In most systems, fares just about cover the cost of collecting fares. They contribute little if anything to operating expenses. Their effect is to limit usage. That could be desirable, but usually not.
I've tried to calculate this for the New York City Metro, but they spend about $1 billion per year collecting $5 billion per year, out of a budget of $20 billion per year. Year so they would need to make up about $4 billion per year if they were to eliminate fare collection, or increase the budget by 20%.
In my mind it would be a no-brainer for all the benefits you would get from free service, but 20% increase in cost is not an easy sell - especially when a lot of people paying tax on it never go to NYC
If more people use it, the operating cost will increase. So it'll be a bit more than 20%.
… or service quality deteriorates. Political support for free buses you can’t actually ride collapses.
I’m getting a real feeling of “nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.”
While we should never expect public transit to be self funding removing fares removes the ability for transit funds to scale with ridership, there is a reason that farebox ratios are correlated with ridership.
It's self funding in places like Japan and Hong Kong, but these places also engage in value capture. Train services in these places are basically real estate companies with trains attached to them. They diversified by making train stations shopping malls.
In any case, cities can engage in value capture for public transportation. Just direct some of the property taxes collected directed to public transit. Even better would be some sort of LVT, ideally but not necessary 100% of the economic rent from land.
In any case, public transit should also engage in value capture on their own property. If they own a train station, they should consider building on top or adjacent to it spaces that they can then rent out to tenants. It's not only efficient but also serve the public and the local economy and making public transit more economical to run due to higher ridership.
NYC also has subway stations with intense commerce, e.g. the Columbus Circle, or some bits around Herald Square. As a regular user, I find this convenient.
Almost every smaller station shows ads on walls, too, and every train carriers ads inside.
I don't see why the subway specifically could not be self-sufficient, or even a profit center. Sadly, this is not so, because of very large expenses, not because of low revenue.
Brick and mortar shopping really seems to be struggling in the US since covid, though. It’s possible some transit systems could add malls above some of their stations, but a lot of cities still have persistently high retail vacancies, and even suburban malls aren’t what they were a few decades ago.
And urban malls and chain stores are frankly often depressing — awkward layouts translated imperfectly from suburban sprawl, along with obviously underpaid and burned out staff.
Selling food works well though. I won't mind grabbing some bagels right past the turnstiles, especially if it means not standing by a food truck outside when it's cold and drizzling.
Japan uses employer subsidy to break even. It a below the line tax in the same way health insurance is in the US.
What do you mean by employer subsidy here? Are you referring to the system where employers reimburse the costs of transit fees for commutes?
Many companies in Tokyo prevent their employees from commuting by car (legally commute is covered by workers comp insurance, and many companies do not elect the more expensive car coverage option) - so even in the absence of workers paying for the commute, public transit (or bike/walk) would be the only realistic option.
> They diversified by making train stations shopping malls.
Like airports in America. We should pursue a similar path for our rail stations and, frankly, ensure they are heading toward locations that are walkable and connected.
Sure, yet it also established a double standard. In my neck of the woods, most busses operate on municipal roads. Municipal roads are funded by municipal taxes, and the municipality does not have the right to charge fuel taxes. The revenue that they collect from drivers is from parking and parking permits in a tiny fraction of the city, as well as property taxes on the low value land used for parking lots. City council would face a bloodbath if they tried to increase revenues for road maintenance directly from road users. Never mind asking those users cover the cost of appropriating land and new road construction, which is being driven by the excessive use of vehicles that are occupied by one or two people. Yet transit users are typically expected to fund about half of transit operations. If they're lucky, the provincial or federal government will throw some money their way for new busses.
It's hard to draw a direct comparison because people who never drive still benefit significantly from the existence of the roads. It might be possible to drill down far enough so that it was charged directly to every use case for the road, but I bet it would end up in about the same place in the end but with a lot more bureaucracy.
People who never use public transit still benefit from its existence too.
same for libraries and home owners paying their millage taxes
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I live in the SF Bay Area. For a family weekend day trip to SF, taking BART costs $50+, and we always elect to just drive.
I wonder how much the traffic would improve in/out of SF if BART is cheaper.
So many public transit options just absolutely fall about if you have more than the standard 1.5 kids.
It adds up super fast; even “kids ride free with parent” would go a long way.
Perhaps, but with more transit options that means fewer people on the road which is good for those who have 2+ children to lug around.
On a side note we should drop the public bit of this because it implies a bus is “publicly funded” but highways aren’t. Both are subsidized by the taxpayer.
Why are you equating busses to roads and not cars? Cars are not subsidized and in fact car-related taxes (vehicle sales, gas tax, yearly registration fees, in some cases tolls) have historically covered the majority of roadway infrastructure costs. Without car related taxes, we would absolutely need to charge bus fees to subsidize roadway costs, and they would probably need to be pretty steep.
Who Pays for Roads?
~ https://frontiergroup.org/resources/who-pays-roads/Road Taxes and Funding by State, 2025
Looking through the list,
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-road-taxes-fu...
that's about what I expected. And that's not even including sales tax from car purchases, and maintenance related spending. Suffice to say, without cars, a year bus pass would need to run ~ however much the average person spends per year on all car related taxes.
Well it wouldn’t because we wouldn’t have as many people driving cars, so there wouldn’t need to be as many roads so costs would be much lower.
In Ohio we just spend $2bn on about 2 miles of road to effectively temporarily ease congestion. That’s $2bn paid for by taxpayers regardless of how it’s paid, that we didn’t necessarily need to spend.
I’d also like to add, yes that “bus ticket” (I’m no fan of busses for short term travel) might be a little more expensive but consumer costs overall would’ve likely to go down. Why? Well in addition to already paying for highway infrastructure you’re paying $30,000, $50,000, &c . on a vehicle, plus insurance, gas, repairs, tires, maintenance, interest on loans, &c. So while I think it’s hard to compare apples to apples, I think it’s good to have this information in mind as well when discussing this topic broadly.
Thanks. Yea also not accounting for other social costs - obesity, teen deaths, first responders and police spending time rescuing people who are maimed in car crashes.
There are benefits too and all, just saying we don’t really have a full cost readily available for comparison because it’s hard to measure, never mind the literal dollars and cents that go into funding.
> On a side note we should drop the public bit of this because it implies a bus is “publicly funded” but highways aren’t. Both are subsidized by the taxpayer.
Arguably, neither of them should be. Give poor people money, instead of giving free highway access (and bus transit) to rich and poor alike. Rich people don't need our help, and poor people would rather have the money to spend as they wish instead of other people deciding for them what alms they should consume.
Individual cars have worse externalities than busses, so that means we should tax them more than busses. Though I suspect once drivers of cars and busses are paying non-subsidised prices for road access and fuel, busses will naturally look better in comparison, no extra tax differential needed.
The poor I want to help the most are not mentally able to handle money. I know someone who gave money to 'nigerain prince' scams several times - a nice guy but he has no idea scams exist even after that.
Sure. That's a decent argument for paternalism for some people.
It's independent of the argument against giving well-off people free stuff.
Not exactly because as soon as you realize it doesn't solve the most important problems the a side effect of giving to well-off people as well becomes easier to argue against as well. If we need to identify those who cannot handle money then we may as well use that same effort to identify who doesn't need help in the first place. Not that your point doesn't stand, but it isn't as powerful.
Note that I don't know how to identify people who cannot handle money. I know individuals, but how to you fairly do this in a way that doesn't get abused or abuse someone - both have been major problems with every plan to help the poor in the past.
> Note that I don't know how to identify people who cannot handle money. I know individuals, but how to you fairly do this in a way that doesn't get abused or abuse someone - both have been major problems with every plan to help the poor in the past.
Welfare (nor any other undertaking) doesn't have to be perfect. Good enough is good enough. And you can always optimise over time, as you learn. There's plenty of programmes out in the real world and throughout history to learn from: the good programmes as examples to perhaps imitate, the bad programmes as illustrations of what to avoid.
> If we need to identify those who cannot handle money then we may as well use that same effort to identify who doesn't need help in the first place.
Isn't that perfectly compatible with what I'm suggesting? (Though I'm not quite sure they are actually the same kind of effort. Looking at eg people's taxable income is rather different from judging their mental state.)
I'm making two points:
(A) Don't bother giving welfare to the well-off.
(B) Prefer cash payments over in-kind provision, where possible.
You convinced me to add the 'where possible' clause, because there are some cases were people can't handle money. Though I hold that these spendthrifts should be dealt with as a special case, and not be the default template for how we treat everyone else.
> You convinced me to add the 'where possible' clause, because there are some cases were people can't handle money.
I'm not really in favor of or against UBI, but I think that your assessment here isn't quite right. It's not that there are some cases where people can't handle money, it's actually the norm that people can't handle money, at least in America. And when you expand your scope to include folks with steady jobs and such and "can" handle money, they don't really make enough money such that their better handling of money will make a difference either. UBI kind of rests on this assumption that people will "spend their money wisely" or spend their money efficiently - but people will spend their money in obviously stupid ways and then we'll deal with the consequences anyway because as a society we are not willing to let people die on the street. To be fair, not all who would make use of UBI would do so in a poor fashion, and like you said don't let perfect become the enemy of good.
Most people who are competent and kind enough to look at these kinds of problems and want to provide a great solution for them out of the kindness of their heart, in my estimation, just do not have experience dealing with the target population and understanding the true limitations of just giving a little bit of help.
If you grew up in a roughly middle class environment, went to college afterward, etc. and you didn't know any crackheads in your family, you probably should stay far away from trying to find solutions for these problems because you're just going to wind up frustrated and wrong about worthwhile solutions for the rest of your life which will distract anyone from actually making progress. I'm not suggesting this about you or anything, just speaking broadly. Most of the time people working on these issues are like product managers who just care about what the data says instead of having a really good intuition for the "customer" or the "problem".
Back to UBI itself I actually think it should go to everyone, because at the end of the day those who are high earners are just going to net out paying for it, and it'll be simpler to administer if "everyone gets it" and there's less room to complain about it and less hand-wringing and adjustments for whatever excuse people come up with for who gets some and who gets more. If everyone gets it, there's much less arguing about that stuff.
The best part about a potential UBI implementation is that we can replace all of the government workers administering and declaring who is eligible for benefits whether that's SNAP or Welfare and one dude can be sitting at home and push the big red "send checks" button with an offshore team in India in case that guy is too drunk to do his job.
Maybe just providing free healthcare and dental care, job training and education, and a sack of fresh produce is the way to go too. I'm not sure.
I'm not sure why you bring up UBI? Government welfare for poor people in eg Germany (and many other countries) is mostly handed out as money, but it's not a UBI. Whether a UBI is a good idea is indeed a wholly separate discussion.
> If you grew up in a roughly middle class environment, went to college afterward, etc. and you didn't know any crackheads in your family, you probably should stay far away from trying to find solutions for these problems because you're just going to wind up frustrated and wrong about worthwhile solutions for the rest of your life which will distract anyone from actually making progress.
I grew up on welfare in the place formerly known as East Germany. Bleak times. Not sure that will get me past the gate you are keeping here.
(As late as 2006 a government spokesman warned foreign football fans coming for the world cup of no-go areas that they should avoid, if they want to survive. Compared to the 1990s, the late 2000s were the Good Times.)
> Back to UBI itself I actually think it should go to everyone, because at the end of the day those who are high earners are just going to net out paying for it, and it'll be simpler to administer if "everyone gets it" and there's less room to complain about it and less hand-wringing and adjustments for whatever excuse people come up with for who gets some and who gets more. If everyone gets it, there's much less arguing about that stuff.
Someone has to pay the taxes to finance the redistribution. The average person can't get more out of the system than they pay in (by definition of how averaging works).
I would suggest to pay attention to the net effective marginal tax you charge people across the spectrum of incomes. Basically, for every level of income ask: taking account of welfare phase-outs and marginal income tax, how many cents of net income would a person get for an extra dollar in gross income?
This effective marginal tax rate matters a lot more than how you split the rate between welfare phase-outs and other taxes. Yes, for simplicity you could have no welfare phase-outs (aka UBI) and create the whole shape of the taxation graph simply with progressive income tax rates. Or you could merge both systems, and call your UBI a negative income tax.
In any case, what you want to really avoid are sudden cliffs, where an extra dollar in gross income costs you more than a dollar in net income. And ideally, you also want to avoid unduly high marginal rates (even if they are still below 100%) from phasing out multiple, uncoordinated welfare payments.
> The best part about a potential UBI implementation is that we can replace all of the government workers administering and declaring who is eligible for benefits whether that's SNAP or Welfare and one dude can be sitting at home and push the big red "send checks" button with an offshore team in India in case that guy is too drunk to do his job.
Well, as described above at the moment we have (at least) two arms of the government that assess how much you earn: the tax people and the welfare people. My suggestion would be to streamline that into one organisation. At least, if you want to keep an income tax around at all.
> I'm not sure why you bring up UBI?
In the American context that's the generally agreed upon "alternative". There's no appetite for, say, all of the existing welfare programs and also handing out cash. I don't think there's a meaningful distinction between "handing out cash" and "UBI", but of course I want to acknowledge that cash paid or services rendered (healthcare, etc.) can be a mix in an overall scheme and that UBI typically refers to a specific program. To me it's all the same thing with just a mix of how you want to do it but it's not fair of me to suggest that you think of it the same way so I apologize for that.
> Not sure that will get me past the gate you are keeping here.
If you haven't personally deal with or lived with crackheads, homeless, hustlers, etc. you have little to no insight into how to effectively work with people who are experiencing those issues or lifestyle challenges and you just make the problem worse in general while also wasting money.
It's not gatekeeping to suggest one must have more experience with something in order to make informed decisions or create helpful and fair programs. But if you want to call that gatekeeping I'm happy to gate-keep.
Last Tuesday I called the local police because a homeless guy was standing on the side of the road with a good chunk (the size of an average hand or so) of his leg missing, out in the rain at night, in 40 degree weather. He's not doing that because he just needs some UBI or healthcare, and there's no clinic or pamphlet that will "fix" that person's problems.
The ivory tower will tell you we just need to get that person help, a safe place to live, etc. but they're wrong. I'm sure you see a lot of that in Germany too? What do you guys usually do when you see a homeless person in such circumstances? Do you give the money and does that fix the issues?
> Someone has to pay the taxes to finance the redistribution. The average person can't get more out of the system than they pay in (by definition of how averaging works).
That doesn't make any sense at all. Plenty of people in the United States at least get more than they pay in, even if it's not exactly a cash reimbursement. Not that I have a problem with that.
> In any case, what you want to really avoid are sudden cliffs, where an extra dollar in gross income costs you more than a dollar in net income. And ideally, you also want to avoid unduly high marginal rates (even if they are still below 100%) from phasing out multiple, uncoordinated welfare payments.
Right and we can just avoid those by not having restrictions on the income. It doesn't matter if Bill Gates gets a $2,000 UBI check, he's going to more than make up for it in overall taxes (ideally, unfortunately our government is all too happy to tax anyone but the ultra wealthy). I think the same is true for many other folks too and don't think it's a worthwhile concern.
Highway is paid for in vehicle registration and gas taxes.
but not completely - and this is only even talking about maintenance. The initial investment is absolutely not "paid for", because the economic returns from them are privatized, and the tax collection of those private benefits aren't really up to par imho. If it was a private business who did this road/highway investment, they'd be losing money (due to the cost of capital, and the lack of returns from collected tolls/taxes, not to mention the maintenance outlay that comes as a big lumpsum).
Roads are also not public goods in the economic sense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good
> In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good)[1] is a commodity, product or service that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous [...]
That's because roads are rather excludable (see toll roads), and if you've ever been in a traffic jam, you'll notice that road use is rivalrous.
It distinguishes it from private transit like Uber and taxis and even shared ride vans.
If you have any transfers as part of that to muni or other services you'll be happy to know that they'll be much cheaper/free starting in December.
https://clipper2.hikingbytransit.com/
When I had a solar-charged EV, taking transit to SF only made sense if I was going by myself and didn't need to do any transfers. Any additional people or modes and it was always better to drive.
I've found this to be the case nearly everywhere I've travelled, regardless of the kind of vehicle.
The only exceptions are the places with free public transit and expensive parking, like Luxembourg.
This is misleading. How far is your drive from home to your destination in SF? I bet the total cost of ownership per kilometer driven far exceeds the BART fare.
Like many households, they probably have a car already for other reasons.
To me this is big reason why transit has to be basically free to attract riders. It has to compete with marginal cost per kilometer of private car use, not total cost.
Marginal cost of driving is much higher than people think, because they don't count depreciation, maintenance, and insurance. There's a reason the IRS reimbursement rate is $0.70/mi.
True, though it depends quite a lot on the car. If you're driving a second-hand civic or prius, the marginal cost per mile will be much lower than a Mini or a truck. I don't know what it's like for EVs.
Where I live and with what I drive, once there is a single passenger, the car breaks even on the milage. But parking can shift things back in favor of public transit. It's close enough that traffic is always the deciding factor for which mode I take.
If transit were free, I would probably just take it most of the time.
This. No matter what is said to drivers in HN (and the "Real World"), they always have a good reason to drive instead of take transit. No worries about them. We, transit riders, can be productive (read, work, sleep, etc.) during our commutes.
We just need to subsidize public transport like we subsidize roads.
Isn't most public transit already subsidized?
Very much so. When I was younger I assumed fares were for the cost of the public transport, but after following some local budgeting discussions I was stunned by how little the fares covered operating costs.
Small amounts of cost sharing are a useful technique for incentivizing people to make wise decisions in general, so there’s some value in having token small fares. It’s the same difference that shows up when you list something for $10 in your local classifieds as opposed to listing it as FREE. Most people who use classifieds learn early on that listing things for free is just asking for people to waste your time, but listing for any price at all seems to make people care a little more and put some thought into their decisions. I’ve often given things away for free after listing them for small amounts in classifieds because it filters for people who are less likely to waste your time.
That ignores the massive amount of parking and highway subsidies that make the car-first model in the US viable at all. The absurd amount of space given away for free (or below value) in the city to support cars is actually insane. Its just not properly account for.
In a sane world you would either not have any public parking spots, or parking spots that cost so much that about 10-20% of them are empty, and you would have a road use tax (like Singapore).
And American transit systems are uniquely bad at fare recovery because they are just uniquely bad at everything.
Fares income isn't insubstantial -- just as an example I'm familiar with, King County Metro (Seattle area) was ~33% funded by fares before Covid (which destroyed both ridership and percent non-stealing riders). It is material; not "token."
What was funded? You mean operating costs? That’s only part of what it costs to build the lines and do all of the construction, among other things.
You wrote:
> I was stunned by how little the fares covered operating costs.
(And I'm talking about buses -- there's not a ton of construction involved.)
Isn't operating costs what's being discussed here?
What is the behavior you are trying to filter out?
More or less the same thing as patio11's "pathological customers" premise[0]. People who are unwilling to pay a few dollars to ride the bus tend to be extraordinarily antisocial in other ways. Public transit is for the masses; it's not a homeless shelter.
[0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=patio11+%22pathological+custom...
Yes.
US cars get 1 cent per passenger mile.
US Transit gets $2.39 per passenger mile.
https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=22027
Also look up the Farebox Recovery Ratio.
There are values for many US cities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio#United_...
Now add environmental cost.
"While private passenger vehicles contribute 90% of the mileage in the U.S. transportation sector, their emissions share is only 58%. The remaining emissions come from public transit (27%) and other modes including airplanes (13%)."
From :
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01660...
Diving in, that research is less against public transport in general, more about how the US is just not very good at it:
ie. US public transport was inefficient and polluting to begin with, and while it improved somewhat when a prior administration finally applied some funding to the task, US public transport stills woefully lags in comparison about the glone.And parking garage costs
How do you measure it?
Yes, but with fewer dollars than roads.
Not nearly as much as cars and highways are subsidized.
Strong Towns talks quite a bit about how especially suburban roads are not financially sustainable.
strong towns is not honest about it though. Urban areas have been maintaining roads for a long time. They seem to think that if you ammortize a road over 20 year you have to replace it in year 21 but most roads are good for 40+ years
Iowa city doesn't even run buses on the weekends/holidays. I really don't think this should be a model for real urban centers
https://www.icgov.org/government/departments-and-divisions/t...
Most of the routes run Monday thru Saturday. Schedules are something that are easily changed to support demand.
Models are typically smaller scale/scope... So a "real urban center" could probably easily provide service that smaller cities can't.
As to why Iowa City doesn't run on Sundays and Federal Holidays:
The University is about half the population of the city. The University runs a separate "Cambus" system[1] (that the community can also use) and after-hours routes for students[2].
We're also still in relatively early days of finding out how Iowa City residents use public transit when there's no barrier. For instance, they stopped running the downtown shuttle and reduced the number of stops downtown[3] because downtown is relatively dense, walkable, and student-heavy (i.e. mostly young, healthy, ambulatory people) and served by the University.
There's also a growing interest in adding service to nearby towns and adding Sunday service, even if it's in a limited capacity.
1: https://transportation.uiowa.edu/cambus/cambus-service-calen... 2: https://safety.uiowa.edu/nite-ride 3: https://www.icgov.org/Home/Components/News/News/2165/390
So there is nothing to learn her at all?
If you want to look at successful systems, would you look at Paris, London, Berlin, Tokio, Münich, Zürich .... or Iowa City?
I wouldnt call the Munich one successful as in "nailed it". the shortcomings are many and increasingly visible
Everybody loves to complain about their own city, but compare it to US cities and its fine. I just listed a bunch of European cities that I have visited and seemed fine. My point is that if you want to 'learn' there are lots of places that you can take a look at.
Why are you picking on Iowa City? Anti-Americanism? Or is your prejudice more narrowly against the Midwest?
If I want to look at succesful systems, IDGAF where they are, but how they operate.
Are about being serious? Its not 'Anti-American' to point out basic facts that literally everybody knows.
Let's just look at some basic comparison between Iowa City and my own city of the same population (mine is somewhat larger in metro city):
about 1.05 million trips
about 50.1 million trips
Its not even close. Why would you look at some tiny US city that doesn't even have actually good results if you compare it to anybody even halfway competent. Why not look for evidence in systems that are better by LITERALLY EVERY METRIC?
That's the basic issue with looking to the US cities for evidence. Their baseline is so pathetic that 'improvements' isn't really that significant.
So maybe its time to start giving a fuck, and not cherry-picking examples to confirm your bias. Actually learn from the systems that achieve the best results.
Good thing there are plenty of other cities with free bus lines and no one saying “no we have to do everything exactly like Iowa City”!
Paris, Amsterdam, Kopenhagen, Utrecht did it with bikes https://www.ethicalmarkets.com/paris-air-pollution-is-down-5...
I just love cycling in Paris (apart from winter...) the experience is amazing, and the city is beautiful. It's a joy to experience the city this way.
Both bicycles & free transports would be even better !
Do they clear out each bus at some end point of the route, so homeless people can't live on the bus?
Iowa City is in Johnson County. A 2024 point-in-time count of the chronic homeless population--the highly visible population noticeably encountered in public spaces--in Johnson and Washington Counties combined is less than 200 people. See https://opportunityiowa.gov/media/5390/download?inline#page=... There are also only 13 bus routes, and it's a college town with a significant percentage of price-sensitive student ridership (i.e. highly elastic demand) that either wouldn't qualify or wouldn't bother applying for fare subsidies or passes (common in major metro regions). The context is incomparable to major coastal cities.
We know free transit works in many cases. There are plenty of examples. But it's rare to compare and contrast the contexts. (But, see, e.g., this 2012 National Academy of Sciences report: https://cvtdbus.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/2012-07-TCRP-...) It's far easier to promote free transit than it is to address underlying issues, like regulatory barriers to housing production and infrastructure projects, that limit organic improvements to social welfare and which are likely to cause free transit to fail long-term in large, diverse metro areas.
I live there in that city. There are hardly any homeless at all here. Not like other cities at least. I could see it being a major problem in other places.
It does seem that it should be possible to offer "free buses" without having to also offer "free hotels inside of the free buses". As an example, I can go to a local store and experience free parking or go to my nearby town and park for free downtown. I can't, however, park and sleep overnight in my car in that shopping centre or in that town.
Why can't buses be regulated the same way?
Who’s supposed to enforce it? Is the driver supposed to pull over and wake up a sleeping person who has a small but real chance of stabbing them? Any situation where they call the police could be quite a hassle for the other passengers.
It works in every other country.
Because you can’t make a subjective judgement with regard to the worthiness of a particular passenger of a public resource. A car on private property eventually becomes trespassing.
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Can you please not post in the flamewar style here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are?
It's always possible to make your substantive points thoughtfully, so please do that instead. You may not owe people who are wrong about use of buses by the homeless better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I can stop posting in flamewar style but I feel:
> also offer "free hotels inside of the free buses".
Is the inciting flamewar style spark. There is nothing in the article about this specific part. Is it not bad faith argument to insist that all buses every where are used as hotels just because of a few bad experiences? The way the commenter discusses all homeless as either dangerous, addicted drugs, smelly, etc. is incredibly flamewar intending to push stigma on the topic.
If the people who are pushing unfound truths can’t be called out for it, then I guess the FUD spreaders win. The community doesn’t need me. Please scramble this username to something random. I’m out.
I hear you that there was a provocation in that bit. But it's a matter of degree. From my point of view, the GP comment may have been wrong and even bad (let's assume that's so), but by itself that doesn't break the site guidelines. People are allowed to be wrong in comments; it's up to the community to debate what's right vs. wrong and sort that out.
The way to respond to wrong comments is to refute them with better arguments and better information. This can be done without breaking the site guidelines. Of course there are downsides to this approach—it's a lot more time-consuming to patiently refute wrongness than to post it in the first place. But the downsides of breaking the site guidelines are much greater—that path basically leads to conflagration, and we'd like to avoid having this place burn to a crisp. Scorched earth is not interesting (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
For what it's worth, I think you and trollbridge are actually in agreement. Re-read their comment, to me it doesn't imply what you think it does.
I would be in favour of (for example) someone who is attempting to “reside” on a bus being referred to a social worker that then sees to it the person ends up referred to an appropriate shelter.
We are not. I don’t believe homeless people are “using the bus as a hotel” because I actually ride buses unlike the commenter who is afraid and probably has never volunteered or talked to someone less fortunate in their community in their life.
Their username is literally trollbridge! I mean come on.
Last time I visited New York I was lucky to have a companion who knew all the ways to get around including the free bus lines. The people using these buses were no different from those using buses and other public transportation that charged fares.
Ipso facto, eliminating fare collection eliminates crime. Fare evasion as a crime amounts to make-work for cops. Not all value, and often least of all value in public goods, is derived from charging at the point of use.
Having a fare wouldn’t affect this much. It’s not too hard to get someone to spot you a couple of bucks at a bus stop.
Honestly it’s not that big a deal if someone sleeps on the bus. Homeless, drunk, tired from work, whatever.
Everyone, but especially the working poor deserve a civilized way to get to work. Without screaming, smelly, sleeping, druggies taking up the seats. Or worse.
If you’re appalled by the idea, you may not be aware: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-14/horror-t...
LAMetro recently woke up and started cleaning this up. Not sure how long it will take before ridership fully returns.
Bus drivers don't seem too excited to enforce the fare either. They're not exactly law enforcement; it might be dangerous and it would delay everyone else on the bus.
This is just an anecdote, but I got the sense from living in North Liberty, near Iowa City, that the police didn't have much to do. That is, I was pulled over for minor things like going 5 over the speed limit and running a yellow light (when I could have conceivably stopped).
So when I see stories like this I compare it to people suggesting we adopt a Scandinavian public school policy, it worked for them why not us, proposal.
Whenever I hear about this criticism of free public transit I always wonder why the question isn't "how do we keep homeless people from living on our busses" and is instead "why don't these homeless people have some place to live that isn't a bus?"
> I always wonder why the question isn't "how do we keep homeless people from living on our busses"
Similar questions get asked often enough. The problem is that there aren't any easy answers or solutions. Cities have tried different things but none that appear to work for medium to large sized cities.
If you see a city employ a workable solution that can used as a model and be deployed everywhere, that would be awesome.
>Whenever I hear about this criticism of free public transit I always wonder why the question isn't "how do we keep homeless people from living on our busses" and is instead "why don't these homeless people have some place to live that isn't a bus?"
Exactly. and asking the wrong question is nothing new either. there were plenty of folks wondering aloud about how to "get rid of" the homeless people back in the 1980s in NYC (then the homeless population there was ~50,000).
Usually it was some sort of "arrest/detain them all, then reroute them to shelters." The shelters being places where they can be warehoused and victimized over and over again without disturbing the normies or, heaven forfend, the tourists!
Only once did I see the right question being asked. I've searched and searched but have been unable to find the article online. It's an op-ed piece from the Village Voice, circa 1987 by Nat Hentoff or Dan Ridgeway entitled" What Do Homeless People Want?"
Fortunately the question posed in the title is answered in the very first sentence of the body: "Homes, mostly."
Why is it that we're not asking (or acting upon the obvious answers to) the right questions? That's not really rhetorical, although the answers will likely be pretty ugly.
Here in the US we can* do better, and we should do better. This is not a new issue that requires new solutions. Give homeless people, you know, homes.
But that's evil and wrong and absolutely Stalinism that will end up with tens of millions dead, right? Please.
When I was younger and lived near Iowa City homelessness was nearly unseen. Not sure what it's like these days.
I don't live in Iowa City but do live in Iowa; the (visible) homelessness population is still nearly zero. I have to imagine that anyone who finds themselves homeless for long enough will eventually find a way to move indoors (couch surfing, shelters) and become less visible or, if possible, leave the state entirely for warmer climes. Winters just aren't survivable here for the "traditional" homelessness we think of when we envision camps of people in California metros.
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There's nothing "made up" about it. It actually happens. There are areas of this country with endemic homelessness and absolutely no strategy to address it. So, you get the obvious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVKE2pqUjIA
Yeah but what are the actual problems? It shouldn’t be a crime to not have a house. We should probably focus on actual problems like peeing or being intoxicated on the bus which are the actual harms.
Falling asleep on a bus is a great way to get victimized. The homeless are most likely to be victimized by other homeless. It almost never gets reported to the police.
It's not a shelter and it's not meant to be converted into one. To me it's an indication of an overworked and failing system that leaves people in bad situations because it has nowhere else for them to go.
Sure, you could argue that because there's currently no obvious major problems, that you could just leave it as is and be entirely unconcerned with it, or even go so far as to suggest that anyone who does want to fix it is doing so in bad faith. I think that's cruel and lazy.
The actual problem? These people need _real_ shelter.
Whilst it's not a crime not to have a house, providing housing via free buses is a very poor way to address people who don't have houses, and it has an unfortunate side effect of pushing people who would otherwise use public transportation away from using it.
You see this in public libraries in major cities. They're open to everyone, so they become shelters of last resort for homeless folks. The large presence of homeless people discourages the public at-large from using the library as a library. That in turn weakens the political will to continue funding libraries.
I live in an area where the homeless by and large are well served (lots of halfway houses), so despite being a generally impoverished area in terms of bottom quintile of income or percent of population on food stamps and so forth, public facilities like buses and libraries get to be used for their intended purpose.
A library levy recently passed despite being in a deep-red political jurisdiction. If families couldn’t use the library without contending with people using it as a residential facility, it wouldn’t have passed.
Do daily commutes by bus in a major west coast city. You'll quickly find this is no made up problem.
It must not have anything to do with free fares, then, so it seems like an irrelevant thing to bring up here. There are no major west coast cities with free buses.
Homeless already often get access to free or cheap passes, often that allow unlimited rides.
Insisting that we charge everyone a bus fare because we think otherwise it might make it eaier to homeless people to use the bus is not only uninformed, but also heartless.
If you have problems with homeless people on buses, then figure out why those people aren't in a better shelter and solve that problem.
It’s not easy to shelter people.
In Ithaca we recently built this place
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/115398619308992584
which is all low income housing on top of a conference center with maybe 1/4 of the units for people who had been unhoused. I think most of the people there are not criminally minded and keep to themselves but there are a few people there who are starting fires, dealing drugs, and causing damage. (Note a few windows in that image are busted out) Many homeless people have dogs that are important to them and wouldn’t be housed if they couldn’t bring their dogs, but… last year they had an outbreak of parovirus because dogs were having puppies and the puppies weren’t getting shots. A friend of mine got bit by a dog across the street from that place and thought it belonged to someone who lived there.
Some of it is people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder can be almost impossible to live with if they aren’t getting treatment and I’m worried that deinstitutionalization will have a even more profoundly negative legacy seen 50 years from now than it already does. Not least, a 20 year old today spent many years of their life in a classroom where a ‘special’ kid sucked all the air out of the room and will probably be highly receptive to the notion that if we ‘get rid’ of 5% of people we can live in a utopia. If being in public means being in a space dominated by someone screaming at the demons they hallucinated then people will move to the suburbs instead of the downtown, they will not support public transit, they will order a private taxi for their burrito instead of eating out. They’ll retreat to Facebook.
I didn't claim it would be easy. I do claim that it will be more effective than pretending that charging people to get on the bus will have any real impact.
Alternate institutions that turn the 5% into productive members (but not necessarily CEOs) would probably get Lasch's stamp of approval)
EDIT to atone for the snark: Good candidates for such alt institutions already exist; "just" need to test their policies on an expanded student body. Bonus, some (myself included?) consider these "conservative":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45598371
Particular to the US in many ways.
Not an issue for cheap / free public transport in many other countries mentioned.
Perhaps the manner in which the US deals with the distribution of income and basic human needs could use a few tweaks.
Alternately, the US is simply much more tolerant of dysfunction and antisocial behavior.
What do you mean made-up problem? This is an extremely common problem in many areas. Sketchy characters will definitely stay on the bus and create unsafe environments for the bus driver and the customer unless there are systems in place.
They're not, and it's not really an HN thing to respond like you did. The guidelines ask you to assume best intent and engage in good faith.
Here good faith curiosity would have led you to where peer replies are pointing you: that free transit in big metros tends to come with loitering issues, and if they become too extreme, it can make the transit system pretty inhospitable and uninviting for the families and working people meant to be using it, undermining the purpose of making it free.
It's a genuine challenge that metros of a certain scale need to address, although the OP is maybe (or maybe not) wrong in assuming that it would be an issue in a fairly small/high-trust college metro like Iowa City. But, in best interpretation of their comment, that's why they were asking it as a question.
I dont think you have ever regularly rode a public bus before.
that is exactly what homeless people be doing.
Do you live in the real world or a utopian fantasy of your own making?
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So you advocate for executing all homeless? Thats more then 800,000 people.. What about homeless adjacent to? If you dont earn more then the median income what we get to enter you into some sort of hunger games elimination match?
Go touch grass you psycho.
>So you advocate for executing all homeless? Thats more then 800,000 people.. What about homeless adjacent to? If you dont earn more then the median income what we get to enter you into some sort of hunger games elimination match?
Absolutely! But don't stop there! There are billions of useless subhumans out there who require a final solution[0] .
Kill those subhuman scum dead! Hell we should just set up gas chambers, that would be even cheaper than bullets, guns and people to shoot them!
That's a great suggestion, westpfelia!
Yes. We should kill every undesirable. The real trick is figuring out who decides which people are undesirable. You wouldn't want to be considered "undesirable" would you? That could be dangerous and unhealthy (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).
[0] Poe's Law[1] strikes again, eh? I'm tripling down on it as you seem pretty gullible. It's almost a shame I'm copping to the satire. Heck you might start foaming at the mouth and try to doxx me. Calm down, chief! You're gonna give yourself an MI.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law[2]
[2] Text of Poe's Law for your perusal:
Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture which says that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views.
Homeless people aren’t living in the bus. Cool your stigmas. It’s weird your biggest concern is the people who need the most help. Life must be pretty good for you to attack those in need.
Be honest, do you take the bus to work ?
Absolutely! I take the bus 5 days a week in Brooklyn. The only way to get across the southern part of the borough.
I did for a year in DC. There were some folks who were struggling - talking to themselves, intoxicated, fragrant. I sort of liked it. Made me feel alive.
I do and I can't recall ever seeing a homeless person on it. I'm not from the US though.
how is this relevant? I agree with the comment and have not once in my life taken a bus other than school bus
I guess once the car companies find out about this, they’ll start lobbying the local government and put an end to this
That's how we lost public transit the first time. Here's hoping local government knows their history.
United States vs National City Lines, Inc. 1947.
Is it cheaper to lobby or to create an incompetent monopoly to ruin things?
Why is public transit so expensive in general?
In Europe, if you're a group of 2-5 adults with no discounts, it's often cheaper to take a car than to use the bus / train. That makes no sense.
Because you're paying humans' wages to operate the system, and there isn't a carbon tax.
Excise taxes on fuel already exceed carbon taxes.
At the IMF suggested rate of €65 per tonne of CO2, a liter of fuel that produces 2.3 kg CO2 would cost €0.15 per liter, while European excise taxes on fuel average around €0.55.
Very strange comment. You're over-generalizing a comparison of one proposed carbon tax to one excise tax.
> if you're a group of 2-5 adults
even a taxi or ride share may come out cheaper than public transit too.
Part of it is public transit like trains and trams have to maintain their own infrastructure.
Not sure about buses, I would guess these are way cheaper to operate. In many parts of the world they are cheap, private and profitable, e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/Detroit/comments/1l5pt2a/detroit_th...
Irish Rail wants to charge me €15-€20 for a single trip from Wexford to Dublin, a 150km trip that would cost roughly €5 when taking my EV and can be an hour quicker with nice traffic. Buses aren't much better.
Sure, parking and wear/tear on my car needs to be factored in, but the moment I'm not travelling alone, the public transport costs are completely blown out the water. A trip to the big city for me and my wife will be €60 when taking the train, and with the car it will be about €20-€30 depending on where I park.
It's crazy frustrating, because I would LOVE to take public transport more.
Not only that, it can be infeasible for a single-passenger as well. There's only the train available here, and I need to be ~400km away every couple months. Most of the time tickets are ~40€, but sometimes they're 200€+ one-way, even if you book weeks in advance. It makes it infeasible to plan anything when prices may fluctuate so wildly.
As a comparison, my 2009 diesel gets me there at around 4,7L/100km, but let's round it to 5, at average cost of fuel 1,65€/L that's 33€, for a single passenger, and I can leave whenever I want, have any sort of holdup and just go.
In my country, the elderly used to ride for free on busses and trams. 15 years ago I was involved in this problem where some decided to get on a bus or tram in the morning, go back and forth all day, bring a lunchbox, and go home just in time for the favorite soap series. They got free heating and some social contact.
It turned out, in my region, about 1/3 of public transport capacity was lost on them on peak hours. Also, some decided a specific seat was 'theirs' and started verbally abusing 'seat thiefs', throwing their stuff around, or even hitting them with canes. They also drove everyone bonkers by begging drivers to speed up or change routes so they would be home in time for their favorite soap series.
At the time, not much was done about it. The busses and trams forced everyone off at the terminus, made a round, enforced being empty while pausing a bit, and then the elderly were allowed back on, but at least places got shuffled and others got a chance for a seat. There was great gnashing of teeth about this decision.
I still feel double about it. It is very sad how this was a great life quality improvement for these people, but public transport is not the right medium for fixing this.
In a country like the US there are many opportunities like this to improve the overall status but other than small hyper local changes nothing will happen at a large scale because the powers be will not let it happen.
Problem is politcians and aspiring politicians/media influencers have figured out that the money is not in solving problems but keeping it in the news and agitating people. They will never do anything to solve problems but keep throwing wrenches and never let it be solved. Well, if it’s solved they need to find a new problem, worse still, what if people now expect things to be actually solved!
Iowa city is a gem of a college town. Beautiful, vibrant and really nice people.
Maybe this program wouldn't work everywhere. Makes sense it would work there.
Corvallis, Oregon is another college town where buses are free within the city and also to some other cities including Eugene and McMinnville.
I read an old study that claimed driving a mile cost society 20 cents and cycling a mile had 20 cents of societal benefits.
I'd imagine public transport is similar so we should move the Overton window towards bus and train tickets entering you into a lottery funded by charging cars for entry to, and for parking in, downtown areas.
> I read an old study that claimed driving a mile cost society 20 cents and cycling a mile had 20 cents of societal benefits.
"The Social Cost of Automobility, Cycling and Walking in the European Union":
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...
* https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.12.016
* Via: https://medium.com/strava-metro/whats-the-cost-of-choosing-t...
I seriously long for a free transit solution in my city, Memphis. We already pay for 90% of the operating cost anyway via various taxes, and fareboxes frequently cost more than they bring in. If I am a citizen paying property taxes in the city, why charge me $1.75 to hop on a bus?
However- it shouldnt be simply "free".. it should be "free with a pass, which is free" and a pass is easy to get, tied to your ID, and easy to revoke. No pass? thats fine, pay the $3 to ride. bus driver yanked your pass because you were peeing on the seat or intimidating other riders? You can ride again, for $3. Concerned about security or privacy? No problem, Pay $3.
Before the majority of law abiding citizens and travelers, passes are easy and free to get.
That's a little racist.
Fares end up being a trade off between service area and ridership. Eliminating fares tends to mean cuts to service for the same budget, so your service area would drop. Alternatively, having fares will allow for some more service, to cover more area but some people might not ride. Becomes dependent then on the goals of the transit system.
Moving from Iowa City to Kansas City I can say that free public transit works quite well. In Iowa City the campus bus system (Cambus) has all of its busses operated by students who go out and get their CDL and get great job experience, on top of it being one of the highest paid campus jobs for students.
Kansas City’s street car system is an incredible testament to this as well. It’s clean, safe, and for the most part quite efficient. And with its recent extension down to UMKC’s campus it’s now a viable transportation method for a lot of people in the heart of Kansas City. Keeping it clean and safe after more than doubling the size of its route might be a bigger lift now, but as long as the city sticks with it post-World Cup I see it continuing to grow.
The MVTA in Minnesota operates with 90% subsidies, so only 10% of revenue is from fares.
It feels like there could be some societal benefit to similarly reducing the number of busses and just making them free. (Today most busses are only at 10-30% capacity). This seems to support that idea.
> ... It feels like there could be some societal benefit to similarly reducing the number of busses and just making them free. (Today most busses are only at 10-30% capacity). ...
Public transit systems need to consider a lot of trade offs when they plan how to use the resources they have.
Optimizing for cost like this can make the busses less practical to use and less attractive to potential riders.
If a bus stop is only visited by a bus once an hour, then the average amount of time someone needs to wait for a bus to visit that bus stop is 30 minutes (assuming a uniform distribution for when that person arrives at the bus stop). If the bus stop is visited by a bus every 20 minutes, then that person would only need to wait at that bus stop for an average of 10 minutes.
The average time of a trip on this bus will be roughly equal to: the time to walk to the bus stop + the time spent waiting for the bus + the time the bus takes to reach the closest stop to the destination + the time to walk to the destination.
From that, reducing the number of busses that visit that bus stop increases the average amount of time for trips which originate from that bus stop.
A factor which impacts usage of public transit system is how quickly it can get someone to some arbitrary destination.
So, cutting the amount of busses a public transit system runs can reduce costs but also reduces how attractive that public transit system is to potential riders because of the increase in the amount of time an average trip takes.
That increases the use of other forms of transportation, assuming that people don't forgo trips entirely (e.g., staying home instead of going to a bar and getting a DUI, or eating at a hotel's restaurant to avoid spending $60-80 on taxis or Uber for a single meal).
IMO the key issue to adoption of public transport is not just the cost (which can be subsidized either for everyone or for lower income riders), but the extent of the network and the frequency of buses/trains. Higher density cities with extensive networks have high ridership, cities that are spread out with endless suburbs and who didn't build a good rail network covering the suburbs (looking at you, LA) don't regardless of whether it's free to ride or not.
Whenever this is discussed where I live, drivers come out of the woodwork to oppose it. And of course they also complain endlessly about traffic. It amuses me to no end.
I mentioned this video in another comment but I thought it was informative so sharing here:
“The truth about Zohran’s free busses” by Breaking Points:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P275SobdE-s
clickbait headline (of course) but gives a lot of facts about the proposal and talks about other places they’ve tried it.
I'm calling BS on this one.
The claimed increase in ridership is modest (18%) off a low baseline (0 service on weekends) and occurred over a long time period (pre-pandemic to today.) They also expanded service during that period, which probably fully explains the increase in ridership. Certainly the reduction in fare ($1-->0) is nice for some people, but it's hard to imagine that it is actually decisive for a large portion of trips.
The estimates of traffic reduction and CO2 reduction just quote the city's numbers without establishing that "traffic cleared, and so did the air."
Key paragraphs:
> In 2021, the city starting [sic] running more buses, streamlining routes and seriously considering waiving the $1 fares. In 2023, the City Council voted to pay for a two-year fare-free pilot with Covid-19 relief funds.
...
> Ridership eventually grew to 118 percent of prepandemic levels, compared to the average nationally transit ridership-recovery levels of 85 percent.
All public transport should be like $1. You need to charge something to keep the crackheads out, but it should not be enough that people think 'oh I better walk/cycle/drive instead to save money'
This would happen naturally except that most US cities have made it illegal to build anything without gobs of parking attached, so car drivers like myself get a government handout.
In Tokyo, parking is managed by the market, so it’s incredibly expensive. So it’s always cheaper to take public transit without artificially low public transit prices.
Downtown any big city is accessible by car, but parking fees keep most people away. At least, I won't willingly drive to destinations inside downtown of a big city, unless it's something special that can't be managed otherwise.
Which means suburban style businesses have an advantage, and eventually downtown merchants form an association and start pushing for free parking so they can get customers to show up.
Downtown Seattle doesn't seem to have much free parking. Even downtown San Jose doesn't have a lot of free parking.
Well in the big city I live in, downtown is often very crowded so I don’t think everyone is like you.
And I live in a car centric city. But literally millions of people ride trains in Tokyo everyday, and because of that they have clean air, nice walkable streets, and far few deaths.
> most US cities have made it illegal to build anything without gobs of parking attached
No they haven't. Places with "gobs of parking" are suburban Walmarts. Pretty much every city is super short on parking.
Parking is "super short" because there is never enough supply of something that is free. When you make something free, you induce demand for it.
For almost everywhere in LA country (where I live), it is illegal to have a store, coffee shop, gym, restaurant, laundry mat or almost anything else without attached parking. There are pockets where they've allowed parking reform (like Old Pasadena) and beautiful, walkable neighborhoods spring up. But these are rare exceptions.
I just find it genuinely perplexing. A 1-hour commute in LA is absolutely unremarkable. That's 500 hours a year! We have horrible air pollution even though we're right by the ocean. The weather is perfect and yet people need to go drive someplace to be able to walk around in it. Like why do so many people out here think the status quo is so great?
> Parking is "super short" because there is never enough supply of something that is free. When you make something free, you induce demand for it.
But city parking is very expensive and still often fills up, and the free parking at suburban Walmarts usually has plenty of open spots.
Expensive is a relative term, but if the parking fills up, then it’s probably not market pricing. When market pricing is used, there will generally be a few open spots. Because if day after day there is more demand for something than there is supply, suppliers will increase the cost and continue to do so until the market reaches equilibrium.
From experience, $1 is not enough to keep out the people who spend the whole trip talking about where they want to go to jail for the winter.
And $1 is already expensive enough that if the destination is within 5-10 miles, driving is cheaper if you already have a car and parking, so you are keeping that class of people out.
Though really I find the main reason people don't take the bus is that there aren't enough buses (in time or space) for where/when people really want to go. This is an `m×n` problem.
How are you calculating driving any distance as being cheaper than $1? Surely if you factor in wear-and-tear on the car, you couldn't even get out of the driveway without eating that $1.
Let's say a gallon of gas costs $4 and your car gets 40 MPG. So $1 gets you 10 miles if you only consider gas (which very many people do, even if you think they shouldn't - much maintenance is imagined as time-based, and this is not entirely wrong - cars do decay even if you don't drive them, and insurance only rarely considers your odometer and only coarsely if so).
Wear and tear is generally assumed to be roughly equal to gas costs on well-maintained roads, depending on a lot of varying assumptions of what to include. So, 5 miles.
Adding depreciation, recurring costs such as insurance, parking, perhaps even opportunity cost from capital allocated in a depreciating asset. It starts to not look that cheap.
Lots of those things are relatively fixed, so it’s a “use the car today” question, not a “do I buy a Car” ideation.
If you already have access to a car, the marginal cost of driving an extra mile is low.
Marginal cost of a mile is about 20-40c including wear and tear. If you've got a car already that's all that matters
Driving 5 miles costs a lot more than $1.
It really doesn't, though, especially if you've already decide to drive 10 or 20 miles for some other reason. Marginally, the cost of driving 5 miles is quite a bit less than $1.
The IRS sets the reimbursement rate at $0.7 per mile, which would estimate a 5 mile trip as costing a marginal $3.5
Upto 0.7 per mile I think? That includes an allowance for depreciation so it's not really a true marginal cost, however for a moment let's assume it is. If the bus was $3 do you think it's wise that it's cheaper to drive a 4 mile journey than take a bus?
Or maybe you could take serious steps for the homeless as well.
That would be amazing and is worth serious effort and resources. However I wonder if you could find one country that's managed to do this successfully (eradication not reduction)? It's often not really about housing and healthcare, it's about addiction, mental health, childhood trauma..
Japan is remarkably close.
Cuba, also, but their economic priorities are very different.
Dubai (actually all of UAE). Never seen 1 homeless, beggar, panhandler, crackhead or a fent zombie here.
I’d presume because they aren’t tolerated but correct me if I’m wrong.
Been to their graveyards?
every developed country on earth has solved this problem except us
addiction, mental health, childhood drama… only in america would that lead to sleeping on the streets
Sorry from Canada, we haven't solved it either.
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Are you saying Australia isn't developed?
The UK and France have hundreds of thousands of homeless.
"Homeless" in that sense, however, are not rough sleepers (people who actually sleep outside), which would seem to be what is meant in this context.
It's by no means zero, but in autum 2024, rough sleepers were estimated at less than 4700 in the UK. That might well represent and undercount, but it is certainly nowhere remotely near the people counted as homeless, who would include anyone without a permanent address, such a people e.g. sleeping at friends places on a non-permnanet basis.
In public transport? Or are you changing the subject?
What would happen if you had to tap a card/phone to get in to the subway system (and this was enforced, no jumping turnstiles), and then have to tap it to get out too.
Then if someone is habitually in the system for a significantly longer time than it reasonably takes to travel from point A to B, deactivate their access.
> What would happen if you had to tap a card/phone to get in to the subway system (and this was enforced, no jumping turnstiles), and then have to tap it to get out too.
Not sure about the "measure how long the subway rider has been in the subway system for a continuous period of time" feature, but otherwise that's how subway in Japan works. You gotta tap on your way in and out of the current system you are riding on (as there are multiple competing subway system companies running together even within a given city, often enough with their stops being near each other).
Their reason for doing so is a bit different though. In NYC, your ride is a flat fee, as long as you don't exit subway, no matter where you are going. In Japan, your ride cost is determined by your actual route, as some parts of it have different rates. They actually need to know where you exited in order to calculate the final cost of your ride.
This is how it works on the Gautrain in Pretoria/Johannesburg in South Africa.
You scan when you enter the system, and you scan when you exit. Your fare is calculated based on where you enter and exit. If you stay in the system longer than some define period of time, you are automatically charged the maximum fare, regardless of where you got on and off.
You can either scan with a dedicated train fare card, your debit/credit card and also NFC mobile payment.
The buses linked to the train service and the parking uses the same payment system, so you get automatic discounted bus fares and parking fees if you actually use the train as well, but you can park and use the bus without taking the train.
It works quite well.
Edge case: what if your phone does while in transit, and you can't charge it?
In the UK, the newer trains and tube carriages all have USB ports for charging.
But, it is kind of a non issue. You are responsible for your ticket. Having a dead battery is no different to losing your paper ticket.
iPhone NFC will work for a while even when “dead”, not sure about the android world.
But in the edge case of the edge case, security can let you out. If it becomes a pattern, they’ll note it somehow.
Seems like the most important thing to do is _anything_. The current approach of doing nothing and shaming people who suggest public transport is a poor option because it’s full of druggies doesn’t seem to work.
>Seems like the most important thing to do is _anything_. The current approach of doing nothing and shaming people who suggest public transport is a poor option because it’s full of druggies doesn’t seem to work.
I don't know, I think it's much worse, in the wealthiest nation that ever existed, to shame those who have no place to live by singling them out for abusive treatment for not leaving the transit system in a (arbitrary) timely fashion.
I'd much rather shame those claiming public transport is a poor option, and even more so those advocating for evicting passengers -- presumably violently -- because they spend "too much" time on public transportation.
Ugh!
You get charged for the max distance you could have ridden.
For that reason, among others, I strongly prefer non-phone, non-battery-powered options for transit payment.
Tap to enter/exit is already a thing. Rarely enforced here, however. Emergency exits and all that.
DC is tap in tap out. But you can buy a single trip ticket. It would be sort of dystopian if we had to give up anonymous public transit access to prevent homeless folks from staying warm.
In Portland they make the busses free in the central area but charge a bit outside that, partly to stop homeless sleeping in the busses.
This went away years ago
And one reason it went away was because "fareless square" became a synonym for rather extreme levels of drug abuse.
Why do we want to prevent people from walking?
why not go in the other direction and get them housing and healthcare so they can be treated like people and will also not disrupt your ride
people from outside the US often think it’s a land of fabulously rich ppl and are aghast at how we treat our citizens
> people from outside the US often think it’s a land of fabulously rich ppl and are aghast at how we treat our citizens
We can have concern for residents who feel justifiably unsafe and uncomfortable on public transit as well as homeless riders.
Easier to charge a dollar. Solve the simple problem first.
Then tackle the more complex.
More like never tackle the complex
The less average people are inconvenienced, the less urgency there is to tackle harder problems. This is a nation that seems to only be able to kick the can down the road.
Probably. But at least you've solved one problem.
I'm pro paying for them to get whatever housing and healthcare they need via taxes, just like everyone else. It's not like it's that simple though. Giving someone a house and a doctor will not get them off heroin on its own and may not even help them very much at all honestly.
Most heroin addicts can be remarkably close to a normal functioning healthy person if they don't live in precarious conditions without access to a clean supply.
The proportion of heroin addicts who would still be wrecks with healthcare that extends to prescribing what they need is miniscule.
So the first problem is thinking you need to get them off heroin to be able to start dramatically helping.
> Giving someone a house and a doctor will not get them off heroin on its own and may not even help them very much at all honestly.
Giving someone a house and health care will, though.
Every addict I have ever known (I’ve known many) consume drugs in order to escape something. Addressing this while also treating the user will indeed help them. Mental health care + physical health care = “health care” in my opening sentence.
I don’t know what it is about people in the US, but almost all of us completely reject the idea that someone can be held down entirely by their own mind. Large amounts of people are, and those that don’t seem to understand that this is possible are often people whose own mind holds them down, but not so much that they’re homeless.
People in other countries get this. We do not. I don’t understand it.
it's actually highly effective for a majority of people. [1]
Otherwise, what do you propose?
1: https://nlihc.org/resource/new-study-finds-providing-people-...
Do you really think people are homeless because of lack of housing? Have you seen what becomes of a house when homeless people are moved into one? A huge percentage of homeless are homeless by choice.
Hang on, in another comment you say you’re in Dubai where there aren’t any homeless. So how are you seeing this?
Free public roads and highways? Free public parking? Good, normal, should be encouraged. Add a lane or two to the highway? Always a good idea! (hint: it never is)
Free public transit? KILL IT WITH FIRE!!! It will never work (those places it did are aberrations)
Go look up: 1. Jevons paradox (induced demand): More road capacity → more traffic. 2. Marchetti’s constant (30-minute city): Average commute time is stable; faster modes → sprawl. 3. Downs–Thomson paradox (transit sets highway speed): Car speeds improve only if transit gets better. 4. Braess’s paradox (network effect): Adding a new road can worsen traffic for everyone.
I am impressed there was no report of conservative backlash.
I'm conservative. I think buses should be free. Then they'll actually get used and all the secondary benefits they were supposed to bring will be much more easily realized.
You need public transport in major cities. Not everyone can or should drive.
You need private transportation almost everywhere. Not everyone should be forced to ride public transport just because it exists.
As long as people have an actual choice that's not manipulated in some way then I think the system is fine. It has a public function and it provides immediate and secondary benefits.
Iowa City is the bluest of Iowa cities. It's a university town.
That tracks, it's a situation where most people are going to the same place so public transit has a huge advantage.
I am surprised that the bus wasn't already free; in my college town and the one near it (both had their own bus line), fares are free for all undergraduates.
My experience with bus service in college towns is that the routes between campus and student residential areas get heavy use, while the buses serving the rest of the town drive around nearly empty.
U of I's cambus is free, but it has a limited route in and around the campus. City buses cover a lot more area.
That is a particularly fine line to walk for the modern conservative. Government should not be picking winners, except for the very targeted tariffs that just happen to benefit company X or Y.
I would note that based on my experience in Africa, there were a lot of private buses being operated, ridership was high, and the buses were cheap.
In America we have very few private intra-city buses, ridership is low, and the buses are very expensive when you consider how much goes to them in the way of subsidies.
Government should not be picking winners ... the company with the biggest bribe wins.
Shouldn't be picking winners -- unless you can bully them for a cut of the business, of course.
Meanwhile PDX is letting homeless people ride certain bus rides for free.
It is a fucking nightmare. I'm a liberal guy but the amount of bums make the transit here unusable.
The truth that nobody wants to admit is that if you build a system that anybody can use, nobody will want to use it.
TANSTAAFL, New York Times
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You can tell who actually lives in cities because they're the ones who see through this and go about their lives unafraid of city violence fanfic.
There’s a big difference between someone who happens to live in a city and someone who is reliant on public transit.
There's also a big difference between anecdotes/instances of crime and a statistical reason to live in fear.
Sure, but fear has little basis in statistics. People still worry about plane crashes and instead opt to drive.
Right, that's why it's unfortunately so easy to commit the evil of manipulating people by nurturing their fear.
In NYC, private vehicles are responsible for 10x the deaths of humans than crime on the subway.
As such, I'm in much more (10x, in fact) danger from someone driving than I am from a fellow subway rider.
But yeah. The subway is way too dangerous /eyeroll. Please.
Sure thing buddy
- Sent from my corn field
Bring some corn when you come and visit.
Please stop watching, andd being a pawn of, paid and party propoganda on tiktok et al.
Watching Iryna Zarutska get stabbed in the neck and a bunch of people do fuck-all to help her wasn't anyone's propaganda. Though it was radicalising.
The woman who got gasoline poured on her and lit on fire in Chicago last week isn't helping either. It doesn't make people like my wife, for example, excited about the idea of going and riding public transportation alone.
We did this in the seventies too. I get that it’s infuriating but I don’t get how the solution is to charge $3.00. I’ve seen guys on street corners get more in one handout. Meanwhile we’re letting one guy ruin it like Bin Laden did air travel.
It's all probability distributions. A bus driver will usually stop the bus and refuse to move if someone refuses to pay the fair. People who skip fairs are more likely to commit other crimes. If you put these together, you improve the probability that a subhuman doesn't get to commit acts of violence on public transit.
s/fair/fare/g;
Actually, it was, given that many right wingers who benefit from a sense of unease from existing in society boosted the video to make it seem like more than an a random act of crime, done by a schizophrenic man who wasn't treated properly.
> [The suspect's] mother told ABC News that [the suspect] was diagnosed with schizophrenia [...] and displayed violent behavior at home. His mother said that she had sought involuntary commitment, but that it was denied.
> Elon Musk criticized judges and district attorneys for allowing "criminals to roam free".
> U.S. President Donald Trump called the attacker a "madman" and "lunatic", and said that "when you have horrible killings, you have to take horrible actions. And the actions that we take are nothing", before blaming local officials in places like Chicago for failing to stop crime and denounced cashless bail.
> On the same day, the White House released a statement criticizing "North Carolina's Democrat politicians, prosecutors, and judges" for "prioritizing woke agendas that fail to protect their citizens".
> On September 9, the White House released a video in which Trump said that Zarutska was "slaughtered by a deranged monster".
> On September 24, U.S. Vice President JD Vance discussed the killing in a visit to Concord, North Carolina, blaming it on "soft-on-crime policies" and stating he was "open" to deploying the North Carolina National Guard to Charlotte if requested by Governor Stein and Mayor Lyles.
> The U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary held a field hearing in Charlotte on September 29 on safety in public transit systems and the treatment of repeat offenders.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Iryna_Zarutska#Reac...
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Oh, they've got drugs there, don't worry about that...
Yeah there's a difference between psychotic dread-heads with knives and college kids on a shroom trip.
> psychotic dread-heads with knives
can you give me some other descriptions of what this might look like?
Skin color?
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Which ones are those?
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> You know which ones :)
This is straight up racism right here. Not even trying to hide it.
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> Next time I hope it's someone you love.
See, that’s something I would never say to anyone.
A one-time event of a black person killing a white person is not enough for me to hate black people. For you it seems to be the topical reference you care to type out; just one of a library of events you pay attention to while ignoring everything else.
You are the problem here. Not anyone that’s black. People like you are who I’m afraid of. And I’m confident you’re the most violent demographic in the US.
You keep exclaiming I have some racial hatred but I really don't. You know who else hates these violent career criminals? Black people just trying to get on with their lives! They're the ones that suffer the most, statistically speaking.
It's white leftists who expose everyone to these threats through their crime-tolerant policies. You will never change until you experience the consequences of such policies first hand, like she did. In the meantime you're happy for everyone else's children to be sacrificed at the altar of progessivism so long as you can keep that Wojak smirk on your face and maintain an heir of (assumed) moral superiority.
Only one of us has blood on their hands. You would never say that (^) to anyone but you're content implementing it through the consequences of your political ideology.
FWIW I'm sorry I said that and I don't wish that for you.
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Saying that there are cities with endemic violence and anti-social behavior tolerated by left-leaning DAs, which inevitably leads to someone with dozens of priors committing heinous acts of violence, now qualifies as white nationalism? For real???
There are alternatives to dealing with violence and anti-social behavior aside from the boot of quasi-military police on those that struggle.
Some people and places consistently appeal to greater and greater draconian use of force, other places and people resort first to social policy to take tempretures down and to not regard schizophrenics as "subhumans".
> regard schizophrenics as "subhumans".
I hope you aren't insinuating this is my position? That man is a subhuman. He is lesser than a rat. I wish him nothing but unending torment and fear for many years to come. In no way is my contempt for him universally applicable to all schizophrenics. I judge the man by his actions not his condition.
I have a close relative who is a schizophrenic. I also work with one.
Neither of them have been arrested 72 times nor convicted 15 times. Neither of them have set a random woman on a train on fire, either.
I consider someone who does that subhuman, yeah. Schizophrenics can and do experience empathy and go out of their way not to hurt others.
The article is dishonest. A better title would be: "Making transit free in Iowa City did not significantly increase the ridership (just 18% over the 2019 level), while imposing more taxes on everyone".
They claim to have removed 5200 cars, out of area of 500000 people ("Iowa City-Cedar Rapids statistical region"). The increase is pitiful, from 6.7% of people using transit to 7.2% with the rest being car commutes.
Neither has it "cleared the traffic". Iowa City is also a well-run city, with just a 17-minute average commute time, indicating that it has no congestion to speak of.
"More taxes on everyone" also is dishonest. Every individual is paying more in "taxes", but the net amount of money collected from the population of the city for the cost of providing transit is decreased. (Since the cost of fare collection disappears. Or if the net amount of money doesn't decrease, they're presumably spending what was formerly spent on fare collection on additional service.)
No, it's not. Fares are not taxes, so while some people might end up paying less (no fare), the overall amount of tax did go up.
I didn't imply that fares are taxes, because I don't feel that it's a relevant point either way, it's just a distraction to the actual matter - the cost of transit to society. Whether the cost is collected in taxes or fares is just an implementation detail.
I agree. You can't compare the transit system of Iowa City (population less than 75,000) to that of New York City (population 8,500,000).