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.
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.
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.)
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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?
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.
> "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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
"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
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...
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%
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>Do they clear out each bus at some end point of the route, so homeless people can't live on the bus?
I don't think "can" or can't" live is the right question.
Those filthy homeless folks are homeless because they're lazy, defective, worthless and less than human.
The correct question is "should" or "shouldn't" live. Obviously, the answer is "shouldn't."
Just do the cost/benefit analysis! USD$0.010/bullet (one time cost) vs. USD$35,000/annum to keep these "undesirables" incarcerated. The solution seems pretty obvious, no?
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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 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.)
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.
You know black people go to college, too, right? Yikes - liberals really do embrace the racism of low expectations. Do better.
Dread-head = low-life degenerate whose greatest contribution to society is killing each other off over silly beefs. Like the guy we are talking about ITT.
Interesting. I would have thought a black man stabbing a white woman in the neck three times and proclaiming 'I GOT that white girl" would be racist. But no, no, you're right. Pointing out that leftist DAs in these cities are endangering the public - that's the real racism. Thanks for keeping me honest you absolute fucking clown.
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.
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.
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