6 ms·

It's mostly the poor and middle-class that use public transportation, so ending fares for it is helpful to their finances. Also, there are tremendous operating

It's mostly the poor and middle-class that use public transportation, so ending fares for it is helpful to their finances. Also, there are tremendous operating cost savings to a free at the point of use transit system. No ticket machines, turnstiles, the associated maintenance, ticketing staff, fare enforcement officers/police in places where there aren't turnstiles. Additionally, without turnstiles, people can enter and exit metro stations more quickly during peak service hours. On buses, the driver doesn't need to waste time dealing with payments. It's cheaper to fund a public transportation system through taxation. Some may make the argument that why should people that don't use it have to pay for it? Well, since it's now included in your taxes, there's an incentive for you now to use it. For the wealthy that would never use it, I argue that they benefit from it. Their workers use the system to get to work, their customers use it to arrive at their businesses, students use it to get to school. These students use that education to become employees at those businesses.

rootsudo 3y ago
"since it's now included in your taxes, there's an incentive for you now to use it." The ironic part is, the poor and middle class may vote for it, but it's the local property owners that pay for it.
- madsbuch 3y ago
  > but it's the local property owners that pay for it. And the local property owners that benefit in increased real estate prices.
  - rootsudo 3y ago
    Exactly. No matter what it always comes from somewhere.
- Contusion3532 3y ago
  The landlords pass the costs of property taxes onto their tenants in their rents. So who is really paying for them?
- theluketaylor 3y ago
  Who then turn around and pass those costs along to renters as landlords. Or they take transit and get value. Or they drive and benefit from every vehicle not on the road since someone else took transit.
up2isomorphism 3y ago
“Their workers” you will be much more convincing if you actually know the people who are employed pays most of the taxes in the US. Taxation almost never makes anything cheaper here.
- Contusion3532 3y ago
  Public ISPs, power companies, and healthcare are examples where the government does it cheaper. Profit is unnecessary cost.
  - up2isomorphism 3y ago
    They are all more expensive compared to a free market private ones. Although in Europe thanks to the education standards and low corruption level, at least it is doing a good job. In US these are sink holes.
larsrc 3y ago
There are also further savings in not having to figure put, publish, and update fare systems. And if the change results in people taking public transit instead of cars, there are knock-on effects in the forms of less road congestion and fewer accidents. Accidents that cause costly policy work, hospitalizations, loss of work days, etc. These savings in other parts of the city finances are rarely figured in.
pierat 3y ago
> It's mostly the poor and middle-class that use public transportation, so ending fares for it is helpful to their finances. Its the poor class that uses public transit because it is substandard, and they dont have other choices. Public transit is substandard because public transit has to fight on the regular roads, and not dedicated track/roads for transit. This means it is innately as slow or slower than driving. Because of this, it anyone who has a car WILL TAKE A CAR. For example, it takes me 20 minutes to go from 1 side of the city to the other. Using the bus routes, its 2 hours. This is the predominant reason why people don't use public transit - 6 times longer. Free is an essential start, though.
- maxfurman 3y ago
  > For example, it takes me 20 minutes to go from 1 side of the city to the other. Using the bus routes, its 2 hours Compared to SEPTA (Philly's bus system) this seems way off base. Yes, it takes longer to take the bus than to drive yourself because the bus has to stop for passengers. But your own car will still have to stop at red lights, wait for pedestrians, etc., nearly as much as a bus. I can see 30-45 minutes for a bus ride comparable to a 20 minute direct drive, but any more than that points to some other problem with your city's roads.
  - BeetleB 3y ago
    You're not accounting for time spent waiting for transfers.
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      Where I live the major employer is Cornell University and almost all of the buses stop there. A Cornell id will get you on any bus in Tompkins County and it is almost always a single-seat ride to Cornell and to the downtown area. Transfers in the downtown-Cornell-Mall triangle are also easy because you can always get a bus in 15 minutes or less. Overall transit works great if most people are going to a few central points. It's much more difficult if the destinations are distributed. Frequent service could be a balm for that: if you had buses every ten minutes on all routes transfers would not be bad at all.
Swenrekcah 3y ago
As a regular transit user I must disagree. While what you say is true in principle, in practice it would quickly translate into deteriorating service. Public transit is and should of course always be mostly tax funded, but a small fare can add money in the system, it adds demands from users and a sense of responsibility for the suppliers. The fare is always much cheaper than operating a car and its easy to have discount programs for those that need it. Enforcement can be as easy as random checks, all the fancy infrastructure is not really needed although for underground systems its good to have a little barrier for entry. I can afford a car just fine but I don’t want to spend my money on it just to get to work. The real measure of the affluence and quality of life in a city is how large a portion of the wealthy take transit. The higher the better.
- jeromegv 3y ago
  > its easy to have discount programs for those that need it. Actually its not that easy. You need someone to check income threshold (how?), have a separate program to distribute that special fare, monitor for fraud, special fare system, etc. Tons of people that would benefit from cheaper fare end up not having access to it if the way to get that discount ends up being complicated (as many social programs are). I agree transit should be cheaper, not free, but often cheaper helps everyone and encourage habits to change, even among the middle class.
  - Swenrekcah 3y ago
    Sure but don’t let perfection be the enemy of progress. Cast a wide net, 50% discount for students, municipalities can hook people up with free or discounted passes depending on their municipal tax returns, it can all be automated even. Some who don’t need discounts will get them and some who need them won’t but they will get better quality of service however. And if they don’t manage to get themselves a discount by any means, if the alternative is buying a car they’re saving anyway. The absolute amount of money collected isn’t really the point, just that there is some of it and it is a non-negligible portion of the total.
- 3683748 3y ago
  > The real measure of the affluence and quality of life in a city is how large a portion of the wealthy take transit. The higher the better. < I don't think this will actually measure anything but gentrification and how few social services a city offers. Of the wealthy friends I have, the reasons they don't take public transit are always either time or the trash people. Of those categories, I know a few willing to deal with the wasted time to feel good but none willing to deal with the junkies, homeless, or hood crowd. If none of these groups are on your public transit it's either because you priced them out or the region is already hostile enough to keep them out.
nerdponx 3y ago
People that don't use it on a regular basis also benefit in other ways, like cleaner air, less traffic on the roads (leading to better road quality, better emergency response times, etc), and the opportunity to use transit on the occasions when they do need it.
Brian_K_White 3y ago
I would say it's like schools. I benefit from the fact that the society I live in has it, even if I don't have kids myself.
nojvek 3y ago
You pay for schools even if you don’t have kids. Pay for highways you don’t use. Agree with premise about free transit, or at-least certain free routes.
vxNsr 3y ago
all that's gonna happen is service will get worse, budget cuts will mean there's no way to make up shortfalls, and fewer staff around means more people abusing the system (e.g. defecating on seats, stairs, platforms, attacking other passengers, creating a generally unsafe environment). I don't expect any of this to be surfaced in the many "experiments" that are now ongoing because of course as we know any inconvenient truths can just be dropped/ignored from the final report as "anomalies" or "non-representative" or "racist".
tsukikage 3y ago
> I argue that they benefit from it Fewer other cars on the road - fewer traffic jams, faster to get places, more pleasant drives! Public transportation benefits even people who don't use it themselves /and also don't care about any of the ways it indirectly benefits them by benefitting others/.
jonhohle 3y ago
Isn’t this the communist/socialist philosophy that ends up driving programs into mediocrity at best and awful at worst? If a program can’t pay for itself, what incentive does it have to be efficient and operate in the interest of riders? It’s now become a bureaucrat’s slush fund which will see an ever increasing budget divorced from the service it provides. Others have mentioned public schools, and I would agree. For as expensive as many private schools are, the average cost per student is about 60% that of public schools. Getting rid of turnstiles and other populating recording devices spreads the gap between ridership and funding even further. Minus fare evasion, there is a direct correlation between fares and riders. Programs to provide free transportation based on income are already available in many metro areas. Everyone loves “free” stuff, but when it’s not really free, and the cost are just hidden in taxes, most people lose. Being cheaper to fund through taxes now has nothing to do with future costs that no longer correlate to ridership.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  I'd put it this way. If you paid for the bus 100% with your fare it would be completely scalable. If transit demand doubled, revenue would double and they could run twice as many buses. A fixed amount of public spending (typically 75% of expenses in many transit systems) is not scalable. You could double or triple bus ridership but service deteriorates because you don't get buses. The municipality, bus company, etc. have every incentive for transit promotion to fail because more people taking transit blows up their budget. Note there is a good case for subsidization in that people riding the bus create benefits for others: 20 people riding the bus can take 20 cars off the road which makes life better for drivers, pedestrians, etc.
  - jonhohle 3y ago
    I am very much in favor of public transportation, especially light rail. The best systems I’ve used were Seoul and Tokyo. I rode King Metro most working days into Seattle for four years. When I lived near DC I’d rarely drive in because I preferred taking the metro trains. The solution to congestion, imho, is making public transportation acceptable to the largest customer base by making it clean, convenient, and timely. That might not capture the poorest or the richest, but they still benefit from less congestion, noise, and air pollution. Making it good would provide more benefits to most cities than making it free, imho.
sschueller 3y ago
In Switzerland we have no turn styles and no gates. You can hop on and off at any point. Rich or poor everyone uses it. However public transport isn't even close to being free. I fact it is quite expensive in addition to being heavily tax supported. This is the only way to offer the high quality of service we have from over 92.5% on time trains and 98.7% connections made [1]. It also allows to offer service at infrequent stops out nowhere. You having a ticket is based on trust. There are random checks on short trip and more regular check on longer trips. It is estimated that around 10% don't have a valid ticket from wrong ticket to people who didn't get one on purpose. To get the percentage lower would cost more than what is lost in revenue and 100% is not something anyone can achieve. [1] https://news.sbb.ch/medien/artikel/115696/gute-puenktlichkeit-2022-sbb-will-niveau-trotz-vieler-baustellen-in-naechsten-jahren-halten https://news.sbb.ch/medien/artikel/115696/gute-puenktlichkei...
- nerdbert 3y ago
  > This is the only way to offer the high quality of service we have The other way would be to make drivers pay for the advantages that public transportation provides them: Significantly less traffic congestion, etc. Per-km, per-kg charges for cars could be calibrated to completely cover the cost of transit, since many people are too snobbish to ever ride it no matter what the financial situation.
  - sschueller 3y ago
    If we want to keep cars those driver taxes are already being collected and are in use for highway maintenance etc.
- karmakurtisaani 3y ago
  > However public transport isn't even close to being free. I fact it is quite expensive in addition to being heavily tax supported. Oh boy is it expensive, in particular to the poor foreigners visiting without the half-price card. And for some reason if you're in the know, you can buy all-day whole country covering travel passes for 50 something chf. Something that the foreigners can never get without insider help. There's absolutely no way it's ever going to be cheaper, the best one can hope is that the prices don't go up very fast. Still, it's cheaper than having a car somehow.

rootsudo 3y ago

"since it's now included in your taxes, there's an incentive for you now to use it." The ironic part is, the poor and middle class may vote for it, but it's the local property owners that pay for it.

madsbuch 3y ago
> but it's the local property owners that pay for it. And the local property owners that benefit in increased real estate prices.
- rootsudo 3y ago
  Exactly. No matter what it always comes from somewhere.
Contusion3532 3y ago
The landlords pass the costs of property taxes onto their tenants in their rents. So who is really paying for them?
theluketaylor 3y ago
Who then turn around and pass those costs along to renters as landlords. Or they take transit and get value. Or they drive and benefit from every vehicle not on the road since someone else took transit.

up2isomorphism 3y ago

“Their workers” you will be much more convincing if you actually know the people who are employed pays most of the taxes in the US. Taxation almost never makes anything cheaper here.

Contusion3532 3y ago
Public ISPs, power companies, and healthcare are examples where the government does it cheaper. Profit is unnecessary cost.
- up2isomorphism 3y ago
  They are all more expensive compared to a free market private ones. Although in Europe thanks to the education standards and low corruption level, at least it is doing a good job. In US these are sink holes.

larsrc 3y ago

There are also further savings in not having to figure put, publish, and update fare systems. And if the change results in people taking public transit instead of cars, there are knock-on effects in the forms of less road congestion and fewer accidents. Accidents that cause costly policy work, hospitalizations, loss of work days, etc. These savings in other parts of the city finances are rarely figured in.

pierat 3y ago

> It's mostly the poor and middle-class that use public transportation, so ending fares for it is helpful to their finances. Its the poor class that uses public transit because it is substandard, and they dont have other choices. Public transit is substandard because public transit has to fight on the regular roads, and not dedicated track/roads for transit. This means it is innately as slow or slower than driving. Because of this, it anyone who has a car WILL TAKE A CAR. For example, it takes me 20 minutes to go from 1 side of the city to the other. Using the bus routes, its 2 hours. This is the predominant reason why people don't use public transit - 6 times longer. Free is an essential start, though.

maxfurman 3y ago
> For example, it takes me 20 minutes to go from 1 side of the city to the other. Using the bus routes, its 2 hours Compared to SEPTA (Philly's bus system) this seems way off base. Yes, it takes longer to take the bus than to drive yourself because the bus has to stop for passengers. But your own car will still have to stop at red lights, wait for pedestrians, etc., nearly as much as a bus. I can see 30-45 minutes for a bus ride comparable to a 20 minute direct drive, but any more than that points to some other problem with your city's roads.
- BeetleB 3y ago
  You're not accounting for time spent waiting for transfers.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    Where I live the major employer is Cornell University and almost all of the buses stop there. A Cornell id will get you on any bus in Tompkins County and it is almost always a single-seat ride to Cornell and to the downtown area. Transfers in the downtown-Cornell-Mall triangle are also easy because you can always get a bus in 15 minutes or less. Overall transit works great if most people are going to a few central points. It's much more difficult if the destinations are distributed. Frequent service could be a balm for that: if you had buses every ten minutes on all routes transfers would not be bad at all.

Swenrekcah 3y ago

As a regular transit user I must disagree. While what you say is true in principle, in practice it would quickly translate into deteriorating service. Public transit is and should of course always be mostly tax funded, but a small fare can add money in the system, it adds demands from users and a sense of responsibility for the suppliers. The fare is always much cheaper than operating a car and its easy to have discount programs for those that need it. Enforcement can be as easy as random checks, all the fancy infrastructure is not really needed although for underground systems its good to have a little barrier for entry. I can afford a car just fine but I don’t want to spend my money on it just to get to work. The real measure of the affluence and quality of life in a city is how large a portion of the wealthy take transit. The higher the better.

jeromegv 3y ago
> its easy to have discount programs for those that need it. Actually its not that easy. You need someone to check income threshold (how?), have a separate program to distribute that special fare, monitor for fraud, special fare system, etc. Tons of people that would benefit from cheaper fare end up not having access to it if the way to get that discount ends up being complicated (as many social programs are). I agree transit should be cheaper, not free, but often cheaper helps everyone and encourage habits to change, even among the middle class.
- Swenrekcah 3y ago
  Sure but don’t let perfection be the enemy of progress. Cast a wide net, 50% discount for students, municipalities can hook people up with free or discounted passes depending on their municipal tax returns, it can all be automated even. Some who don’t need discounts will get them and some who need them won’t but they will get better quality of service however. And if they don’t manage to get themselves a discount by any means, if the alternative is buying a car they’re saving anyway. The absolute amount of money collected isn’t really the point, just that there is some of it and it is a non-negligible portion of the total.
3683748 3y ago
> The real measure of the affluence and quality of life in a city is how large a portion of the wealthy take transit. The higher the better. < I don't think this will actually measure anything but gentrification and how few social services a city offers. Of the wealthy friends I have, the reasons they don't take public transit are always either time or the trash people. Of those categories, I know a few willing to deal with the wasted time to feel good but none willing to deal with the junkies, homeless, or hood crowd. If none of these groups are on your public transit it's either because you priced them out or the region is already hostile enough to keep them out.

nerdponx 3y ago

People that don't use it on a regular basis also benefit in other ways, like cleaner air, less traffic on the roads (leading to better road quality, better emergency response times, etc), and the opportunity to use transit on the occasions when they do need it.

Brian_K_White 3y ago

I would say it's like schools. I benefit from the fact that the society I live in has it, even if I don't have kids myself.

nojvek 3y ago

You pay for schools even if you don’t have kids. Pay for highways you don’t use. Agree with premise about free transit, or at-least certain free routes.

vxNsr 3y ago

all that's gonna happen is service will get worse, budget cuts will mean there's no way to make up shortfalls, and fewer staff around means more people abusing the system (e.g. defecating on seats, stairs, platforms, attacking other passengers, creating a generally unsafe environment). I don't expect any of this to be surfaced in the many "experiments" that are now ongoing because of course as we know any inconvenient truths can just be dropped/ignored from the final report as "anomalies" or "non-representative" or "racist".

tsukikage 3y ago

> I argue that they benefit from it Fewer other cars on the road - fewer traffic jams, faster to get places, more pleasant drives! Public transportation benefits even people who don't use it themselves /and also don't care about any of the ways it indirectly benefits them by benefitting others/.

jonhohle 3y ago

Isn’t this the communist/socialist philosophy that ends up driving programs into mediocrity at best and awful at worst? If a program can’t pay for itself, what incentive does it have to be efficient and operate in the interest of riders? It’s now become a bureaucrat’s slush fund which will see an ever increasing budget divorced from the service it provides. Others have mentioned public schools, and I would agree. For as expensive as many private schools are, the average cost per student is about 60% that of public schools. Getting rid of turnstiles and other populating recording devices spreads the gap between ridership and funding even further. Minus fare evasion, there is a direct correlation between fares and riders. Programs to provide free transportation based on income are already available in many metro areas. Everyone loves “free” stuff, but when it’s not really free, and the cost are just hidden in taxes, most people lose. Being cheaper to fund through taxes now has nothing to do with future costs that no longer correlate to ridership.

PaulHoule 3y ago
I'd put it this way. If you paid for the bus 100% with your fare it would be completely scalable. If transit demand doubled, revenue would double and they could run twice as many buses. A fixed amount of public spending (typically 75% of expenses in many transit systems) is not scalable. You could double or triple bus ridership but service deteriorates because you don't get buses. The municipality, bus company, etc. have every incentive for transit promotion to fail because more people taking transit blows up their budget. Note there is a good case for subsidization in that people riding the bus create benefits for others: 20 people riding the bus can take 20 cars off the road which makes life better for drivers, pedestrians, etc.
- jonhohle 3y ago
  I am very much in favor of public transportation, especially light rail. The best systems I’ve used were Seoul and Tokyo. I rode King Metro most working days into Seattle for four years. When I lived near DC I’d rarely drive in because I preferred taking the metro trains. The solution to congestion, imho, is making public transportation acceptable to the largest customer base by making it clean, convenient, and timely. That might not capture the poorest or the richest, but they still benefit from less congestion, noise, and air pollution. Making it good would provide more benefits to most cities than making it free, imho.

sschueller 3y ago

In Switzerland we have no turn styles and no gates. You can hop on and off at any point. Rich or poor everyone uses it. However public transport isn't even close to being free. I fact it is quite expensive in addition to being heavily tax supported. This is the only way to offer the high quality of service we have from over 92.5% on time trains and 98.7% connections made [1]. It also allows to offer service at infrequent stops out nowhere. You having a ticket is based on trust. There are random checks on short trip and more regular check on longer trips. It is estimated that around 10% don't have a valid ticket from wrong ticket to people who didn't get one on purpose. To get the percentage lower would cost more than what is lost in revenue and 100% is not something anyone can achieve. [1] https://news.sbb.ch/medien/artikel/115696/gute-puenktlichkeit-2022-sbb-will-niveau-trotz-vieler-baustellen-in-naechsten-jahren-halten https://news.sbb.ch/medien/artikel/115696/gute-puenktlichkei...

nerdbert 3y ago
> This is the only way to offer the high quality of service we have The other way would be to make drivers pay for the advantages that public transportation provides them: Significantly less traffic congestion, etc. Per-km, per-kg charges for cars could be calibrated to completely cover the cost of transit, since many people are too snobbish to ever ride it no matter what the financial situation.
- sschueller 3y ago
  If we want to keep cars those driver taxes are already being collected and are in use for highway maintenance etc.
karmakurtisaani 3y ago
> However public transport isn't even close to being free. I fact it is quite expensive in addition to being heavily tax supported. Oh boy is it expensive, in particular to the poor foreigners visiting without the half-price card. And for some reason if you're in the know, you can buy all-day whole country covering travel passes for 50 something chf. Something that the foreigners can never get without insider help. There's absolutely no way it's ever going to be cheaper, the best one can hope is that the prices don't go up very fast. Still, it's cheaper than having a car somehow.