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.
Why is that equilibrium impossible for other transportation infrastructure?
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.
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.
and lose the very thing that keeps the US top dog. You're implying that political shifts could happen to shift _anything_.
That's not true for things of fundamental importance. So is transit of fundamental importance?
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.)
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.
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.)
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
There was some bussing of homeless into city centres. But I haven't seen evidence that a majority, let alone a relevant plurality, of these cities' homeless addicts became homeless somewhere else.
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.
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.
And you're out here bragging about what you "let" your neighbors and kids do. And bragging about visiting two US cities.
Source? (I genuinely know nothing about this. But would appreciate hard data.)
> 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.
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..
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.
Meanwhile it's 70 deg F here in Atlanta. California and Florida have even warmer temps.
If public transport provides value to people, they should pay for some of it. 30 day unlimited ride pass in only $132.
That is 16 hours of work if you make $8 an hour. You obviously make more than that if you can say "only $132"
There are just a lot of people in New York. The roads are packed, and the public transit is packed. More transit would help solve both problems.
If you don't know that's a lot for some people ...
> they should pay for some of it
They do. It must be paid for, and all government money comes from the citizens.
Registration fees are usually time-based, not usage-based.
We’re a quarter of the way through the 21st century, gas taxes have been optional for driving for quite a while now.
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.
And electric cars don't pay a gas tax.
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.
And besides, the comment upthread said "some", not "all".
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.
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.
> 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
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.
Where this happens they arrive promptly. And it doesn’t happen often.
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.
Making the buses free isn't going to produce any more of it.
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).
This is very basic economics of public transit. I completely agree with the comment about having a minimum payment and enforcement.
Do they also not use the streets in that case? There's nothing preventing "mentally ill people or hucksters" from being there.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/san-franciscos-union-square-...
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'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.
And it doesn't raise compliance at all. Why would it?
It's not rocket science and other countries figured out how to do it.
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.
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?
At the risk of feeding the trolls, I have to object to this ignorant, callous, brutal bs. Please, read this account^1 of NBA player Chris Boucher staying alive by riding public transit, and try to put yourself in his shoes for a moment.
[1] https://www.theplayerstribune.com/chris-boucher-nba-boston-c...
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.)
It was noticeable in that as a tourist, it seemed like a chill place, but there are lots of police of various stripes and they seemed very serious when enforcing things.
I told him my boss is an asshole and was paying. That made him happy, he said “f that guy” and wished me a good day.
There's absolutely no need to wait for the cops. They can drive to a stop in front of the bus.
Not to mention, you know, the person might have gotten off by that point since they got to their destination already.
If they get off the bus right away then no big deal in the first place.
Some public transit has a much more rigid fare collection structure - trains are typically much more controlled entry points. But buses? It's in their best interest to get everyone on as quickly as possible and get everyone off as quickly as passive. Are you going to have gates that block you if you don't scan your card/phone from exiting? Same for boarding. Do you dedicate policing resources to ensuring the collection of what is certainly less than the cost to employ the police officer? Seems wasteful until you hit a very high ridership.
I see fare evasion almost every time I take the tube
Anecdotally, the bart gates seem to have improved the riding experience.
Some data from LA:
> Of the 153 violent crimes perpetrated on Metro between May 2023 and April 2024, 143 of them — more than 93% — were believed to be committed by people who did not pay a valid fare and were using the transit system illegally.
https://ktla.com/news/local-news/metro-violence-largely-perp...
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.
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.
It's obvious nowhere near e.g. Switzerland or Singapore, for example.
But then on the other hand, people obey the rules a ton more than in places like Brazil or India.
Just as many foreigners are shocked at how polite and orderly Americans are, compared to back home.
The world is a vast and diverse place.
American exceptionalism is just as silly when it’s “America bad.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
How many other $200M projects should they just "find" budget for? Only the one you like?
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?
I wonder how much the traffic would improve in/out of SF if BART is cheaper.
It adds up super fast; even “kids ride free with parent” would go a long way.
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.
How the "Users Pay" Myth Gets in the Way of Solving America's Transportation Problems
Road Taxes and Funding by State, 2025
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.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.
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.
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.
US cars get 1 cent per passenger mile.
US Transit gets $2.39 per passenger mile.
https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=22027
Also look up the Farebox Recovery Ratio.
There are values for many US cities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio#United_...
From :
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01660...
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.
Strong Towns talks quite a bit about how especially suburban roads are not financially sustainable.
Most of the routes run Monday thru Saturday. Schedules are something that are easily changed to support demand.
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.)
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.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-08-13/carjacki...
Personally, I would rather be on a bus with someone high on drugs than be carjacked at gunpoint.
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/health/trimet-max-fentanyl-...
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’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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Both bicycles & free transports would be even better !
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?
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.
Why can't buses be regulated the same way?
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.
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.
Honestly it’s not that big a deal if someone sleeps on the bus. Homeless, drunk, tired from work, whatever.
If you’re appalled by the idea, you may not be aware: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-14/horror-t...
LAMetro recently woke up and started cleaning this up. Not sure how long it will take before ridership fully returns.
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.
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.
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.
In Ithaca we recently built this place
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/115398619308992584
which is all low income housing on top of a conference center with maybe 1/4 of the units for people who had been unhoused. I think most of the people there are not criminally minded and keep to themselves but there are a few people there who are starting fires, dealing drugs, and causing damage. (Note a few windows in that image are busted out) Many homeless people have dogs that are important to them and wouldn’t be housed if they couldn’t bring their dogs, but… last year they had an outbreak of parovirus because dogs were having puppies and the puppies weren’t getting shots. A friend of mine got bit by a dog across the street from that place and thought it belonged to someone who lived there.
Some of it is people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder can be almost impossible to live with if they aren’t getting treatment and I’m worried that deinstitutionalization will have a even more profoundly negative legacy seen 50 years from now than it already does. Not least, a 20 year old today spent many years of their life in a classroom where a ‘special’ kid sucked all the air out of the room and will probably be highly receptive to the notion that if we ‘get rid’ of 5% of people we can live in a utopia. If being in public means being in a space dominated by someone screaming at the demons they hallucinated then people will move to the suburbs instead of the downtown, they will not support public transit, they will order a private taxi for their burrito instead of eating out. They’ll retreat to Facebook.
EDIT to atone for the snark: Good candidates for such alt institutions already exist; "just" need to test their policies on an expanded student body. Bonus, some (myself included?) consider these "conservative":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45598371
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.Not an issue for cheap / free public transport in many other countries mentioned.
Perhaps the manner in which the US deals with the distribution of income and basic human needs could use a few tweaks.
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.
that is exactly what homeless people be doing.
Is it cheaper to lobby or to create an incompetent monopoly to ruin things?
In Europe, if you're a group of 2-5 adults with no discounts, it's often cheaper to take a car than to use the bus / train. That makes no sense.
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.
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.
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).
Maybe this program wouldn't work everywhere. Makes sense it would work there.
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.
No they haven't. Places with "gobs of parking" are suburban Walmarts. Pretty much every city is super short on parking.
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?
But city parking is very expensive and still often fills up, and the free parking at suburban Walmarts usually has plenty of open spots.
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.
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.
Cuba, also, but their economic priorities are very different.
addiction, mental health, childhood drama… only in america would that lead to sleeping on the streets
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.
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.
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.
But, it is kind of a non issue. You are responsible for your ticket. Having a dead battery is no different to losing your paper ticket.
For that reason, among others, I strongly prefer non-phone, non-battery-powered options for transit payment.
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.
people from outside the US often think it’s a land of fabulously rich ppl and are aghast at how we treat our citizens
We can have concern for residents who feel justifiably unsafe and uncomfortable on public transit as well as homeless riders.
Then tackle the more complex.
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.
Otherwise, what do you propose?
1: https://nlihc.org/resource/new-study-finds-providing-people-...
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.
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.
It is a fucking nightmare. I'm a liberal guy but the amount of bums make the transit here unusable.
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.
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.
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 suspect's] mother told ABC News that [the suspect] was diagnosed with schizophrenia [...] and displayed violent behavior at home. His mother said that she had sought involuntary commitment, but that it was denied.
> Elon Musk criticized judges and district attorneys for allowing "criminals to roam free".
> U.S. President Donald Trump called the attacker a "madman" and "lunatic", and said that "when you have horrible killings, you have to take horrible actions. And the actions that we take are nothing", before blaming local officials in places like Chicago for failing to stop crime and denounced cashless bail.
> On the same day, the White House released a statement criticizing "North Carolina's Democrat politicians, prosecutors, and judges" for "prioritizing woke agendas that fail to protect their citizens".
> On September 9, the White House released a video in which Trump said that Zarutska was "slaughtered by a deranged monster".
> On September 24, U.S. Vice President JD Vance discussed the killing in a visit to Concord, North Carolina, blaming it on "soft-on-crime policies" and stating he was "open" to deploying the North Carolina National Guard to Charlotte if requested by Governor Stein and Mayor Lyles.
> The U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary held a field hearing in Charlotte on September 29 on safety in public transit systems and the treatment of repeat offenders.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Iryna_Zarutska#Reac...
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.
This is straight up racism right here. Not even trying to hide it.
Next time I hope it's someone you love.
See, that’s something I would never say to anyone.
A one-time event of a black person killing a white person is not enough for me to hate black people. For you it seems to be the topical reference you care to type out; just one of a library of events you pay attention to while ignoring everything else.
You are the problem here. Not anyone that’s black. People like you are who I’m afraid of. And I’m confident you’re the most violent demographic in the US.
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.
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.
Neither of them have been arrested 72 times nor convicted 15 times. Neither of them have set a random woman on a train on fire, either.
I consider someone who does that subhuman, yeah. Schizophrenics can and do experience empathy and go out of their way not to hurt others.