As far as I remember, in the bigger cities in Germany farebox recovery ratios are usually somewhere in the 30 to 80 % range, in some cases even higher. (Accordi

As far as I remember, in the bigger cities in Germany farebox recovery ratios are usually somewhere in the 30 to 80 % range, in some cases even higher. (According to https://www.vdv.de/vdv-statistik-2019.pdfx#page=35 https://www.vdv.de/vdv-statistik-2019.pdfx#page=35, the average might actually be around 75 %, it seems.) So completely abolishing fares would mean a considerable, definitively non-trivial increase in spending requirements on public transport for cities – and if you're seriously prepared to spend that much money (or create some sort of additional tax to raise that money, or whatever), I'd rather prioritise spending it on service improvements first, because even in big cities there are enough examples of service offerings that are only borderline attractive. They actually did some (admittedly smaller-scale) experiments in that direction recently, and as I understood it, the takeaway was that service improvements were indeed somewhat more effective in generating additional passengers than lower fares.