8 ms·

Free transit is stupid. When surveyed, the huge majority (98%) of weekday transit riders say they want increased service over decreased prices. Everyone wants 1

Free transit is stupid. When surveyed, the huge majority (98%) of weekday transit riders say they want increased service over decreased prices. Everyone wants 10 minute or less headways. People will pay 3 dollars for a bus ride if the line has 10 minute headways or less and signal priority, but they won't take the bus if its stuck in traffic and has 30 minute headways. The reality is that transit funding for free transit is zero sum, and the riders of the system would prefer if the money was spent on improved service instead of free fares.

braingenious 4y ago
What percentage wanted increased service and decreased price? Was the question phrased “Pick one (1) of the following two things”? I would love to see the data on “What would improve your experience using public transit?”
Scoundreller 4y ago
98% of consumers of any product/service would be willing to pay more but most places don’t allow this kind of price discrimination.
- charlieyu1 4y ago
  I mean this can be solved by giving discounts to elderly/disabled/poor people
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    At some point, means testing for a $1.50 bus ride is going to cost more than it saves and can become a barrier to the ridership that it's intended to encourage.
kennywinker 4y ago
Your issue seems to be with funding. Fares are usually quite a small component of transit system’s budgets. We don’t require users of city streets to pay fares to use that transportation infrastructure, with exception of the occasional toll-funded highway/bridge/tunnel, and we spend many many billions of tax dollars more on those than we do on public transit. If free transit is a bad idea so are free city streets.
- minitoar 4y ago
  arguably fuel tax is that fare
  - mertd 4y ago
    If fuel tax is enough why do we keep passing trillion dollar infra bills and allocating majority of it to road repair?
    - Bluecobra 4y ago
      The current fuel tax (in the USA) not enough. Federal fuel taxes have not been raised in 30 years and not adjusted for inflation/cost of living. I’m sure it would be a political death wish to try to raise it again. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_Sta...
      - wahern 4y ago
        Fuel tax is complicated by the fact that poorer families tend to live further away from work and thus drive more, both because housing is cheaper the further away from a city you get, but also because non-skilled labor doesn't aggregate along transit corridors the same way it does for office workers. So a low fuel tax is in effect a subsidy to the poor, notwithstanding that it also benefits corporations which maintain the infrastructure. You can see this in every part of the world--cheap fuel is the easiest way to placate the working class. Public transit can be a remedy, but outside Manhattan I don't think any locale in the U.S. has remotely the density to make it truly viable at scale for the poor and working classes. Obviously public transit is critical for some poorer subgroups, but those groups tend to be the ones trapped in ghettos. To truly bridge the gap so public transit is a substitute for fuel subsidies would require an order of magnitude increase in the size and reach of our public transit networks, plus a dramatic shift in zoning to reduce the costs of housing in urbanized areas, plus a dramatic shift in geographical demographics. Note that poor and working classes will hold onto the white picket fence ideal for much longer than the middle classes. So you're dealing with very strong counter-veiling pressures when it comes to the groups you're attempting to help the most.
redox99 4y ago
Isn't public transportation already heavily subsidized? Surveyed people might not understand that to increase spending 2x without any increase in subsidies, fares might need to 5x or 10x.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  It is, and at least the cases I'm familiar with, fares are sometimes nominal fees. Commuters wouldn't be able to afford the real cost of public transportation if it needed to be solvent and funded by fares alone.
acomjean 4y ago
I went to umass amherst which had a free bus system which I used regularly. It was pretty great, you didn’t have to think about it. Also without having to make sure fairs paid up people could get on from the middle of the bus instead of just the front door which seemed to speed the boarding process. I work in the longwood area of Boston. There are private bus routes that make up for the lack of good public transit for the area. It’s also free with Id. https://www.longwoodcollective.org/lma-shuttles/shuttle-routes https://www.longwoodcollective.org/lma-shuttles/shuttle-rout...
- CuriousCosmic 4y ago
  Worth noting that university transit systems are very much not free. The fees are just included in your tuition. For Amherst specifically, this is covered by undergrad students' tuition and graduate students' service fees. For context the grad student service fee is around 300-700USD per semester depending on how many credits you take. So by no means is it free. I do agree with you though that universal access to transit makes it a lot more pleasant and speeds up boarding quite substantially. https://www.umass.edu/bursar/fee-explanation https://www.umass.edu/bursar/fee-explanation
  - acomjean 4y ago
    The busses I took were the “pioneer valley transit authority”. Apparently they do charge some routes, but the ones operated by umass now are free to students. They’d actually train students to drive the buses. ( still do apparently) an interesting skill to leave university with. https://www.umass.edu/transportation/now-hiring https://www.umass.edu/transportation/now-hiring) Umass was interesting. The fees were how they kept money at the school as tuition went to the states general fund. Sports were always covered by those fees which was free basketball tickets (though it was a lottery when I left, but I worked at the paper and would take pictues..) It was a while ago that I was there (last century..) https://www.pvta.com/ https://www.pvta.com/
- Broken_Hippo 4y ago
  Also without having to make sure fairs paid up people could get on from the middle of the bus instead of just the front door which seemed to speed the boarding process This is just a rule they've made: You can have both fares and boarding at any door in the bus. I know this because this is how the busses in Trondheim, Norway are. You can't always pay on the bus, so everyone has their ticket before they get on. They have spot checks by folks that aren't bus drivers. Does it cause some folks to risk not buying a ticket? Yes, but it is obviously not worth doing more checks.
chimeracoder 4y ago
> The reality is that transit funding for free transit is zero sum Except it doesn't have to be zero-sum. A government can simply decide it wants to prioritize public transportation. The funding isn't inherently zero-sum.
adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
the reason to do free buses is that making people pay slows the bus down. it's not a major slowdown, but 1s per rider adds up. Also decreasing price does increase demand which helps justify increased service.
- loeg 4y ago
  Make people pay at the stop before they board.
  - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    that costs a lot of money maintenance and sidewalk space. it's a lot cheaper and easier to just take it out of taxes
- katbyte 4y ago
  It also costs a lot of money to collect and enforce fares.
tshaddox 4y ago
Are the fees there to actually provide a meaningful portion of the funding, or just to make rich people who don’t use public transit feel like it’s more fair because the poor people don’t get to ride for free? I’d be surprised if the fees are meaningful on many transit systems, especially if you also throw out the costs of selling the tickets and enforcement.
- BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
  >”Are the fees there to actually provide a meaningful portion of the funding, or just to make rich people who don’t use public transit feel like it’s more fair because the poor people don’t get to ride for free?” It is entirely the first reason - mass transit is not cheap and fares help alleviate the burden of the subsidy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    Recovery rates are almost all under 20% in the US, and these numbers don’t even incorporate the cost of selling tickets and ticket enforcement or the costs of the initial builds and expansions (which are almost entirely paid for by the taxpayer).
    - BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
      That’s still a significant amount of money, even though it’s under 20% of the total operating cost. For most of the entries in that article it covers tens of millions of dollars. I don’t think the cost of issuing tickets and enforcement is that significant compared to how much money collecting fares brings in. It certainly doesn’t seem like something that is done at a loss or something that barely breaks even.
      - tshaddox 4y ago
        It's not nothing, but if the goal is to turn a profit it's nowhere close. On the other hand, if the goal is to get more people riding public transit, I'd want to look into how removing fees might help that goal.
woodruffw 4y ago
This is in conflict with public transit in many European cities, which is (1) free or nominally priced, (2) has favorable headways compared to nearly every US city, and (3) is more sustainably funded than public transit in the US. I frankly wouldn’t mind paying more for public transit, but making it the crux feels roughly analogous to corporate ”greenwashing”: push the responsibility onto individuals and we can conveniently ignore the structural changes needed to make public transit systems grow and thrive.
- raldi 4y ago
  First make it good, then make it free.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    There’s no intrinsic ordering here: making a public transit system better requires justification through ridership numbers, and making your system free is a fantastic way to improve those numbers.
    - raldi 4y ago
      Why do you believe that? American transit experts are saying things like, “I’ve heard people describe the free fare movement as being a movement for free, terrible service, and that’s how the trade-off ends up working if you expect this to happen inside the budget of an impoverished American transit agency" and "if a transit agency had to choose between devoting funds to reducing fares or to maintaining or improving service, most riders would prefer the latter. It also suggests that the notion of making transit “free”—though politically appealing —would provide less utility to the public than if the equivalence in foregone revenue were spent improving service and continuing to charge a fare." Sources: https://slate.com/business/2021/06/free-transit-is-not-a-great-idea.html https://slate.com/business/2021/06/free-transit-is-not-a-gre... https://transitcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/TC_WhosOnBoard_Final_digital-1-1.pdf https://transitcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/TC_Whos...
      - 4y ago
ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
> The reality is that transit funding for free transit is zero sum This is not necessarily true. If reducing fares increases ridership it may allow a strong case to be made for increasing the system funding.
- missingcolours 4y ago
  That's usually the political calculation for free fares (aside from the virtue signaling aspect) - free fares = more riders = more political support for increased public funding. The potential peril is that compared to the counterfactual of spending this money on improved service, free fares may attract few new riders or fail to generate additional political capital, or even lead to reduced funding if transit starts to be seen as a welfare expenditure rather than a system for everyone that pays for itself to some degree.
greggarious 4y ago
It's not free transit unless they include WMATA (the subway). Very few people commute via bus in DC. I rarely did it because often traffic would make it take a long time even though I lived in the district.
pugworthy 4y ago
It's been free in my city since 2011 and it's great from this smaller town's perspective. Perhaps "stupid" applies to big cities or certain demographics, but to smaller towns and low income people it's a proverbial godsend for transportation to work, school, etc.

braingenious 4y ago

What percentage wanted increased service and decreased price? Was the question phrased “Pick one (1) of the following two things”? I would love to see the data on “What would improve your experience using public transit?”

Scoundreller 4y ago

98% of consumers of any product/service would be willing to pay more but most places don’t allow this kind of price discrimination.

charlieyu1 4y ago
I mean this can be solved by giving discounts to elderly/disabled/poor people
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  At some point, means testing for a $1.50 bus ride is going to cost more than it saves and can become a barrier to the ridership that it's intended to encourage.

kennywinker 4y ago

Your issue seems to be with funding. Fares are usually quite a small component of transit system’s budgets. We don’t require users of city streets to pay fares to use that transportation infrastructure, with exception of the occasional toll-funded highway/bridge/tunnel, and we spend many many billions of tax dollars more on those than we do on public transit. If free transit is a bad idea so are free city streets.

minitoar 4y ago
arguably fuel tax is that fare
- mertd 4y ago
  If fuel tax is enough why do we keep passing trillion dollar infra bills and allocating majority of it to road repair?
  - Bluecobra 4y ago
    The current fuel tax (in the USA) not enough. Federal fuel taxes have not been raised in 30 years and not adjusted for inflation/cost of living. I’m sure it would be a political death wish to try to raise it again. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_Sta...
    - wahern 4y ago
      Fuel tax is complicated by the fact that poorer families tend to live further away from work and thus drive more, both because housing is cheaper the further away from a city you get, but also because non-skilled labor doesn't aggregate along transit corridors the same way it does for office workers. So a low fuel tax is in effect a subsidy to the poor, notwithstanding that it also benefits corporations which maintain the infrastructure. You can see this in every part of the world--cheap fuel is the easiest way to placate the working class. Public transit can be a remedy, but outside Manhattan I don't think any locale in the U.S. has remotely the density to make it truly viable at scale for the poor and working classes. Obviously public transit is critical for some poorer subgroups, but those groups tend to be the ones trapped in ghettos. To truly bridge the gap so public transit is a substitute for fuel subsidies would require an order of magnitude increase in the size and reach of our public transit networks, plus a dramatic shift in zoning to reduce the costs of housing in urbanized areas, plus a dramatic shift in geographical demographics. Note that poor and working classes will hold onto the white picket fence ideal for much longer than the middle classes. So you're dealing with very strong counter-veiling pressures when it comes to the groups you're attempting to help the most.

redox99 4y ago

Isn't public transportation already heavily subsidized? Surveyed people might not understand that to increase spending 2x without any increase in subsidies, fares might need to 5x or 10x.

heavyset_go 4y ago
It is, and at least the cases I'm familiar with, fares are sometimes nominal fees. Commuters wouldn't be able to afford the real cost of public transportation if it needed to be solvent and funded by fares alone.

acomjean 4y ago

I went to umass amherst which had a free bus system which I used regularly. It was pretty great, you didn’t have to think about it. Also without having to make sure fairs paid up people could get on from the middle of the bus instead of just the front door which seemed to speed the boarding process. I work in the longwood area of Boston. There are private bus routes that make up for the lack of good public transit for the area. It’s also free with Id. https://www.longwoodcollective.org/lma-shuttles/shuttle-routes https://www.longwoodcollective.org/lma-shuttles/shuttle-rout...

CuriousCosmic 4y ago
Worth noting that university transit systems are very much not free. The fees are just included in your tuition. For Amherst specifically, this is covered by undergrad students' tuition and graduate students' service fees. For context the grad student service fee is around 300-700USD per semester depending on how many credits you take. So by no means is it free. I do agree with you though that universal access to transit makes it a lot more pleasant and speeds up boarding quite substantially. https://www.umass.edu/bursar/fee-explanation https://www.umass.edu/bursar/fee-explanation
- acomjean 4y ago
  The busses I took were the “pioneer valley transit authority”. Apparently they do charge some routes, but the ones operated by umass now are free to students. They’d actually train students to drive the buses. ( still do apparently) an interesting skill to leave university with. https://www.umass.edu/transportation/now-hiring https://www.umass.edu/transportation/now-hiring) Umass was interesting. The fees were how they kept money at the school as tuition went to the states general fund. Sports were always covered by those fees which was free basketball tickets (though it was a lottery when I left, but I worked at the paper and would take pictues..) It was a while ago that I was there (last century..) https://www.pvta.com/ https://www.pvta.com/
Broken_Hippo 4y ago
Also without having to make sure fairs paid up people could get on from the middle of the bus instead of just the front door which seemed to speed the boarding process This is just a rule they've made: You can have both fares and boarding at any door in the bus. I know this because this is how the busses in Trondheim, Norway are. You can't always pay on the bus, so everyone has their ticket before they get on. They have spot checks by folks that aren't bus drivers. Does it cause some folks to risk not buying a ticket? Yes, but it is obviously not worth doing more checks.

chimeracoder 4y ago

> The reality is that transit funding for free transit is zero sum Except it doesn't have to be zero-sum. A government can simply decide it wants to prioritize public transportation. The funding isn't inherently zero-sum.

adgjlsfhk1 4y ago

the reason to do free buses is that making people pay slows the bus down. it's not a major slowdown, but 1s per rider adds up. Also decreasing price does increase demand which helps justify increased service.

loeg 4y ago
Make people pay at the stop before they board.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  that costs a lot of money maintenance and sidewalk space. it's a lot cheaper and easier to just take it out of taxes
katbyte 4y ago
It also costs a lot of money to collect and enforce fares.

tshaddox 4y ago

Are the fees there to actually provide a meaningful portion of the funding, or just to make rich people who don’t use public transit feel like it’s more fair because the poor people don’t get to ride for free? I’d be surprised if the fees are meaningful on many transit systems, especially if you also throw out the costs of selling the tickets and enforcement.

BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
>”Are the fees there to actually provide a meaningful portion of the funding, or just to make rich people who don’t use public transit feel like it’s more fair because the poor people don’t get to ride for free?” It is entirely the first reason - mass transit is not cheap and fares help alleviate the burden of the subsidy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio
- tshaddox 4y ago
  Recovery rates are almost all under 20% in the US, and these numbers don’t even incorporate the cost of selling tickets and ticket enforcement or the costs of the initial builds and expansions (which are almost entirely paid for by the taxpayer).
  - BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
    That’s still a significant amount of money, even though it’s under 20% of the total operating cost. For most of the entries in that article it covers tens of millions of dollars. I don’t think the cost of issuing tickets and enforcement is that significant compared to how much money collecting fares brings in. It certainly doesn’t seem like something that is done at a loss or something that barely breaks even.
    - tshaddox 4y ago
      It's not nothing, but if the goal is to turn a profit it's nowhere close. On the other hand, if the goal is to get more people riding public transit, I'd want to look into how removing fees might help that goal.

woodruffw 4y ago

This is in conflict with public transit in many European cities, which is (1) free or nominally priced, (2) has favorable headways compared to nearly every US city, and (3) is more sustainably funded than public transit in the US. I frankly wouldn’t mind paying more for public transit, but making it the crux feels roughly analogous to corporate ”greenwashing”: push the responsibility onto individuals and we can conveniently ignore the structural changes needed to make public transit systems grow and thrive.

raldi 4y ago
First make it good, then make it free.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  There’s no intrinsic ordering here: making a public transit system better requires justification through ridership numbers, and making your system free is a fantastic way to improve those numbers.
  - raldi 4y ago
    Why do you believe that? American transit experts are saying things like, “I’ve heard people describe the free fare movement as being a movement for free, terrible service, and that’s how the trade-off ends up working if you expect this to happen inside the budget of an impoverished American transit agency" and "if a transit agency had to choose between devoting funds to reducing fares or to maintaining or improving service, most riders would prefer the latter. It also suggests that the notion of making transit “free”—though politically appealing —would provide less utility to the public than if the equivalence in foregone revenue were spent improving service and continuing to charge a fare." Sources: https://slate.com/business/2021/06/free-transit-is-not-a-great-idea.html https://slate.com/business/2021/06/free-transit-is-not-a-gre... https://transitcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/TC_WhosOnBoard_Final_digital-1-1.pdf https://transitcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/TC_Whos...
    - 4y ago

ravel-bar-foo 4y ago

> The reality is that transit funding for free transit is zero sum This is not necessarily true. If reducing fares increases ridership it may allow a strong case to be made for increasing the system funding.

missingcolours 4y ago
That's usually the political calculation for free fares (aside from the virtue signaling aspect) - free fares = more riders = more political support for increased public funding. The potential peril is that compared to the counterfactual of spending this money on improved service, free fares may attract few new riders or fail to generate additional political capital, or even lead to reduced funding if transit starts to be seen as a welfare expenditure rather than a system for everyone that pays for itself to some degree.

greggarious 4y ago

It's not free transit unless they include WMATA (the subway). Very few people commute via bus in DC. I rarely did it because often traffic would make it take a long time even though I lived in the district.

pugworthy 4y ago

It's been free in my city since 2011 and it's great from this smaller town's perspective. Perhaps "stupid" applies to big cities or certain demographics, but to smaller towns and low income people it's a proverbial godsend for transportation to work, school, etc.