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To you all complaining about free transit, I invite you to actually look the next time you take the bus or metro at the amount of infrastructure dedicated to ti

To you all complaining about free transit, I invite you to actually look the next time you take the bus or metro at the amount of infrastructure dedicated to ticketing, validation and enforcement. I invite you to think about the amount of money spent on it. I invite you to think about the amount of time wasted by people on ticketing. The queues at ticket booths, people spending time researching what pass they want. Seniors spending time asking for their special card so they can get it cheaper or for free. The amounts spent on advertising to reduce gate jumpers, or to tell people about the latest formula or whatever. The massive amounts spent on RND of new techniques to make going through the gates quicker because it’s an annoying experience. The bad deals made with payments companies to be able to take card payments directly at the gate. Really it’s insane. When you start believing that public transit should be free because it’s infrastructure (there’s a lot of reasons why it should be free), you start actually seeing just how much money and time would be saved. Then it clicks.

loeg 4y ago
So, it would help your argument if you could put concrete figures to any of these perceived costs, and then contrast that with the lost fares.
- Gibbon1 4y ago
  SFMTA's fare box recovery ratio is 17%. Were for driving it's 50% but the sums are vastly higher. While back read a fair argument that when you consider the alternative is a person driving the the proper fare price for mass transit is negative.
  - loeg 4y ago
    SFMTA's recovery ratio prior to Covid was in the 20s %, and 30s a few years ago: https://www.sfmta.com/reports/muni-farebox-recovery-ratio https://www.sfmta.com/reports/muni-farebox-recovery-ratio Looking at 2020 ratios in isolation doesn't give a very complete picture.
- Donckele 4y ago
  In a small European capital city it cost 250 Million Euros some years ago to install electronic gates at the metro stations.
- scrollaway 4y ago
  Here's an example from pre-covid in Brussels, BE. https://2019.stib-activityreports.brussels/en/a-high-performing-company https://2019.stib-activityreports.brussels/en/a-high-perform... The STIB is the Brussels metro & bus company. As you can see, subsidies represent 54 percent of the STIB's revenue: Subsidies of almost 400M EUR. The figure you want is "traffic revenue": 225M EUR. So now, the calculation is: Is ticketing and enforcement worth 225M EUR / year in Brussels? The answer on paper is yes, because we're not taking into account the costs I outlined above. Breaking them down by line item is impossible because the figures are not public, but going by related figures, it's not looking good for proponents of ticketing. Let's just go with sibling comment's ticket gate price: 250MM EUR. They are replaced every 8 years roughly. So, 31MM / year. Now down to under half of the subsidies. Direct costs: Ticket enforcement staff + equipment, gate maintenance, automated sales booths + maintenance + software, in-person sales booths + maintenance, payment processing fees, contract costs Externalities: Ticket littering + cleanup costs, inefficient purchases by customers (bought the wrong tickets/too many) Time costs: Validation time, gate bottlenecking (especially at peak time), reduced opportunities for those who can't afford tickets... ---- Okay, so let's say you do all those calculations, and you end up finding out they're all zero (they won't be, but w/e), and actually you're still making decent tax revenue from public transit (0.2bn eur). What is the lesson here? The lesson, is that all these are insignificant compared to the investment that same city wants to make into public transport: 5.2 bn EUR. (ref. https://www.stib-mivb.be/article.html?l=en&_guid=0035aa30-f3b3-3410-c188-e0a713117e7f https://www.stib-mivb.be/article.html?l=en&_guid=0035aa30-f3...). Or compared to the costs of road maintenance (50-100bn EUR / year in BE). Or, or ... Make no mistake, removing costs would increase ridership which would increase costs. But it would also increase national productivity output which increases tax revenue. This is not a simple calculation to run, and my girlfriend is using my parallel universe simulator right now so I can't check. Public transit should be free (AS IN PAID BY TAXES), because it's the right thing to do, when the roads are financed the same way.
SamReidHughes 4y ago
Recently a train opened up that connects downtown to where I live, not free, but ticketing isn't really enforced. There had previously been bus service, and of course, roads. Now the place is populated with bums, the nearby Starbucks removed indoor seating, the supermarket, once open 24 hours and a place for van-dwelling homeless to use computers, now has gates up to inhibit shoplifting, and what was once a safe area at night, with some safe homeless people, now has crazy lunatics walking around. This is the cost of free public transit.
- vlovich123 4y ago
  Could be correlation not causation without knowing more about the time period and geographic area you’re discussing. Homeless rates have been skyrocketing everywhere.
  - SamReidHughes 4y ago
    It happened basically as a phase change over the first month it was open. Far beyond the previous rise in local homelessness, which had happened a bit here and there, but you were never stepping over people.
- scrollaway 4y ago
  Oh stop. No, this isn't the "cost of free public transit" - first of all, it's not even "free public transit". It's the cost of your local administration not dealing with the homeless population correctly. It's the cost of a terrible social net.
  - mixmastamyk 4y ago
    It’s called a prerequisite.
- rippercushions 4y ago
  Ah yes, all of this is obviously directly and entirely the train's fault. Are you perchance American?
- 4y ago
midoridensha 4y ago
Over here in Japan, the transit systems are profitable, and there's no trouble with fare collection despite having more ridership than anywhere on the planet thanks to the IC cards normally used for storing money. It doesn't take any time at all to go through the gates with these; even during rush-hour they're not a problem, and it's been this way for many years now. Complaints like yours ring hollow when solutions have already been devised and in use for a long time. If other places don't use these solutions because of NIH or whatever, that doesn't mean these complaints are valid.
- scrollaway 4y ago
  Things working / not working in one outlier city is not grounds for "complaints like yours ring hollow". You know Tokyo is the most populated city in the world, right. The solutions in place there will HAVE to be different to anywhere else on the planet. It's like a Google engineer talking about how some random SaaS's complaints about Heroku or whatever are "hollow, because here at Google we use solution X and it works fine and we have more traffic than anywhere on the planet so obviously solution X is best". Not saying whatever solution it is you're using isn't good, or couldn't fit in another city. But Japanese customs, payment systems, administrations, densities, and incomes are vastly different to the rest of the world's. The numbers to justify free transit will be very different for you.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    >You know Tokyo is the most populated city in the world, right. The solutions in place there will HAVE to be different to anywhere else on the planet. Wrong. The laws of physics are not different in other places. The complaint was that it takes too long to collect fares. This is factually untrue, and Japan's system (it uses the same system nationwide) proves this. It's a solved problem. In other places, it can be even better because it's less populated (crowded) than here. >It's like a Google engineer talking about how some random SaaS's complaints No, it's really not. It's like someone complaining that encoding WAVs into Oggs is too big a problem, and someone else saying, "no, all you have to do is download libogg and libvorbis and oggtools and use it." The solution is right there, you just need to use it. >But Japanese customs, payment systems, The custom of swiping a card to go through a turnstile is too foreign to you? The card is a stored-value card. You put money on the card, and spend it as you go through the turnstiles. You don't even need a payment system: I charge mine with cash. Edit: just to add to this, there are other transit systems that use this same technology, such as in China.

loeg 4y ago

So, it would help your argument if you could put concrete figures to any of these perceived costs, and then contrast that with the lost fares.

Gibbon1 4y ago
SFMTA's fare box recovery ratio is 17%. Were for driving it's 50% but the sums are vastly higher. While back read a fair argument that when you consider the alternative is a person driving the the proper fare price for mass transit is negative.
- loeg 4y ago
  SFMTA's recovery ratio prior to Covid was in the 20s %, and 30s a few years ago: https://www.sfmta.com/reports/muni-farebox-recovery-ratio https://www.sfmta.com/reports/muni-farebox-recovery-ratio Looking at 2020 ratios in isolation doesn't give a very complete picture.
Donckele 4y ago
In a small European capital city it cost 250 Million Euros some years ago to install electronic gates at the metro stations.
scrollaway 4y ago
Here's an example from pre-covid in Brussels, BE. https://2019.stib-activityreports.brussels/en/a-high-performing-company https://2019.stib-activityreports.brussels/en/a-high-perform... The STIB is the Brussels metro & bus company. As you can see, subsidies represent 54 percent of the STIB's revenue: Subsidies of almost 400M EUR. The figure you want is "traffic revenue": 225M EUR. So now, the calculation is: Is ticketing and enforcement worth 225M EUR / year in Brussels? The answer on paper is yes, because we're not taking into account the costs I outlined above. Breaking them down by line item is impossible because the figures are not public, but going by related figures, it's not looking good for proponents of ticketing. Let's just go with sibling comment's ticket gate price: 250MM EUR. They are replaced every 8 years roughly. So, 31MM / year. Now down to under half of the subsidies. Direct costs: Ticket enforcement staff + equipment, gate maintenance, automated sales booths + maintenance + software, in-person sales booths + maintenance, payment processing fees, contract costs Externalities: Ticket littering + cleanup costs, inefficient purchases by customers (bought the wrong tickets/too many) Time costs: Validation time, gate bottlenecking (especially at peak time), reduced opportunities for those who can't afford tickets... ---- Okay, so let's say you do all those calculations, and you end up finding out they're all zero (they won't be, but w/e), and actually you're still making decent tax revenue from public transit (0.2bn eur). What is the lesson here? The lesson, is that all these are insignificant compared to the investment that same city wants to make into public transport: 5.2 bn EUR. (ref. https://www.stib-mivb.be/article.html?l=en&_guid=0035aa30-f3b3-3410-c188-e0a713117e7f https://www.stib-mivb.be/article.html?l=en&_guid=0035aa30-f3...). Or compared to the costs of road maintenance (50-100bn EUR / year in BE). Or, or ... Make no mistake, removing costs would increase ridership which would increase costs. But it would also increase national productivity output which increases tax revenue. This is not a simple calculation to run, and my girlfriend is using my parallel universe simulator right now so I can't check. Public transit should be free (AS IN PAID BY TAXES), because it's the right thing to do, when the roads are financed the same way.

SamReidHughes 4y ago

Recently a train opened up that connects downtown to where I live, not free, but ticketing isn't really enforced. There had previously been bus service, and of course, roads. Now the place is populated with bums, the nearby Starbucks removed indoor seating, the supermarket, once open 24 hours and a place for van-dwelling homeless to use computers, now has gates up to inhibit shoplifting, and what was once a safe area at night, with some safe homeless people, now has crazy lunatics walking around. This is the cost of free public transit.

vlovich123 4y ago
Could be correlation not causation without knowing more about the time period and geographic area you’re discussing. Homeless rates have been skyrocketing everywhere.
- SamReidHughes 4y ago
  It happened basically as a phase change over the first month it was open. Far beyond the previous rise in local homelessness, which had happened a bit here and there, but you were never stepping over people.
scrollaway 4y ago
Oh stop. No, this isn't the "cost of free public transit" - first of all, it's not even "free public transit". It's the cost of your local administration not dealing with the homeless population correctly. It's the cost of a terrible social net.
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  It’s called a prerequisite.
rippercushions 4y ago
Ah yes, all of this is obviously directly and entirely the train's fault. Are you perchance American?
4y ago

midoridensha 4y ago

Over here in Japan, the transit systems are profitable, and there's no trouble with fare collection despite having more ridership than anywhere on the planet thanks to the IC cards normally used for storing money. It doesn't take any time at all to go through the gates with these; even during rush-hour they're not a problem, and it's been this way for many years now. Complaints like yours ring hollow when solutions have already been devised and in use for a long time. If other places don't use these solutions because of NIH or whatever, that doesn't mean these complaints are valid.

scrollaway 4y ago
Things working / not working in one outlier city is not grounds for "complaints like yours ring hollow". You know Tokyo is the most populated city in the world, right. The solutions in place there will HAVE to be different to anywhere else on the planet. It's like a Google engineer talking about how some random SaaS's complaints about Heroku or whatever are "hollow, because here at Google we use solution X and it works fine and we have more traffic than anywhere on the planet so obviously solution X is best". Not saying whatever solution it is you're using isn't good, or couldn't fit in another city. But Japanese customs, payment systems, administrations, densities, and incomes are vastly different to the rest of the world's. The numbers to justify free transit will be very different for you.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  >You know Tokyo is the most populated city in the world, right. The solutions in place there will HAVE to be different to anywhere else on the planet. Wrong. The laws of physics are not different in other places. The complaint was that it takes too long to collect fares. This is factually untrue, and Japan's system (it uses the same system nationwide) proves this. It's a solved problem. In other places, it can be even better because it's less populated (crowded) than here. >It's like a Google engineer talking about how some random SaaS's complaints No, it's really not. It's like someone complaining that encoding WAVs into Oggs is too big a problem, and someone else saying, "no, all you have to do is download libogg and libvorbis and oggtools and use it." The solution is right there, you just need to use it. >But Japanese customs, payment systems, The custom of swiping a card to go through a turnstile is too foreign to you? The card is a stored-value card. You put money on the card, and spend it as you go through the turnstiles. You don't even need a payment system: I charge mine with cash. Edit: just to add to this, there are other transit systems that use this same technology, such as in China.