8 ms·

This is one of those NYTimes "solutions journalism" pieces meant to celebrate the program rather than truly analyze it. You can pick free, or scalable, or fina

• eru 11mo ago
  I mostly agree. > 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.
  • fragmede 11mo ago
    > charging for public transport is the right thing to do 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.
    • MrJohz 11mo ago
      There are plenty of different survey techniques that will tell you how different routes are being used. You don't need tickets or tokens for that.
  • littlecosmic 11mo ago
    In Singapore there is no MRT congestion prices only for private cars, right? Trains get crowded but still workable. It’s not clear if people would start working 6am to 3pm or something if you did. Overall I think charging money made more sense when there were more private, profit seeking companies involved as it’s the name of the game… buts it’s cheap enough that it’s hard for someone with an ok job the get bothered about it
    • eru 11mo ago
      > In Singapore there is no MRT congestion prices only for private cars, right? Singapore charges for MRT rides, but it's not explicitly a congestion charge. Every once in a while they experiment with discounts for off-peak train usage, which can sort-of be interpreted as a congestion charge. > Trains get crowded but still workable. At the peak of rush hour you sometimes have to wait three or four trains before one comes that still has standing room. (It's not as bad as it sounds, because during rush hour trains come every three minutes or so.) IMHO, varying train charges more with congestion would make a lot of sense; but the system as it is works well enough that it's probably not worth for any technocrat to spend the political capital to seriously do anything about it.
  • lazylizard 11mo ago
    on the other hand. gdp is ~200 days of work. 1 day is 0.5% gdp. 1 hour (assuming 8hr day) is 0.06% gdp. gdp/capita is nearly us$90k. 1hr of work is >us$5k! 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..
    • eru 11mo ago
      > 1hr of work is >us$5k! Not all GDP is created by work. See https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPSGA156NRUG https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPSGA156NRUG to learn that our labour share of GDP is roughly 50%. And, of course, the average hides a lot of information about the distribution. Though even given all the caveats, your numbers still seem wrong to me. 90kUSD / 200 / 8 ~ 57 USD, not 5kUSD.
      • amluto 11mo ago
        I’m guessing the comment you replied to confused 0.06% with 0.06.
  • blks 11mo ago
    Charging more for publicity transit during peak hours won’t make people use it less, there’s a reason why so many people commute during peak hours
    • eru 11mo ago
      If that were the case, you found yourself an infinite money glitch. In that situation I suggest, you hike the price up to near infinity and pay off the public debt first and then buy up the entire world's assets.
    • tim333 11mo ago
      In London they charge more for peak travel, especially trains. It definitely causes people who are flexible to travel at cheaper times.
    • throw0101a 11mo ago
      > Charging more for publicity transit during peak hours won’t make people use it less, there’s a reason why so many people commute during peak hours You don't necessarily need all people to use it during peak hours, just "enough" people. There are people who do have flexible schedules, but they may simply may not have had enough motivation to change old habits (yet).
      • ehnto 11mo ago
        I actually think riding on a crowded train would be more deterrent than a fare increase, so I feel like that would be needlessly punishing people already suffering the full trains because they have to.
        • robocat 11mo ago
          See sibling comment by eru: they said there isn't a fare increase congestion charge; instead "Every once in a while they experiment with discounts for off-peak train usage"
        • eru 11mo ago
• anubistheta 11mo ago
  It didn't work out well when the NYC MTA tried fare free rides. https://www.mta.info/document/147096 https://www.mta.info/document/147096 Dwell time and customer journey time decreased. The bus speeds were lower on the fare free routes. If public transport provides value to people, they should pay for some of it. 30 day unlimited ride pass in only $132.
  • wat10000 11mo ago
    We rarely apply this principle to roads, and I never see anyone clamoring to change that.
    • josephcsible 11mo ago
      Where can you drive without having to pay registration fees or gas taxes?
      • wat10000 11mo ago
        Pretty much everywhere allows some sort of vehicle on the roads without registration, such as bicycles. 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.
        • mpyne 11mo ago
          > 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.
• ggherbobooh 11mo ago
  Milwaukee hop
• gnarlouse 11mo ago
  As somebody who grew up in the area, Iowa City has a near-nil homelessness problem.
  • bluGill 11mo ago
    I live just down the road in des moines and there is a homeless problem. It is mostly out of sight but it is there.
    • gnarlouse 11mo ago
      Have delivered food to those homeless. This thread makes me sad.
      • bluGill 11mo ago
        The homeless do make me sad (except for the one rich guy who chooses to live that way - but he is an outlier - 1 in 1000 perhaps)
  • echelon 11mo ago
    It's 23 deg F in Iowa City in a few days. It's not even winter yet. I think this has everything to do with it. Meanwhile it's 70 deg F here in Atlanta. California and Florida have even warmer temps.
  • mmooss 11mo ago
    What is your point? The assumed demonization of people because they lack homes is a false assumption. I've spent plenty of time around people who apparently lack housing (I don't ask), including on public transit. I don't find they behave better or worse than others, on average.
    • olalonde 11mo ago
      Homeless people have higher rates of substance and mental-health issues, and, unsurprisingly, less access to showers and laundry facilities.
• saghm 11mo ago
  For what it's worth, the New York Times has spent most of this year actively trying to dissuade people from voting for the mayoral candidate in New York that had free buses as one of the more widely known parts of his platform. I'm not saying there's not an agenda in them publishing this article, but I suspect it has a lot less to do with a predilection for "solutions journalism" as much as trying to backtrack their pretty noticeable opposition to the incoming mayor that ostensibly came from them not being as far leftward as he is.
  • JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
    > the New York Times has spent most of this year actively trying to dissuade people from voting for the mayoral candidate in New York that had free buses as one of the more widely known parts of his platform 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.)
    • saghm 11mo ago
      I think that's kind of my point. There's a perception of the NYT as leaning pretty strongly to the left, which isn't necessarily false, but it's missing the important context that being based in New York and mostly run by people living in New York, it's arguably a lot less left leaning relative to the city itself. This likely isn't going to be obvious to someone outside of the the city, but I think it's useful information for the wider audience to understand. It's leftward leaning compared to the nation as a whole, but not its local audience, and those dynamics both come into play for its editorial policy. In the case of this specific story, there's an extremely straightforward potential explanation for why you story might have the bias that the parent comment describes, but for almost the exactly opposite reason that someone might think without that additional context.
• mmooss 11mo ago
  > 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 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.
  • chii 11mo ago
    > A political shift could kill military funding in the US. 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?
    • littlestymaar 11mo ago
      > You're implying that political shifts could happen to shift _anything_. Of course it could! One of the key lesson of the twentieth century is that, with political will, a modern state can do almost anything and political power can change the world dramatically very fast, for the better or the worse…
    • freefrog1234 11mo ago
      > and lose the very thing that keeps the US top dog. You're implying that political shifts could happen to shift _anything_. It was the USD as reserve currency that enabled the US to fund it's military to a point that should have bankrupted the US. The US military hasn't won a war outside the Americas since WW2. With a budget half or a quarter of the current, the US would remain secure behind two oceans. I do agree that politically the military budget will remain high due to the relationship between the MIC and US government.
• kamaal 11mo ago
  Bangalore(+State of Karnataka) is currently having free transit, but only for women. 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.
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  • watwut 11mo ago
    Why are women considered to be people who "wont contribute anything back"? But also, why are women specifically traveling for free? What was the original argument?
    • kamaal 11mo ago
      >>Why are women considered to be people who "wont contribute anything back"? Not women in specific, but India has a huge informal economy sector, where payments, salaries, spending are done outside of the tax system. Most people who take these buses work in that economy. So you end up enabling that part of the economy. At the expense of people paying taxes. It wouldn't be any different, if men got free rides as well. >>But also, why are women specifically traveling for free? What was the original argument? Women as a vote bank, has been a growing trend in Indian politics. In a lot of states far more generous perks are given to women. For eg- https://cleartax.in/s/ladli-behna-yojana https://cleartax.in/s/ladli-behna-yojana By offering these perks, you are basically buying votes from 50% of the net voting population. So a lot of states offer these perks.
• JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
  > Big-city transit has an equilibrium 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.)
  • gabinator 11mo ago
    I visited NYC and San Francisco. It's appalling and unacceptable in this day and age. 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
    • a123b456c 11mo ago
      OK, but do you realize that the worst cases from places like yours get exported to SF, NYC and other hubs, for them to deal with? And you're out here bragging about what you "let" your neighbors and kids do. And bragging about visiting two US cities.
      • JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
        > the worst cases from places like yours get exported to SF, NYC and other hubs, for them to deal with? Source? (I genuinely know nothing about this. But would appreciate hard data.)
        • skylurk 11mo ago
          Not GP and I don't know anything about this either, but I found this: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/20/bussed-out-america-moves-homeless-people-country-study https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/... Anecdotally, I used to take the Greyhound a lot and everyone on them is either a student or somewhat homeless, e.g. they just lined up another friend's couch to sleep on for a little while.
• Gud 11mo ago
  You are making a lot of assertions. Meanwhile, I travel globally for work and my preferred mode of transportation is walking and public transport(ideally tram). 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.
  • xdkyx 11mo ago
    Luxembourg is an outlier and more of an edge case, then something that can be dissected and applied to other countries/cities.
    • Gud 11mo ago
      Why?
      • soerxpso 11mo ago
        Luxembourg has insane tax revenue per capita because of its status as an international tax haven. A program that might be hardly noticeable on Luxembourg's budget could put a big dent into the budget of an American city.
        • blks 11mo ago
          What about Estonia?
        • nottorp 11mo ago
          Actually, they said fare revenue was like 10% of public transport spending anyway. It's very possible it's the same in Iowa City.
          • nielsbot 11mo ago
            That’s true in NYC today “The truth about Zohran’s free busses” by Breaking Points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P275SobdE-s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P275SobdE-s clickbait headline (of course) but gives a lot of facts about the proposal and talks about other places they’ve tried it.
• AlotOfReading 11mo ago
  Consider the case of roads as a system of transit. Fuel taxes and licensing costs don't remotely cover the infrastructure costs, and roads predated them by decades. They're obviously scalable. They're not remotely sustainable financially (and effectively free to access) yet they remain stubbornly resilient even in the face of massive political shifts. Why is that equilibrium impossible for other transportation infrastructure?
  • soerxpso 11mo ago
    Roads are cheaper than busses.
  • iso1631 11mo ago
    > Fuel taxes and licensing costs don't remotely cover the infrastructure costs In which country? Because they certainly do in the UK - about £10b a year on maintenance vs £33b a year from road taxes. Half that maintenance comes from local property taxation and half from the central exchequer If you include the societal costs from road accidents it's nearer, with estimates putting all costs from accidents including lost productivity at £35b a year. Throw in global warming and you find drivers only cover about half the costs. But then people who argue societal costs need to be included never seem to acknowledge the societal benefits of a road network.
    • AlotOfReading 11mo ago
      Not familiar with the UK and quite surprised if what you say is true, but in the US about half of highway maintenance costs are covered by the various dedicated taxes. The rest come from general funding. In Canada, the dedicated taxes go to general funding, but fuel taxes and such suffice to cover around 1/3rd of costs. Australia is a bit better at around 2/3rds. The point about social costs is valid, but there's no need to even consider them. The direct costs already need heavy subsidies in many countries.
      • iso1631 11mo ago
        Unlikely in Europe given that fuel prices across the continent are roughly the same (if anything the UK is cheaper) Fuel taxes raise £25b a year (there's also a "sales tax" on top of that which raises another c. £10b a year) Car taxes (VED - an annual tax to have your vehicle on the road legally) raise £8b This revenue goes to the national budget. The national budget spends about £5b a year on maintaining and building major new roads. Local roads are funded from local property taxes, and the total expenditure on those is under £5b a year. The government has been trying to wean itself off fuel taxes over the last 20 years -- in 1999 it accounted for 2% of the GDP, it's now down to 1%. As more and more people shift to Electric vehicles the fuel revenue drops. There have been discussions on moving to a per-mile charge, but in any case, drivers subsidise other government funding priorities. Rail on the other hand is massively subsidised -- on average it's about the same amount of subsidy as the fare revenue. The price charged per mile is far lower for regular long distance commuters (typically those with high wages), occasional use is peanalised. If I go to London at peak time tomorrow, I'll be paying about 90p a mile. If I lived in Brighton and travelled every day I'd pay under 20p/mile. The average rail user pays about 29p/mile (£3.1b and 17b km) and the subsidy is a similar amount.
• jayd16 11mo ago
  Paved roads fails your test but we have those in abundance. I'm not sure this is a useful way to dismiss things.
  • eternauta3k 11mo ago
    The answer is transactions costs, many countries charge for roads where it's practical (not in the city).
    • Zambyte 11mo ago
      What do you mean "not in the city"? Are you saying that NYCs congestion pricing is not practical?
• matwood 11mo ago
  > financially sustainable (and without sustainability, a political shift will kill it) Fiscally sustainable is a BS excuse often put forward by conservatives to not fund the things they don't want funded. Most things the government runs are not fiscally sustainable on their own, but they provide some sort of societal value. See things like the military, police, fire departments, etc... A political shift could certain still kill it, but let's not pretend it has anything to do with fiscal policy.
  • 0xedd 11mo ago
    [dead]
• Braxton1980 11mo ago
  >That equilibrium is stable for a reason. Every major city that tries free transit at scale will eventually snap back to it What about US school bus programs. They have existed in many areas for decades.
• belter 11mo ago
  > 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. Less Jevons Paradox and more Theory of Constraints... Five million people are not going to descend on Iowa City because buses are free. Luxembourg has full free public transport from buses to trains, with no feedback loops. Same in Tallinn, Estonia capital where is free for residents.
• krageon 11mo ago
  You are objectively wrong. Public transit scales the same way free and paid (i.e. based on demand). The cost for free countrywide public transport in a country with very high quality public transportation (so not the US) is about 8k per person, per year. This isn't some insurmountable amount of money - it's not even particularly costly when you compare it to what the infrastructure costs are for cars (mostly related to accident mitigation. Especially bad in the US).
• fragmede 11mo ago
  > Every serious transit city in the world ends up in the same place If we look to Asia, we see that's not the only way things can work. Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, Tokyo, Osaka, are serious transit cities in my book, and their way is to have property development, diversified business models, or operating in extremely dense corridors where demand is high enough to cover costs through fares alone. But you're right that "just run trains and collect fares" doesn't work and has to be subsidized everywhere else. The question is, how do you account for the subsidies that cars get. The cost to invade Iraq isn't usually accounted for when screaming about how much it costs to fund public transportation out of tax money.
• lanthissa 11mo ago
  sounds smart, but this a false premise because its not zero sum and theres this magical thing called taxes that allow you to reap the benefits of a more productive system. If you have free public transit and that enables more economic activity or more disposable income to be funneled into services that boost the tax rake of the city the gains can offset the cost. This is an equation none of us have the info to do as randos online and its pointless to claim otherwise. and even if your point was true free buses are a partial subsidy to low income people like you suggest in nyc its busses are a predominantly taken by low income individuals (source https://blog.tstc.org/2014/04/11/nyc-bus-riders-tend-to-be-older-and-poorer-than-subway-riders/#:~:text=New%20York%20City's%20roll%2Dout,on%20average%2C%20than%20subway%20riders.), https://blog.tstc.org/2014/04/11/nyc-bus-riders-tend-to-be-o... subway nearly everyone, and ride share has their own tax as well.
• iso1631 11mo ago
  Waiting for Tallinn to collapse. It's been 12 years now.
• throwaway0352 11mo ago
  > charge fares, subsidize low-income riders, and fund the basic system with taxes. Car traffic is also expensive. Highways, parking, and maintenance are massively subsidized through taxes, and they consume far more space per traveler making cities more congested and polluted. Cities with good public transport also tend to be more walkable, which has health benefits and could provide significant impact to healthcare costs. According to this article, every $1 invested in public transit generates about $5 in economic returns: https://govfacts.org/housing-infrastructure/transportation/public-transportation-transit/the-case-for-investing-in-public-transit/ https://govfacts.org/housing-infrastructure/transportation/p...
• xnx 11mo ago
  A transit ride in the US might be $12 of subsidies and a $2 fare. Making the ride $14 of subsidies isn't a big difference. There are even situations where eliminating fares saves money because of the overhead. That said we'd probably be better off if we eliminated subsidies and introduced competition.
• freen 11mo ago
  Exact same argument was made against the interstate highway system. Now it is lauded as one of the highest ROI investments the US govt ever made. If you really want to do the math: if we value all urban land equivalently, what is the subsidy provided by free parking? In NYC, it’s astronomical. Free transit is trivial to fund if you actually care about humans being productive. Not everyone does: harder to capture rents that way.
• mapt 11mo ago
  The thing about public bus systems is that none of them are financially sustainable. If they were, you wouldn't need a government to run them. My local system collects about 1/3rd of the annual operational costs and none of the (sizable) capital & infrastructural costs in fares. The choice to collect insufficient fares versus collecting no fares at all, has secondary effects - fewer people choose to ride, spending any money is a psychological nudge against taking the trip, especially if you're not sure how much money you're going to have to spend. The car historically appears to be ~free, while the bus demands exact change in an impatient voice. You can solve the change issue with cards, but you could also just not charge fares. Let's say you double ridership by taking away fares. This doubling adds approximately nothing to your considerable costs, but you get twice as much direct social benefit, and the price you pay for it is having to cover ~100% of the program cost using taxes instead of ~90%. On top of this you get secondary social benefit - buses move people so much more efficiently than cars that traffic speeds up dramatically, and you don't need to perform continuous expansion of the road network to accommodate ever-growing traffic problems. The labor value of those hours stuck in traffic alone covers the whole program, even if that value isn't something you can practically "capture" for some kind of profit.
  • port11 11mo ago
    IIRC the Flemish bus system is profitable. So is the public train company, even if marginally so. What I dislike about GP's comment is that it obfuscates that mostly it's the lower classes that ride the bus, and paying it with fares takes away from the potential to redistribute tax money that harmonises the way we all live together. Like you've said: buses move people more efficiently, and once they're on the road they're better off being closer to full since that won't dramatically change the fuel they're burning. Plus less cars, etc.
• rightbyte 11mo ago
  > 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. You can't name three things, rule out any combination that includes more than two things, and call it a day. The gas saved is less resources wasted, savings which to a large part are taxable. Etc.
• casey2 11mo ago
  >politically unpopular You mean capitalists will stir up a shitfit if they aren't allowed to profit from someones misfortune. The proper amount of traffic on roads should be close to 0. All LA would have to do is offer more and free bus rides and charge for driving in the city and everyone would save hours of their life for no cost.
• taurath 11mo ago
  Do you have examples of cities that have tried and snapped back along with reasons it can’t work, since you speak with such certainty?
• JeremyNT 11mo ago
  > 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. What is your basis for this assertion? One could simply increase the tax rate on high income earners and large property holders and readily fund fare free transportation in a financially sustainable and scalable way. I believe the unstated mechanism of failure here is "it will piss off the wealthy and they will kill it" - which, at some point, needs to stop being true about literally everything in our society, or some extremely unpleasant consequences will manifest.
• rkagerer 11mo ago
  Civilization figured out how to make water relatively cheap and widespread (at least in developed countries). We can do the same for transportation.
• rsynnott 11mo ago
  So, in Ireland, which has a historically pretty terrible public transport system, the government has been fairly aggressively cutting fares. A journey which cost me about 6 euro literally 20 years ago (about 9 euro in today's money) now costs 2 euro, transport is free for kids under 8 and extremely cheap for people under 25, and so on. And it has _worked_; public transport utilisation is dramatically up. Now, maybe there's a point where it stops working as you reduce fares. But it's not particularly _clear_ that that is the case.
• estimator7292 11mo ago
  Just say that you think poor people are gross and that public transit as a concept is beneath your contempt
• inglor_cz 11mo ago
  Here in Czechia, I lived in two cities with a great public transport system. Prague and Ostrava. Ostrava, despite being much poorer, is actually often voted to have the best system in CZ, because the management is really creative and diligent here and they often pull off miracles with a relatively small purse. That said, yes, it is a major burden on municipal finances. The taxpayer here is mostly OK with it, but compromises have to be done, such as fixing sidewalks when they really fall apart and not a day sooner. Maths cannot really be wished away. Important factors that plague the entire system: * fluctuations in cost of energy. The Russo-Ukrainian war, European Green Deal etc. Getting a multi-year contract for electricity that can be used as a basis for budgeting has become impossible, * driver wages. Drivers can move around the EU and they indeed often do, being a wandering folk almost by definition. Thus every city in the EU competes with Stockholm, Amsterdam or Milan on wages, while having half or less the economic power of those metropolises. So you have to find a precarious balance between "paying your drivers so little that they leave for greener pastures" and "paying your drivers so much that the budget cannot tolerate it". Full self-driving could alleviate the second problem. Robots don't eat and don't pay any rent.
• m463 11mo ago
  I think if you treat the bus including "externalities", the bus problem might be very smart. What if you include road construction and widening, road repair costs, impact of traffic on commerce and taxes, and more nebulous stuff like pollution, quality of life, noise, etc.?