4 ms·

Further cherry picking. Brisbane's free buses are only the "city loop". The rest of the transit system is fare based. It also has not stood the test of time yet

by denkmoon 11mo ago

Further cherry picking. Brisbane's free buses are only the "city loop". The rest of the transit system is fare based. It also has not stood the test of time yet.

batiudrami 11mo ago
The fare is a flat au 50c, though. It is basically free.
- ncruces 11mo ago
  Basically free is not free. The point of buses is to replace cars, not short walks. If you make it so that everybody who could walk 5min takes a bus, the bus will have to stop more often - and for longer - which makes it worse for the people who can't just walk 5min. The trick is to balance the system so that buses (and other forms of transit) are cheaper - and approximately as convenient - as cars, without making them cheaper and more convenient than walking (for those who can still walk). Fares don't necessarily need to be about financing the system. They can be about setting the correct incentives, and ensuring people value the service they're getting.
  - mckn1ght 11mo ago
    Another solution that’s already used to help mitigate increased stop frequency is express routes that connect farther endpoints together.
  - sudosysgen 11mo ago
    It's very unlikely people are actually going to take the bus for a 5 minute walk : the wait time for the bus is going to be on that order of magnitude and you'd need your route to be perfectly aligned and have perfect stop placement for that to happen. Most likely, you will have extra trips because people won't feel the need to justify the fare.
    - ncruces 11mo ago
      That's not true on a major avenue that serves 10 different routes, which combined have a frequency of one every couple of minutes. Also, it doesn't help to make bus stops more spaced, and you may not want a bunch of express routes that skip most stops, because another purpose of buses is to help people with difficulty moving (like the elderly), for whom it's not a 5min walk. You just want to make the service available, and as good as possible, without incentivising people who could just walk to use it. Because the actual goal is to displace cars (not walkers, or cyclists, or…)
  - rsynnott 11mo ago
    > If you make it so that everybody who could walk 5min takes a bus, the bus will have to stop more often - and for longer - which makes it worse for the people who can't just walk 5min. ... Eh? I often hit the leap card weekly cap (24 eur) in Dublin. This absolutely does not lead me to take a bus instead of walking for five minutes, because that would be _insane_. Like, maybe there are a few people who despise walking to an unreasonable extent and do this, but it would not be common. If it was, you'd see people doing it anywhere which has a fare cap (ie. most cities, these days).
saithound 11mo ago
> Brisbane's free buses are only the "city loop". The rest of the transit system is fare based With all due respect, I expect more effort than Googling "are buses really free in Brisbane", then copy-pastig the AI summary. Symbolic charges were mentioned for a reason, both cities have a fixed "fare" of about 30 US cents on their networks. If you think there are examples of GP's claim that "every major city that tries free transit at scale will eventually snap back to it", feel free to substantiate it by naming major cities which tried the Brisbane-Lanzhou model and snapped back.
- AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
  > both cities have a fixed "fare" of about 30 US cents on their networks. What form of corruption-induced lobbying is this now? A sizable advantage of making it actually free is to remove the huge cost of the fare collections infrastructure.
  - saithound 11mo ago
    If you remove the fare collection infrastructure, you remove beneficial usage tracking infrastructure too. There might also be other "social engineering" benefits to having a fixed symbolic charge, as some people argued in this thread. I don't know about that, but I don't think it's _just_ lobbying.
    - AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
      > If you remove the fare collection infrastructure, you remove beneficial usage tracking infrastructure too. Most of the cost of collecting fares is actually the money. You need machines that can process currency, which are expensive and often requires network infrastructure and middlemen and contractors, and then they have to be secured against theft or card skimming etc., and you need customer service and billing and tech support when the machines break and all the rest of it. If all you want is to track usage you can just put a simple pedestrian counter at the door and you're not actually disrupting anything if it's offline for a week because you're just looking for statistical sampling anyway. > There might also be other "social engineering" benefits to having a fixed symbolic charge, as some people argued in this thread. I don't know about that, but I don't think it's _just_ lobbying. Ambiguous "social engineering benefits" are the sort of thing that implies it is lobbying, because there is no good way to prove or disprove it but it gives someone something to claim is their reason when the real ones are less sympathetic, i.e. they're trying to get the collections contract (or have read a study funded by someone who does) or they just don't like spending money on transit but know that won't be a convincing argument to someone who does.

Further cherry picking. Brisbane's free buses are only the "city loop". The rest of the transit system is fare based. It also has not stood the test of time yet.

batiudrami 11mo ago

The fare is a flat au 50c, though. It is basically free.

ncruces 11mo ago
Basically free is not free. The point of buses is to replace cars, not short walks. If you make it so that everybody who could walk 5min takes a bus, the bus will have to stop more often - and for longer - which makes it worse for the people who can't just walk 5min. The trick is to balance the system so that buses (and other forms of transit) are cheaper - and approximately as convenient - as cars, without making them cheaper and more convenient than walking (for those who can still walk). Fares don't necessarily need to be about financing the system. They can be about setting the correct incentives, and ensuring people value the service they're getting.
- mckn1ght 11mo ago
  Another solution that’s already used to help mitigate increased stop frequency is express routes that connect farther endpoints together.
- sudosysgen 11mo ago
  It's very unlikely people are actually going to take the bus for a 5 minute walk : the wait time for the bus is going to be on that order of magnitude and you'd need your route to be perfectly aligned and have perfect stop placement for that to happen. Most likely, you will have extra trips because people won't feel the need to justify the fare.
  - ncruces 11mo ago
    That's not true on a major avenue that serves 10 different routes, which combined have a frequency of one every couple of minutes. Also, it doesn't help to make bus stops more spaced, and you may not want a bunch of express routes that skip most stops, because another purpose of buses is to help people with difficulty moving (like the elderly), for whom it's not a 5min walk. You just want to make the service available, and as good as possible, without incentivising people who could just walk to use it. Because the actual goal is to displace cars (not walkers, or cyclists, or…)
- rsynnott 11mo ago
  > If you make it so that everybody who could walk 5min takes a bus, the bus will have to stop more often - and for longer - which makes it worse for the people who can't just walk 5min. ... Eh? I often hit the leap card weekly cap (24 eur) in Dublin. This absolutely does not lead me to take a bus instead of walking for five minutes, because that would be _insane_. Like, maybe there are a few people who despise walking to an unreasonable extent and do this, but it would not be common. If it was, you'd see people doing it anywhere which has a fare cap (ie. most cities, these days).

saithound 11mo ago

> Brisbane's free buses are only the "city loop". The rest of the transit system is fare based With all due respect, I expect more effort than Googling "are buses really free in Brisbane", then copy-pastig the AI summary. Symbolic charges were mentioned for a reason, both cities have a fixed "fare" of about 30 US cents on their networks. If you think there are examples of GP's claim that "every major city that tries free transit at scale will eventually snap back to it", feel free to substantiate it by naming major cities which tried the Brisbane-Lanzhou model and snapped back.

AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
> both cities have a fixed "fare" of about 30 US cents on their networks. What form of corruption-induced lobbying is this now? A sizable advantage of making it actually free is to remove the huge cost of the fare collections infrastructure.
- saithound 11mo ago
  If you remove the fare collection infrastructure, you remove beneficial usage tracking infrastructure too. There might also be other "social engineering" benefits to having a fixed symbolic charge, as some people argued in this thread. I don't know about that, but I don't think it's _just_ lobbying.
  - AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
    > If you remove the fare collection infrastructure, you remove beneficial usage tracking infrastructure too. Most of the cost of collecting fares is actually the money. You need machines that can process currency, which are expensive and often requires network infrastructure and middlemen and contractors, and then they have to be secured against theft or card skimming etc., and you need customer service and billing and tech support when the machines break and all the rest of it. If all you want is to track usage you can just put a simple pedestrian counter at the door and you're not actually disrupting anything if it's offline for a week because you're just looking for statistical sampling anyway. > There might also be other "social engineering" benefits to having a fixed symbolic charge, as some people argued in this thread. I don't know about that, but I don't think it's _just_ lobbying. Ambiguous "social engineering benefits" are the sort of thing that implies it is lobbying, because there is no good way to prove or disprove it but it gives someone something to claim is their reason when the real ones are less sympathetic, i.e. they're trying to get the collections contract (or have read a study funded by someone who does) or they just don't like spending money on transit but know that won't be a convincing argument to someone who does.