I'm one of the many here who agrees with the article, but I came to this comment section mainly to figure out why someone might disagree. So thank you. That s

I'm one of the many here who agrees with the article, but I came to this comment section mainly to figure out why someone might disagree. So thank you. That said I do have a few nitpicks here: > Luckily however, we have a way to tell which is more efficient: The free market! I'm not going to argue this point, as I'm uninterested and others have taken up that torch. Still, it's worth pointing out that it's not self-evident that A) A free market can exist for transportation, or B) That the free market equilibrium would be a desirable situation for anyone in this case. > If you just make the buses free, people may take more roundabout trips to get to where they need to go, just to be able to make use of the free bus, causing inefficiency and waste. This one I don't understand at all. A la carte public transportation is the one that encourages roundabout routes, because they often cause travelers to pay multiple fares. All-you-can-eat public transportation encourages planners to serve customers as efficiently as possible, as opposed to making each route as efficient as possible. > it can have a multitude of unexpected consequences. I agree that this is true, but why would we assume that these consequences would be bad enough to offset the consequences we know about? Why would we assume that, on the balance, these unexpected consequences would be bad rather than good?