Edit: And from a quick look, that’s high for the US. The average seems closer to 10-15%.
[1] https://www.enotrans.org/article/the-mass-transit-fiscal-cli...
I mean, I do. But that boils mostly down to me perceiving more value in a robust public transit network than in a bloated MIC.
Of course there will be outliers, but owning a car is a massive money sinkhole and a disproportionate burden on the poor.
The average car insurance payment alone is $136 (and significantly more for those with 'bad credit' - i.e. the poor). The average monthly transit pass in the US is $83. [1, 2]
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/990891/us-average-monthl...
[2] https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/insurance/how-much-is-car...
https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/2020-11/...
Nationally in millions, Bus: (Fare Revenues 3,778) / (Operating expenses 16,110.4 + Use of capital funds 3,0444.7) = 19.7%. They also break out Bus Rapid Transit which is much worse 16.1 / (166.1 + 51.7) = 7.4% as is Commuter Bus 57.9 / (597.7 + 170.7) = 7.5%
Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, Bus: $124,011,141 / ( $731,946,008 + $182,850,687 ) = 13.6%
So for WMATA forgoing Bus revenue wouldn’t move the needle very much.
PS: And that’s ignoring the overhead of collecting fairs. Skip that step and busses can move faster.
Compare a line of 20 people all try to get on and swipe a metro card vs a line of 20 people all trying to get on. Even collage busses where all people need to do is show school ID you still get people in line who suddenly can’t find their ID.
(NY’s 54% number is probably because of mixing of different fareboxes: recovery is much higher on the LIRR and MNRR than it is on the city buses and subways.)
- MTA heavy rail was 70%.
- Commuter rail was 55%.
- Commuter bus was 32%.
- BRT and Bus was 30%.
[1] https://www.enotrans.org/article/the-mass-transit-fiscal-cli...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_Sta...
Chicken and egg. Density is built along transit because transit supports dense houses. Build transit, get density. Fail to build transit, get sprawl.
Building transit does not guarantee you get density. There are regulatory hurdles at play. In California, for example, cities will often be forced to up-zone the immediate couple of blocks around a station, but then everything else beyond that remains zoned for single-family housing, or at least zoned for far less density than the market could support.
Moreover, there's a time gap between when housing is built and when it becomes economically accessible lower down the income ladder. New housing is expensive, even absent regulatory hurdles, and affordability mandates can't magically change financial viability. New housing can have immediate effects on housing costs, but indirectly on the costs of older housing; and on a regional scale it takes awhile to incentivize people at the periphery to move inward.
Long-story short, to get from the current equilibrium to a more optimal equilibrium requires careful, coordinated policy management across decades. We could and should start, but we live in an age where if people don't see results in 6 weeks, they complain; and even when there are results, they still complain. They complain, vote people out, and vote in new people that promise more immediate results, but invariably can't deliver meaningful results.[1] I mean, this is how democracy has always worked, but the public reactions are far more compressed, while the necessary time spans for effective change are no shorter than they were before.
[1] Case in point: rather than improving public transit, the popular panacea du jure is free fares. Free fares will not improve public transit in any way shape or form; if anything, they'll hasten its degradation. They'll make it cheaper for some, but for the most part not those at the bottom of the ladder, who already enjoy free transit. These gimmicks are popular because they're immediate.
https://electrek.co/2022/04/28/denvers-electric-bike-rebates...
https://electrek.co/2022/05/03/vermont-launches-the-first-st...
https://electrek.co/2022/11/29/another-us-state-adds-electri...
https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/home/showpublisheddocumen...
What you see as a small component of transit systems budgets, they seem to see as a quite significant part of their budget.
I think this is going to lead to worst outcomes, and a worse funded system.
"Metro estimates it lost $40 million due to fair evasion in the 2022 fiscal year."
$40 million is not "quite small"
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/transportation/metr...
And 40 million is not a small number for a person, but for a city with a budget of about 20 billion it’s not a very large number at all - especially when viewed in comparison with spending on roads and bridges. You don’t have to spend billions on another road bridge if everyone is taking the train
Also, WMATA's budget is separate from the city...
You could argue that it's all "just funding," but fares can help to prioritize work which will help collect the most future fares, creating the largest positive impact for end users.
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.
Sources: https://slate.com/business/2021/06/free-transit-is-not-a-gre... https://transitcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/TC_Whos...
https://www.sbb.ch/en/travelcards-and-tickets/railpasses/ga....
Edit: Another example is Prague, which is around $1.
I can’t think of many; the first that comes to mind is Portland’s MAX, which is $2.50, has a smaller network with longer headways, and services a much larger metropolitan area as justification for its existence.
I live in Helsinki and spent a lot of time last year in Tallinn - the ‘transit is free in Europe’ thing is very much an exception rather than a rule.
I think there's also free public travel for tourists with cars if they park their car (in certain places or under certain circumstances).
In which European capital cities bus fairs are free?
Haven't heard of any others, though.
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-rout...
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.
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)
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..)
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.
It is entirely the first reason - mass transit is not cheap and fares help alleviate the burden of the subsidy.
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.
Almost no public transit system has a farebox recovery rate even close to 100%. For municipal service (ie, excluding specialty transit), even 50% is almost unheard-of in the US, and only a few systems in Europe exceed 50% as well. In the US, the better transit systems have a farebox recovery ratio of 25% or less. In other words, over 75% is already funded by taxes, not by point-of-service.
Enforcement is a huge cost. In fact, in NY, the government has decided to spend increasing amounts of money over the last five years on police presence to combat "fare evasion", even though their own numbers show that the amount of money they are "losing" to fare evasion is less than the amount they have decided to spend on the additional police dedicated specifically to fare evasion.
So yes, it's a political, choice, not a fiscally rational one.
Sort of, not exactly. Asian countries typically report their metrics differently, so they look much higher, but it's because they have non-fare sources of revenue that provide a massive source of income which they combine with their fare revenue for reporting purposes. So it's not an apples to apples comparison.
Except it doesn't have to be zero-sum. A government can decide it wants to prioritize public transportation. It doesn't have to be be 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.
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.
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.