Schools seem amazing at spending on lunches, when they can feed people for less than $5 a meal. I can’t eat for that amount, even when cooking at home these days. I’m not seeing clearly what your transit agency’s payment system upgrade has to do with school lunches or why that somehow supports the idea that they’re not spending prudently.

The question was asking if making them free actually saved the government money. I provided an anecdote suggesting that this might very well be the case, by providing an example of a place where the government is burning money in order to collect less money than they burned.

The specific problem is that the alternative in the case of school lunches does not involve upgrading the payment system. Just because transit might benefit in the short term from not upgrading doesn’t mean school lunches would.

TBH I’m a little skeptical of the payment system story, it sounds oversimplified and might be agenda driven. All our transit systems need payment system maintenance and upgrades over time. Riders want & demand tap to pay, for example. All costs cut into and balance against incomes, but that doesn’t mean they can opt out, nor that it will save taxpayers in the long run. Keeping the old payment system might have rising costs and lead to reduced ridership over time, costs which may not have been assumed in the story you shared. I doubt the payment system is very significant compared to train cars, rails, crossing lights & gates, employees, etc.

We tend to cherry-pick and arm-chair debate individual budget items without seeing the big picture, in order to justify the preconceived claim that governments are bad at spending. Making families pay for school lunches is pretty funny when taxpayers pay for the building, books, teachers, and janitorial and food staff, the sum of which is literally thousands of times more than lunch. Debating the funding of school lunches is missing the forest for the trees, right?

Hi, your last point makes me think that we’re in agreement that it’s not worth making students pay for lunch.

As for your other points, without annualizing it’s actually a fairly significant line item — their budget is about 3 billion. Annualized it’s not as bad, but that is hardly relevant as the fact of the matter is it costed 934 billion. Why did cost that much? My best answer is that a bid was held and cubic transportation systems won. This does not mean that the price was reasonable, only that cubic won. As for the new income, yes, that’s true. Trains will run slightly faster as people can board on many doors above ground (free system also does this). Ridership may increase thanks to tap to pay. I discuss this. But they also have, on numerous occasions, drastically overestimated the new revenue. Newer estimates show that the systems enable more fare evasion than before, cutting into profits.

My best guess as to why is mismanagement. After this was approved the MBTA’s management was overhauled for being a circus.

If you want to write a data driven counter argument, I would be more than happy to link to it at the top of my piece and offer rebuttals

Wrong. The question asked the opposite; it asked if the means testing saved the government money.

You answered "yes" in your original comment, but your supporting arguments imply "no" so I can see why people are confused.

Read the original question again:

>Is the overhead in deciding who gets free lunch and who doesn't and then managing the debt really saving more money than just giving all public school kids free lunches with no strings attached?

Oh, that’s my bad

I was going to be shocked if your case study actually found means testing worthwhile, so I read your entire comment, both others might not.

One of the "don't say the quiet part out loud" with transit fares (which would NOT apply to school lunches) is that transit fares are a convenient way to remove unwanted transit enjoyers.

It is somewhat hard to define "being disruptive on the subway" but it's easy to define "doesn't have a ticket".

We need votekick, but in real life. Clearly this is a concept that could have no practical downsides...

You're reminding me of Team Fortress 2 server nightmares from last year with all the hackers and bots

Even before the bots, I remember MvM being unplayable if you weren't with enough friends to make votekick impossible (and that wouldn't stop them from trying, but they'd ragequit themselves when no one votes yes, and leave you down a player).

Don't you already have that? They get kicked to El Salvador IIRC.

That's not VoteKick, that's AdminBan.

We(1) vote Him in. He kicks them out.

(1) not actually me, since I'm not a US citizen just a pro-Russia bot.

A solution that I have seen implemented and discussed is a flat, very low fare. High enough to keep people off public transit that are disrespectful of it, but low enough to allow almost anyone to take it thus increasing ridership. An added bonus is when using a transit card to tap on and off, the statistics of ridership are still readily available for governments to better plan infrastructure.

If you pick a low enough price you even decrease the number of fare dodgers, which means that enforcing is not as important or costly.

Even a very low fare still needs a huge and costly infrastructure around to enforce it

Here in Queensland we just paid $400 million for a ticketing system that is now used entirely for 50c tickets. The marketing line is that the fee is necessary for analytics, but the cynic in me says that it's probably a combination of secret contract negotiations with a pay-per-tap component, and sunk cost fallacy.

I liked it when the ticketing systems were the simple ticket dispensers and maybe some transit cops checking for your ticket.

Millions and millions for apps and taps and other worthless junk is annoying, and the recovery barely pays for the machines, let alone the lines.

I've not been in a place with a functional transit system where fares were high enough to prevent disruptive people from boarding. I've seen rich people get onto Acela trains obnoxiously drunk.

I have, on the other hand, seen transit operators (bus drivers, mainly) kick people who had paid fares off for being disruptive. The definition of "being disruptive on the subway" does not seem to be the barrier you think it is.

    > I've seen rich people get onto Acela trains obnoxiously drunk.

Were they disruptive?

I thought that was implied, but I guess I underestimated the classism of HN.

It'd probably be cheaper to pay for guards to remove disruptive passengers than it would be to implement a ticketing system.

I suspect the only real benefit is a change in behavior of some passengers. They _paid_ for a thing and therefore feel more respectful towards it.

Which would be related to the other symptomatic reasons such a barrier might be sought. As a society my country (USA) sadly has low respect for the commons generally. There's a lack of investment (not none, but not enough), a sense of 'me-ism' entitlement in the population (as if sharing and consideration of others shouldn't mutually be the priority for a public space), and unwillingness to address national scale issues that lead to blights upon the commons (mostly thinking of people society has failed).

None of those are easy enough to fix that a reasonably sized reply could even begin to adequately cover a solution, but those problems are some reasons why a gated access to a public resource might be sought other than as a form of funding.

While I do not deny that this might very well be a problem, it feels fallacious on the part of the American public.

One, they are indirectly paying for it already by way of taxation. Two, I'd argue it is much better to be respectful towards things you didn't pay for.

We agree. Including to not respect things someone (indirectly) paid for through taxation. Part of the me-ism issue I called out in the larger post.

Yes, 100%. Another 'me-ism' I've been thinking a lot about recently is the collective unwillingness to ensure short term pain in exchange for long term prosperity, for instance in regard to climate policy. Likewise, there is no intuitive fix, especially when such prosperity will mostly extend to future generations.

"I Don't Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People" -- https://www.huffpost.com/entry/i-dont-know-how-to-explain-to...

Such is the tragedy of the commons.

Disrespect of the commons has been a 50 year effort on the right to normalize ripping off the government to make it nonfunctional and illegitimate.

We are to celebrate those who get out of paying taxes by any means and looking the other way when others take from the commons.

At some point we have to face the truth that the only well organized and ran country in the world is Singapore. European governments had barely any right influence and they manage to evolve their own disfunction quite well. It seems that for some reasons the states after WWII just lost their capacity to build things. If you watch Oppenheimer - one of the things in the background is how staggeringly competent were the administrative guys. There is no such things now. Any government project both big and small is expected to be cost overrun, delayed and if ever finished is a cointoss if it will make things better or worse. It is a global malaise.

Maybe I am too sick right now to understand your comment, but isn't this an argument for actually making public transit free or sth? If merely upgrading the system costs 10 times the revenue? Isn't it what is actually argued about for school lunches?

Pardon my nitpick, but the “fair” -> “fare” typo is in this context more confusing than the average typo, so I thought I’d let you know :-)

Did you mean no? The question was about whether the bureaucracy was worth it and you said yes, then show an example where bureaucracy is not justified.

> but our governments are awful at spending our money.

No. They're really good at it. There's a lot of kick backs, deal making, and free tickets behind that purchase. You know how hard it is, from the inside, to push through a billion dollar long shot like that? Nearly impossible. Whoever did this pulled a miracle to make that happen.

Our governments are bad at punishing corruption and graft.

LA is upgrading its fare collection systems because the alternative is for the rail cars to become homeless hotels.

Objectively speaking, the past several years (especially post lockdowns) have demonstrated the folly of a fare-free system. It only takes one homeless person misbehaving once to permanently dissuade dozens or hundreds of other people from ever using public transportation again.

In the past few months since LA has upgraded fare equipment and begun checking for valid fares, drug use and property crimes has fallen by over 3/4th. People have begun riding the Metro again now that the homeless aren't using it to shoot up. It has worked so well that they're expanding it to the entire rail system over the next several years and trying to figure out how they can do something similar with the buses.