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.
Indeed, it worked in Brisbane (a metro area comparable to Baltimore in the U.S.) and Lanzhou (comparable to Boston-Cambridge-Newton): congestion was reduced, the environment benefited, and usage increased in many cities that dislodged from that equilibrium and switched to a free-of-charge or symbolic-charge model.
I don't think GP's claim stands, for transit cities big or small.
That doesn't make it a serious transit city
Beware: if there are no true Scotsmen left, and your definition of serious transit city excludes everything apart from ~10 European cities, the conclusions that one can draw from the policies of serious transit cities will be so limited that they will in fact be useless.
However, I think that Iowa City isn't doing the symbolic fare, and that Brisbane's 50 cent fare would make some kind of a difference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translink_(Queensland)#Fares
> However, I think that Iowa City isn't doing the symbolic fare, and that Brisbane's 50 cent fare would make some kind of a difference
A reasonable point. That very well might be the case, and if everybody thinks symbolic-fare is better than no-fare, I won't be the one to oppose it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The cost of the programme rolling out new ticketing infra (the first major ticketing system upgrade in ~15 years since we first got integrated ticketing, going from a stored-value smart card to also being able to tap your credit card) is roughly the same amount of money as the annual revenue from fares.
Then as long as the system is in place you need to pay ongoing costs to repair and maintain the equipment, enforcement against anyone who skips the fare, payment network fees, customer service for anyone with payment issues or damaged cards, connectivity service for anything that needs to be networked, etc.
And the overhead percentage depends on the fares. If it was ~10% when the fare was $5, what is it when the fare is $0.50? Well:
> If fare revenue is now only about $20 million per year, does it even cover the cost of fare collection? The current ticketing system rollout was expected to cost $371m, but ended up at $434m – which appears to cover operations for 17 years from 2018… so $25.5m per year. [0]
[0] https://danielbowen.com/2025/07/11/brisbane-pt-patronage-gro...
And then what is it when that number hasn't included the time value of money or accounting for any of the operating costs?
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.
Most likely, you will have extra trips because people won't feel the need to justify the fare.
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…)
... 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).
> For every £1 invested, walking and cycling return an average of around £5-6
> A study of New York concluded that, in terms of health: “Investments in bike lanes are more cost-effective than the majority of preventive approaches used today.”
From https://www.cyclinguk.org/briefing/case-cycling-economy
If you drive by a small market you often won't park your car to go there. Cars and trucks destroy streets fast. Having less of them keeps repairs less frequent. Infrastructure for walking and biking can exist for multiple decades or even millennia
Shopping locally is more efficient, because the distribution network distributes things locally much more efficiently then a bunch of housewives in their SUVs.
Sure its cheaper for the shop providing the food, but for the society its more expensive. What you are completely missing is the massive cost of all the infrastructure and the massive subsidizes therein to create these centralized stores. And then the massive cost in time and capital investment for every users to buy a car to pick that stuff up.
You are also ignoring the massive waste this creates because people only go shopping every 1-2 weeks. And you are ignore the lack of fresh foods in the food system because of this behavior. That of course Americans eventually pay in their medical systems.
If you actually do some research you will see the systematic bias that is in the zoning code, infrastructure cost calculation and services. Walmart often consumer more in just police services then they pay in taxes. Walmart is systematically gaming the property rights system to pay almost no taxes. And yet Walmart uses a huge amount of land and requires a huge amount of public infrastructure to sustain itself.
If you really need to do some massive pickup of stuff for a party or something there are still larger stores you can go to as well, just not for everyday stuff.
Actually having a shop where I can locally pick up fresh food every day or every other day is actually much more convenient and saves far more time. And I know this is crazy for Americans to consider, but as a society it would be nice if people without a car could also buy food sometimes. This video points this out:
What people don’t benefit from is laws to artificially benefit small businesses at the expense of the consumer. Here in New York, we have this stupid law that one corporate entity can only have one liquor retail license. This law was created at the “behest” of the lobby of liquor store owners. The end result of this is that liquor is more expensive than my hometown of Vancouver, despite NYS collecting a significantly lower tax rate than BC province. That money all flew into private coffers, and the consumer still gets bent over in the end.
I also take issue with the implication that Walmart incurring policing costs is bad for society. The implication is that Walmart should either have private police or be a shoplifting free for all. The former is a bad idea because Walmart police don’t have the same responsibility or accountability to the public as public police. The latter is a bad idea because society will collapse without property rights.
Sure if you want to have an intellectual debate about what the economics of scale means then that's fine but your point about economics of scale about suburban super-markets was still wrong and that was the context of my critic.
The rest of your post is irrelevant to my point. I have not advocated for any policy specifically to help small business. Small shops in cities can and are operate by major cooperation. There is no contradiction between large companies and small/urban locations. Not sure why you are even bringing this up. Are you so 'America'-brained that you think large companies can only exist in large commercial zones right of highway exchanges?
> I also take issue with the implication that Walmart incurring policing costs is bad for society.
I didn't say the issue is that its incurring policing cost, I said the cost it incurs is higher then the taxes its paying. The whole point of taxes is that they finance the operation of a geographical area. And everybody living or operating in that area should help finance that area.
If somebody operates in that area that incurs more cost then benefits then that somebody should only continue to be doing so if people consider it a 'social good'. And supporting Wallmart a highly profitable company, clearly doesn't fall under that.
So designing policies so that a multi-billion $ company can show up and extract value from your town is nonsensically stupid.
In fact you are stealing from other business and people in your area to give more profits to wallmart.
> The implication is that Walmart should either have private police or be a shoplifting free for all.
No 'the implication' is that when a community does land use, infrastructure and tax planning it should consider facts, and consider cost to provide services and infrastructure for to those areas.
The fact is, most communities make most of their money in the 'down town' that is true even for very small town and even villages.
What you are proposing is basically that a community should finance, build and maintain a lot of public infrastructure, then finance continue police and other services far away from where most people actually live to protect cooperate property (and specifically the parking lot) all while Wallmart does everything in its power to pay the absolute minimum back to the community it is in. Both by local tricks and by tricks on a federal level.
But even if you have that you still need high quality public transport. Its not either or. And if you are going to invest in public transport, investing in capacity, speed and convenience. Is a better investment then not making people pay.
while the majority of [the savings] consists of traditional transport decongestion benefits, around a fifth are arising from e.g. health, journey quality and safety.
Once you're too old, the health benefits are less clear e.g. my mother dangerously broke bones after falling off her bike (I think cause was overloading herself with a grubber in a backpack).
The quote doesn't support that. It says decongestion is most of the savings, and decongestion is fewer cars, implying bikes replace cars.
Is there something else in the article that supports it?
Someone on a bike isn't driving - it seems like a clear substitute, though it also substitutes for public transit.
I would favour walking. Its far easier to get people to do it and most people can do it. A lot of infrastructure already exists and its cheaper and easier to improve.
If you provide reasonably public transport its far easier to walk. I drive into town, then park and walk, where I currently live because busses are infrequent. I never even owned a car in London because it has good public transport (to be fair, I probably would have if I lived in a suburb and had kids).
Why exclude cycling? You're range is ~5x walking - in the time and effort required to walk a mile, you could easily cycle 5 miles.
It doesn't have to be a universal panacea to be valuable. Walking isn't possible for everyone, including some who can cycle, and it's not useful for longer distances like 5 miles, ~2.5 hrs walking or 30 min cycling slowly.
Unfortunately stop lights/etc. will also make this longer. My "best" pace where I actually do get tired is about 15 minutes per mile. Few can keep up a 4mph pace even on a dedicated walking trail with no elevation changes for any material length of time.
Most folks average probably greater than 20 minutes per mile, especially for longer walks. 2.5 hours is definitely on the extreme end, but close to 2 hours is probably more realistic for most.
The quote I was replying to was about return on investment. Money spent on cycling infrastructure is money not spent on walking and public transport. Spending money is definitely XOR.
I am arguing that walking for shorter distances and providing public transport for longer distances is a better use of money in most places.
> Why exclude cycling? You're range is ~5x walking
Your range for walking plus public transport is far greater.
One big problem I see with cycling is low uptake in most places - in most (not all, to be fair) places I know cycles lanes are mostly empty.
> Walking isn't possible for everyone, including some who can cycle
People can cycle who cannot walk or use a bus?
You are right that money is XOR. But cycling takes people of roads and improves the overall system while being very cheap. Also, you don't need dedicated super dutch style infrastructure to encurrage cycling. Making it safe for walking and cars to interact, ALSO makes it much, much better for cycling. Its a mistake in thinking that 'cycling' infrastructure is only dedicated cycling lanes. Encuriging cycling almost always pays off, in pretty every systematic measurment ever done on the topic. And if you reach Dutch level it pays of a gigantic amount. Its really low investment high return.
Cycle lanes actually look empty often because they are so much more efficent. They have done some studies on paths that were always empty and the threwput is usually not as bad as people think. To be sure the place you are refering to could be totally empty, it happens, but its not the norm even in the US.
Also, of course in a lot of places, specially in the US where they are really bad at cycling infratructure, they believe that all it takes is for one road to have a cycle lane and then magically people on bikes show up. They just want to get in on the 'hype' and were pressured to 'do something'. You need to actually be able to reasonably safely go from A to B between places that are vaguly useful. Dedicate cycling lanes make sense in places where there is no alterantive and you need cars to go resonably fast. But generally its more about your car infrastructure and how fast and dangerous your cars are. Improving cycling always goes hand in hand with making cars less dangerous, and that always pays off.
It takes some up front investment and actual planning, but its not like that infrastructure is worthless after a few years. Cycle lanes once built basically never get destroyed, so putting it in speculatively while having a long term plan makes a lot of sense.
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?
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…
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.
The Gulf War and the war with ISIS. But yes, lots of bad results in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.
> 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.
The US can't be a self-sufficient island. It's not even close to plausible. Also, people do care about freedom for others everywhere; it's not just Americans who deserve it.
This worked well in Iraq.
A significant fraction of HN has been raised with the idea that “natural” innovation can only arise from the private sector competing on a market, and every attempt at public-funded out-of-market innovation is seen as “unnatural” and doomed to fail.
And like all religion, it's pretty hopeless to refute it with rational arguments.
> hopeless
Here you lose me. I find people respond very well to rational arguments, presented with openness, curiosity, and respect.
I think hopelessness is the religion of this day.
You should charge roughly what it costs to operate because that's information. People should ask why it costs so much. People should consider alternatives. Trying to remove prices is like fighting climate change by removing thermometers.
If it is decided by a city government that we want public transport as a public service, paid for by taxes and other means then removing prices is an option that could make sense in the right situations.
The road system doesn't have a price tag per trip, yet it's costs are managed through policy and governance. No difference here in my opinion.
I think your point about economic signals is very good - I wonder if any locality charges at cost; does NYC do it now? - though 'charging at cost' undermines the goals: universal mobility, reducing climate impact, reducing congestion, and (I think) increasing economic liquidity and competition (e.g., in the labor market, in retail, etc.).
We need another solution: Maybe vouchers for people based on income? That becomes much more complex.
Also, I would gues it impacts ease of use and adoption - imagine being able to just hop on any passing bus, as opposed to finding your payment, going only through the front door, paying, etc.
Also, the US heavily subsidizes fossil fuels, including with military spending.
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.)
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.
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.
It's very possible it's the same in Iowa City.
“The truth about Zohran’s free busses” by Breaking Points:
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.
Free roads and highways: GOOD AND NATUAL
The political class are not typically utilizers of public transit: hence even the best attempts are structurally challenged from the outset.
If that isn’t factored into your analysis, you are missing a huge reason why it sometimes fails and sometimes succeeds.
Every time you fuel up a vehicle you are paying a "fare" to use the road. The fare is subsidized (just like with the bus), but it is very much there and not zero.
I guess busses run on fairy dust too?
>I guess busses run on fairy dust too?
Every vehicle on the roads is basically paying to be there via fuel tax (which in whole or large part is spent on the roads). Busses pass some of this cost on to their riders who's fare may be then subsidized in part or full.
I don't see why you're being so hysterical.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jun/17/walmart-hid...
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.)
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
There was some bussing of homeless into city centres. But I haven't seen evidence that a majority, let alone a relevant plurality, of these cities' homeless addicts became homeless somewhere else.
https://hsh.sfgov.org/services/the-homelessness-response-sys...
Although, many cities do this, and everyone leaving is just arriving somewhere else.
"These three programs all help people relocate outside San Francisco to reunite with family or support networks." (Emphasis mine).
(Maybe this demographic skews more towards natives in the case of homeless addicts, but I can’t find a statistic to support that.)
[1]: https://popfactfinder.planning.nyc.gov/explorer/cities/New%2...
Nope, you'll take homeless folks right to jail, promptly, where they can be zombies out of sight. It isn't like folks in small towns are gonna help the person with treatment. As long as they stay out of view most times, they'll just be gossip. If they are lucky, someone will invite them to church. Small towns will absolutely let folks suffer if they just stay somewhere out of sight.
The best option is treatement. But the worst is leaving them on the streets. They're hurting themselves as much as they could otherwise. But they're also hurting bystanders.
The U.S. has one of the highest re-offense rates out of any developed nation because an arrest is something employers, banks, and even privately run welfare programs all see as a permanent red flag. It's like someone figuratively puts walls in the way so the person with the arrest on their record is confined to a tiny square, cut off from viable opportunities. What makes it even worse is the combination where some states don't expunge records of juvenile offenses when you turn eighteen if they're federal offenses, and records of arrests aren't differentiated by how long ago they happened. If you got thrown in juvie at sixteen for mail fraud for using your uncle's name to scam magazine subscriptions then in some places like New Jersey that'll still be there when you're forty and will be treated as if it happened yesterday.
From a macro view there's more harm done when you arrest an addict than if you had left them to teeter on the edge of an overdose, which is just really messed up. All because of zero tolerance policies from organizations that have nothing to do with law enforcement.
Do you have a source for this?
That's not even considering systems, like how a single arrest introduces costs to the state because of the transportation, the provided meals during their stay, the hygiene standards the arrestee must go through, and the required paperwork. Or how it affects total prosperity by almost guaranteeing that someone will be stuck with less productive and less meaningful employment for the rest of their lives, reducing taxes the town/city, county, state, and federal government can take and that person's own contributions to the local economy.
[1] https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/10/12/every-25-seconds/human... [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9302017/
There's no way up from the bottom other than having another person take your hand. And nobody wants to be the one to reach down their hand. They rely on broken organizations and inappropriate tools to do that because their proximity to that ruin makes them uncomfortable. Either the addict gets screwed by the police or they get screwed by the rehabilitation facilities. So the addicts decide to turn away from both, and the public decides to turn away from the addicts. As you said, those in the public ostracize and shun them.
I think the question turns on scale. If one person has the capacity to harm dozens, as one does in a city, the calculus may shift towards incapacitation. If it’s a small handful of non-violent interactions, on the other hand, as would be more likely somewhere less dense, then I agree with you. (Same turn on access to weapons.)
Yep. There is no solution except to shoot those filthy addicts, amirite?
I mean who wants to spend $35-50K/annum to keep these scum in prison, right?
In fact, why should my tax dollars pay for any of these subhuman criminals, addicts and other undesirables? A bullet only costs a dime.
That's the way to go, right soerxpso? Pew! Pew! Pew!
I wouldn't expect a drug addict to know the above, but it still needs to be stated. If anyone happens to be arrested in the US make sure you don't accidentally get listed as guilty and served time (that night in jail counts as time served so if the judge would sentence you to one night in jail)
So, lets jail the professionals that are addicted too. After all, it is the best option for treatment, right? They are also hurting themselves as much as they could otherwise and probably hurting bystanders and their family. But that's ridiculous - few support that. If it were the best option, it would be recommended treatment for all.
The best option for treatment is actual medical based treatment in a facility that isn't punishing you and with staff trained in caring for you in your state. The best option for not leaving people on the streets is to house them. Housing and feeding folks makes treatment much more likely to work.
It seems to be untrue, but I wanted to ask first.
And you're out here bragging about what you "let" your neighbors and kids do. And bragging about visiting two US cities.
Source? (I genuinely know nothing about this. But would appreciate hard data.)
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.
They may want to decriminalise it and treat it as a health problem because empirically this has been shown to actually make a difference in outcomes.
My take away from that experience is that we normalize the misery around us but seeing it, even in a nearly identical form, in another context is shocking.
You can search for more articles, but small town America has been hit very hard by opioids and now fentanyl.
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us-politics/unbudgeted...
Thinking that it is only a city problem is itself part of the problem.
George Lopez at the LA Times used to be a huge advocate of the homeless. And then he tried to do a series of articles about the homeless in Hollywood to highlight their plight and get more people to think like him. When he went out to do his research, it took him over a day interviewing dozens of homeless people to find one who was actually from LA. Less than a quarter were even from California. Needless to say, he's no longer a huge advocate for the homeless.
So yes, it's easy for small towns to talk about how they don't have a homeless problem, because they've shipped their homeless off to the big cities to deal with.
> 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.
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.
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..
Not all GDP is created by work. See 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.
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.
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).
The point of a congestion charge (whether on driving or on public transport) is to alleviate the congestion 'punishment'.
As a mental model: congestion works a bit like an auction. Getting from A to B during rush hour brings people some benefits (otherwise, they wouldn't bother). Benefits differ between people. But that travel also costs, both in terms of fares and in terms of annoyance and perhaps delays.
So We can imagine every prospective commuter weighs their benefits against the costs. I say it works like an auction, because there's limited capacity, and the people who are willing to endure the most price + annoyance are going to 'win' the auction and will commute. Everyone else shifts their commute around or stays home.
The people you mention who 'have to' travel during rush hour are just the ones willing to bear the highest costs in our model, and thus they 'win' the auction. (Winning an auction isn't necessarily good..: after all, you have to pay the price.)
Having a congestion charge means different people can bid not just with their tolerance for annoyance and delay, but also with actual money.
So now people compare fare + congestion charge + annoyance against their benefits. Assuming benefits on the right side of the equation have stayed about the same, the breakeven point for 'annoyance tolerance' is going to be lower, just because the other part of the left side grew.
A similar example: if tomorrow your local Walmart was handing out free 20 dollar bills with every purchase, you can bet your hat that pretty soon the queues for the cashier at that shop would grow until the wait-in-line for the marginal customer cancels out the free 20 dollars. Keep in mind that the marginal customer isn't the average customer: the queue would mostly be made up of people who have more time than money.
Conversely, in our congestion charging scenario the winners of our auction will tend to shift towards the crowd that has more money than time (or tolerance for packed trains).
The nice thing about letting people bid with money is that afterwards someone else has the money and can spend it. When you bid with your capacity to endure frustration and delay, no one else gets any benefit from that. It's just a poor waste of society's resources.
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.
As someone who was homeless (for less than a year, thankfully!), my experience was that many people with nowhere to go (myself included) become incredibly despondent that they have no roof, no shower, no place to keep (let alone wash) their clothes and turn to drugs as a way of (temporarily) ameliorating their suffering.
Those with mental health issues often can't hold a job as they're suffering from debilitating mental illness (duh!) and those with no place to shower or keep clean clothes have a hard time getting, keeping jobs too.
The latter group mostly just needs the opportunity to present themselves for job inquiries bathed, reasonably well rested and in clean clothes.
The former group needs the same plus mental health services including supervision and treatment.
Don't forget that more than half of Americans are an unexpected $600 emergency away from being unable to pay for food, rent, utilities, etc.
But most folks ignore that and instead just want them gone. They don't care where -- in jail -- in another city -- just as long as they don't have to look at them. It's disgusting.
Really, the land of the free is going to enforce showering laws? If our standard for freedom is that low, I'd lock up all the people spreading fear - they do far more damage.
Meanwhile it's 70 deg F here in Atlanta. California and Florida have even warmer temps.
If public transport provides value to people, they should pay for some of it. 30 day unlimited ride pass in only $132.
That is 16 hours of work if you make $8 an hour. You obviously make more than that if you can say "only $132"
This isn't really unknown either. There's a very good story anyone can look up about Dr. V in India and what it took for him to actually get the eye care he wanted to provide to the people who needed it.
In the digital world many of us know you want to deeply understand your user and design with them in mind. Same thing here in the meat space.
Its still a lot of money at $16.50. 12 days a year you labor just for the opportunity to labor. Your point only makes it slightly better and doesn't really take away from my point - it's a lot of money for a good number of folks. You know, the folks that could really benefit.
A 50% discount is probably pretty hard to get - and you are still asking the poorest folks to pay 4 hours of labour for busses.
There are just a lot of people in New York. The roads are packed, and the public transit is packed. More transit would help solve both problems.
If you don't know that's a lot for some people ...
> they should pay for some of it
They do. It must be paid for, and all government money comes from the citizens.
> Under that metric, the poverty threshold for a couple with two children in a rental household in New York City is now $47,190. The study found that 58 percent of New Yorkers, or more than 4.8 million people, were in families with incomes below 200 percent of the poverty line — about $94,000 for a couple with two children or $44,000 for a single adult. Poverty rates among Black, Latino and Asian residents were about twice as high as the rate for white residents, according to the report.
Sorry I just can't take these arguments in good faith. $100 in the richest city of country of the richest country in the world is basically nothing. If you can't allocate that towards your mobility then IDK what to say to you.
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.
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.
In any case, the point is that public transit riders pay fares. Not taxes, not registration fees, but fares. The equivalent for roads would be tolls. And it’s pretty uncommon to see any advocacy for charging tolls for all roads.
And electric cars don't pay a gas tax.
But that's still "some of it".
> And electric cars don't pay a gas tax.
Electric cars' registration fees are much higher to make up for that, e.g., in New Jersey, you owe an extra $260 per year for an EV (which automatically goes up by $10 every year) vs. a gas car.
And besides, the comment upthread said "some", not "all".
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.
But also, why are women specifically traveling for free? What was the original argument?
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
By offering these perks, you are basically buying votes from 50% of the net voting population. So a lot of states offer these perks.
Why is that equilibrium impossible for other transportation infrastructure?
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.
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.
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.
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.
What about US school bus programs. They have existed in many areas for decades.
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.
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.
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-o... subway nearly everyone, and ride share has their own tax as well.
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 great public transport also tends to be more walkable which has real health benefits.
That said we'd probably be better off if we eliminated subsidies and introduced competition.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.?
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.
It is a classic wicked problem: solving it literally changes the problem.
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: charge fares, subsidize low-income riders, and fund the basic system with taxes.
That equilibrium is stable for a reason. 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. It keeps demand reasonable, service reliable, and the politics tolerable.