Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

Practically every city with a transit system should be giving away free rides all the time. Something along the lines of every citizen can come get a ride card that gives you 4 free rides a week on the tube or 4 free bus rides within city limits.

It accomplishes a ton:

* It gets people who cannot afford regular fares to use these services when appropriate, rather than what might be less desirable (having a friend drive them around if they are too poor, etc).

* It gets people using services they might not use otherwise. A lot of commuters would take the train once or twice just because its free. If you can get people started on using public transit, they might just keep using it.

* You can also give away free rides during low density hours, such as at night. This can help offset daytime load by getting people to do their time-flexible commutes at off hours.

Now there are a lot of tweaks on the model, like making free rides only eligible for non-peak hours. But the whole point of public transit is to increase the efficiency of people and business in the economy where it is built - it is never meant to turn a profit, and if it is profitable it is probably failing on that first premise by costing so much to use. Making it completely free all the time makes it rife for abuse unless you institute a system where riders who ride the most get the least priority. But honestly if anyone were willing to implement such a system making the transit free and just using the tax revenue of booming business to pay for the transit is a much more sensible model than trying to keep your transit system revenue neutral or even cash positive (cough, Amtrak).

Many USA transit systems have such a low farebox recovery ratio that they may even save money by getting rid of the overhead of fare collection. Cash handling is not cheap, nor is maintaining fareboxes and electronic fare collection equipment across entire fleets.

Even SF Muni which is heavily used has only a 22% farebox recovery ratio.

I think parent was suggesting giving some free rides away, not getting rid of fares altogether. Getting rid of fare collection services and infrastructure does save on costs (often comparable to the amount collected, as you say), but once that's done, then demand would presumably increase and possibly outstrip supply. At which point you need to increase supply (expensive, and you're not getting anything back from it), or decrease demand (by charging people for a journey). Every transport system will have it's sweet spot, and some cities have different priorities that others.

It seems wasteful to subsidize, say, 80% of a transit system's costs with taxes, and only use fares as a means to keep it underutilized.

And in many areas of the USA, I doubt removing fares will push demand past capacity -- it's not the $100 - $200 month in fares that keeps most people in a car that may cost them $700/month or more. [1]

[1] https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/total-cost-owning-car/

Isn't most fare collection automated nowadays? There's still likely to be an "info" booth at big stations for out of towners.

It's only in above ground systems where you have to have people watch against fare-beaters. But even then the tickets are mostly electronic and self-serve.

Electronic fare collection systems are municipal IT projects and, as such, not cheap.

While I agree I want to point out that I find reliability and punctuality far more important than price when it comes to get people into public transport. Germany probably excels at both, but it not the same for other countries / cities.

As if! Deutsche Bahn is late all the time, some WWII bomb is found and the track goes through the evacuation zone, someone blocks the trains door from closing because he wants to finish smoking his cigarette, train stops on a turnout track because of course freight trains are more important, people on the rails, fallen tree after a storm, etc etc. Of course compared to other countries our trains are probably still pretty punctual, but it's still annoying when you are stuck at the station for an hour when your whole trip only takes 45 minutes otherwise.

Especially the WWII bomb thing is annoying, because they tend to find one every few weeks when there's construction near the tracks.

And strikes that leave you hanging at Frankfurt Airport with no option to commute at all for three days and more

An hour delay is a few times a month event for Amtrak’s NEC (the best line by far) and that’s with no bombs. And the DC metro... My 26 minute subway ride regularly takes 30-35 minutes, and that’s after a year of single tracking and shutdowns to perform upgrades.

It's a meme that American transit sucks. But some is very good. Seattle's light rail has been great even though it doesn't go everywhere yet. You might be surprised.

This is a fantastic idea - is there anywhere which implements this?

However, if the transit system is already at capacity at peak time, then it would need to be restricted to off peak (in lieu of building more services), as the ticketing is acting as demand management rather than revenue collection.

I'm not convinced that even with finite free rides public transit users would make rush hour worse. The people taking the tube at rush hour are usually doing it where they cannot travel at an alternate, less congested time. Those people will go for free or not, and are stuck riding at the times they do. Even with a free ride card, you would still want to avoid rush hour just to not have to wait for transit to become available.

What is interesting is that most public transit obeys the same congestion rules as roads - if you take a congested road system and add more roads, you often just end up with more cars on the roads at the same times congesting the new roads again because of all the offset load that uses transit at off hours due to congestion. For people on the roads, they are effectively "free" to use once you have the car, but people still actively decide to drive at off hours to avoid congestion. The same happens with any transit system regardless of cost - unsurprisingly, people don't want to be stuck in traffic.

In Melbourne Australia there’s a “free tram zone” where in the centre of the city anybody can use trams to get around for free. It works pretty well, although the trams sometimes get very packed.

It’s not exactly the same idea, just a similarity from where I’m living.

Brisbane, Australia already charges peak vs off-peak rates with off-peak being 80% of the peak rate. Peak hours are 6:00am-8:30am and 3:30pm-7:00pm Monday-Friday. Non-front-facing government jobs are also generally somewhat flexible in start and end times, allowing a large portion of the government's workforce to spread out around some of those times and lessen the peak demands.

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