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Comment by L_Rahman | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why this comment was voted into the negative, but I suspect that it has something to do with the world view of the people who oppose taxes on a fundamental level.

To those of you, I ask - why?

New York's flat non-distance based fare is one of the great democratic institutions of the city. Whether you live in Flushing, Rego Park or Gramercy; whether you ride one stop or make four transfers - you pay the same fare. The only way this can work is if those of us with more wealth take care of those of us with less. What seems wrong about this?

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In Buenos Aires you can ride the entire subway track for 0.30$, which is about 1.5 hours of subway. Without subsidies, the subway would cost at least 1$ a ride.

The hourly rate of a great part of the city workers is below 3$ and do not have full day employment.

What do these numbers mean? That a worker can get a 3.5$ an hour for 3 hours a day on the other side of the city will do it because it will cost him 0.6$ a trip. But if he had to pay 2$, that worker might not do it.

He doesn't have the choice now: he pays a tax when he buys food that forces him to take long trips to make a difference in the subway.

Overall result:

Economic efficiency: bad, because it costs more to do it this way

Welfare: bad, because it increases commute times, and reduces wages

Transit & demographics: bad because it concentrates people on the expensive side of town and increase transit exponentially

You are assuming that there are jobs anywhere in the city!! No there are no jobs in most places even in NYC. Most jobs are concentrated in and around manhattan.

Subsidizing transport is subsidizing that concentration.

It encourages people to live in inefficient places and mooch off everybody else.

Encouraging people to live attached to a subway and then incentivizing their usage of it, regardless of distance in almost any circumstance, is a huge transit efficiency boon for the economy.

If you price people out of the trains so they start driving cars again or even taking busses you are suddenly losing a huge amount of volumetric efficiency in your transit system.

Optimal cities can get almost everyone anywhere either walking, biking, or riding train all the time. Any requirement for road bound vehicles is an infrastructure failure of city planning. There are exceptional circumstances (moving heavy items that can't be carried) but they should be just that - exceptional, and rare.

> Encouraging people to live attached to a subway and then incentivizing their usage of it, regardless of distance in almost any circumstance, is a huge transit efficiency boon for the economy.

Discouraging people from working where they live is the worst inefficiency you can create.

You want people to live in inefficient places, it's not doable for everybody to live in the nearest location. All that does is skyrocket housing prices, and drive out people with lower paid jobs.

That's the idea. You drive people with low paid jobs out of living in places they can't afford without mooching off of their neighbors. They move closer, get a smaller apartment, people build more densely, or they get a job elsewhere, or they eat the true cost of travel, less want to do it, wages increase somewhat.

I used to travel, in Philadelphia, from a Main Line-adjacent community, on a bus to 69th Street Station, and then on the Market-Frankford Line, and then switched to the Broad Street line, all the way up to Temple U. for a $10/hr job, on a $1.30 token plus a $.60 transfer, each way. That's outrageous. I was mooching off the system, and my employer was mooching off the system as well. If they made me pay higher fares, well, I could afford it. What's an extra $3.80 when you're making $10/hr? At that wage, it was a small fraction of the time spent commuting.

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