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The additional bit of information is that often the ticketing systems make up a non trivial fraction of the overall cost of running the transportation network. Often these systems are implemented by large international consortia who funnel money from the public. Take Melbourne for example implementation of their chip card system ran much over budget and was 1.5 billion AUD in the end [1].

That doesn't mean making public transport free always makes sense, but it would eliminate some of the large rentseekers from the system.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myki

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That is analogous to the argument favouring UBI as a replacement for usage-restricted (food stamps, scholarships, etc.) and means-tested benefits. Leaving aside the debate on whether the universality of UBI is sustainable or not, the simplicity of just giving X amount of money to each individual, no questions asked, saves a huge amount of inefficient bureaucratic overhead.

While I agree with the simplicity argument, I think providing a free service is very different from giving everyone free money. UBI is likely to have many unintended consequences. For example, what would be stopping land lords from hiking rent prices? And what would happen to addicts who use their UBI to buy drugs instead of food and shelter?

That last one isn't an issue. If an addict needs help, give them medically-based, compassion-built-in free help. If they don't want help and aren't making others unsafe, it isn't my business any more than it is my business if someone donates 10% because their religious organization requires/suggests tithes.

People are going to spend money in ways you don't approve of. Period, it is part of life. I truly believe that we, as a society, shouldn't let that take away something that can help a bunch of people.

The concern many have with UBI is that society will still have to provide all the other social benefits anyway, food stamps, housing, etc, because many people who need UBI likely are not going to spend the money wisely.

The second question: asking this question about UBI is as wrong as asking it for salary. It's none of anyone's business. (Well – it's everyone's business in that society should offer addiction help for those who feel they need it, but that's not unique to UBI).

> For example, what would be stopping land lords from hiking rent prices?

Exactly the same things that are stopping/not stopping them now?

UBI won't magically make everybody non-poor, no matter how you tweak the numbers. But it creates a gentle slope where everything means-tested creates harsh cut-offs full of bad incentives. It prevents many things (even if not all things) that make up the trap-like nature of poverty.

What is stopping them now exactly? If they know that your family all of a sudden had, for example, $500 more per month, they will simply raise the rent for $500. Similarly, your hairdresser knows you have more money so he will charge more, your mechanic knows you have more money so he will charge more etc. ad infinitum.

By this logic, people would be scared of buying a good looking car or dressing well.

Nope. Just because someone has a good car, doesn't mean he has the money. Actually, I would argue that most of the people don't have the money, i.e. they're driving better car then they can afford. And you're assuming that your landlord or hairdresser suddenly know which car you drive, but that is very long assumption.

In this case (UBI) literally everybody knows 100% that you have more money than before.

There will always be edge cases to every public measure.

> what would be stopping land lords from hiking rent prices?

This argument doesn't seem specific to UBI, but could be raised towards giving anybody money for anything.

Maybe some landlords would initially raise prices, but presumably competition or alternative housing options would push the prices down again.

> While I agree with the simplicity argument, I think providing a free service is very different from giving everyone free money.

Free public transport is the tragedy of the commons in inverse. Free roads mean public transport can barely compete against cars. The convenience of a car simply cannot be compared to a bus but the real question is, why is it so cheap to drive yourself? Shouldn't it be far more expensive? If people abuse free public transport that is actually a good thing.

>For example, what would be stopping land lords from hiking rent prices?

Nothing, nobody guarantees that you get to live in the most expensive locations on earth. Please move to a place where your UBI is enough instead of trying to drag down the most productive members of society (indicated by their ability to pay high rents) and by productive I just mean economically (nobody gets to tell how to live your life), which means they are the source of the UBI income in the first place so it is in your best interest to make sure they succeed.

>And what would happen to addicts who use their UBI to buy drugs instead of food and shelter?

They will rob less stores and houses to fund their drugs.

> why is it so cheap to drive yourself? Shouldn't it be far more expensive? If people abuse free public transport that is actually a good thing.

Yearly taxes on my car are higher than a yearly public transport pass, yet I still have a car. Public transport could be free, they could even pay me for each trip and I would still have a car, simply because my car takes me to places/times that public transport doesn't.

I'm all for public transport, and I use it regularly, but it is not a complete replacement for a car. In fact if you make it free people might even use the savings to buy a bigger car.

Except, of course, you cannot leave aside the issue of affordability and sustainability, which is by far the main issue of UBI in terms of public finance.

If you do then, considering the overall cost of actual UBI, the claim that this saves on bureaucracy is like claiming that spending 100 to save 1 (both on a recurring basis to make it worse) is sensible since it saves 1. This 1 in potential savings is simply irrelevant (and in reality would be replaced by another bureaucracy anyway) because it is dwarfed by the overall additional cost. Or, what you call 'UBI' is just a single benefit to replace a number of existing benefits, like the UK did with "universal credit".

I'm suspicious of the downvotes your comment has attracted - I suppose I'd like to challenge whoever is feeling so negative to explain why they think UBI gets pushback, if not the sustainability aspect?

I think everyone agrees that if we all got infinite amounts of free stuff that would be great. Failing that, finite amount of free stuff is good. There are good reasons that despite that we have a pay-as-you-use economy.

People keep trying to come up with financial perpetual motion machines where everyone gets lots of free stuff. Much like perpetual motion machines, there are broad principles the limit what is possible - people on average just don't do things if there isn't a reward for doing it, and we need people to first produce the stuff before it can be given away.

There are grave questions about whether a UBI can be simultaneously effective (ie, a meaningful amount of money) and also sustainable (ie, not catastrophically dis-incentivise working). It may be possible to do both at once, but that is really the only aspect of the debate worth talking about - otherwise it is a bit of a no brainier for everyone to get free stuff.

How about if you need $x money for UBI you raise the taxes by $x. Then what you've done is just redistributing some money from those earning most to those earning the least.

If you want a higher income gap between those working and those not working, you can make the income tax negative at the bottom.

Posted this on another comment but:

Having gotten clued into modern monetary theory from The Deficit Myth lately I’ve come to question all the hand-wringing about cost. If the government can just print however much money it costs to pay out a UBI, then it’s more about controlling inflation with a significant increase in deficit spending, not about if a (monetarily independent) state can “afford” it. Taxes may be a part of that to drain money from the general supply and incentivize work, but it’s not necessary to pay for it.

MMT says that if you have unused capacity in the society, the government might as well use it (by printing money). As long as it doesn't compete for resources it won't create I inflation but simply grow the economy.

It's a pretty distinct issue from redistribution.

Distinct? It seems to just be a rephrasing. How will we create unused capacity? We'll take money from some people so it can't be spent on whatever capacity they want and so spend it on the capacity we want.

On that level MMT isn't particularly troubling to me. The thing I don't like about it is when the proponents start implicitly talking about having politicians directly control the money supply. The status quo has the Fed - which ultimately is a creature of congress but there's at least a bit of inertia for congress to enact its will and the Fed has room to do things outside of that will.

> ... but it’s not necessary to pay for it.

Your point seems rather close to:

* There would be high spending

* There would be high taxes

* The high taxes and the high spending would be linked

Those three things link together into paying for the spending with taxes. "Controlling inflation" is a series of measures that have all the properties of taxes, it is just a euphemism. Much like how the term is "quantitative easing" rather than the more easily followed "money creation".

The characterization of UBI as "free stuff" is a non-starter. It's an emotionally-laden term which also fails to consider how UBI proponents frame the benefits in terms of establishing a baseline quality of life (food, shelter, clothing). To conflate that with "free stuff" as if we're discussing free government-provided Playstations won't move the debate forward.

> The characterization of UBI as "free stuff" is a non-starter...

There isn't any negative emotion associated with free stuff. Free stuff is great.

The issue is that there is pretty solid social ... I don't want to say understanding, perhaps suspicion is the right word ... that giving out free stuff hasn't ever worked well.

So the political faction that likes the idea of free stuff comes up with a reason that this scheme will work - trying very hard to come up with a framework where people get to consume stuff without necessarily having to do the work to produce an equivalent amount of stuff.

Much like a perpetual motion scheme, the system gets more complicated to the point where eventually nobody can explain why this specific system can't work ... but there is a core relationship here that needs to be broken, and the debate needs to centre around whether it has been broken this time. It cannot be hand-waved away. The enormous costs associated with a UBI are an important factor and there are questions about whether it can be sustained long term.

My workplace's monthly coffee mug giveaway is "free stuff". An impoverished family's housing allowance is not "free stuff". Can you see the difference?

What standard of living is considered baseline quality? Would an internet connection be included in baseline quality of living? I know this is HN, and everyone is microoptimizing their day schedule to fit in time for their side projects, but you'd be surprised how many people would be completely comfortable with living a basic life with basic food, shelter and some internet access.

Now there's nothing wrong with that, but someone still has to work for the UBI to work.

Yeah, I'm not sure I wouldn't just switch to this lifestyle and devote all my time to those side project.

You're mistaking me for a proponent of UBI because I gave a clear definition that didn't involve trivializing the needs of the poor. I actually don't think it would work.

> how UBI proponents frame the benefits in terms of establishing a baseline quality of life (food, shelter, clothing).

As always the first question is: Why do you mean by UBI? It seems that everyone has their own idea.

If that means a benefit to ensure everyone has a minimum income to buy basic things then this is nothing new and exists in most Western European countries. In that case 'UBI' is just a new term for an old thing used purely within the US political debate (perhaps to avoid stating that this is what those 'socialist' Europeans have, I don't know).

On the other hand if UBI means what it is supposed to mean, i.e. "is a theoretical governmental public program for a periodic payment delivered to all citizens of a given population without a means test or work requirement" [1] then you can immediately see that the main issue is indeed feasibility and sustainability because unconditionally giving a meaningful amount of money to every person in a country is extremely expensive and the money still has to come from somewhere.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income

The concept of "free stuff" is also rather artificial: it comes from the idea that we MUST pay for things.

Imagine we build self-sustained machines capable of producing and distributing enough food for twice the Earth's population. Does it still make sense for people to have to PAY for their food?

As a reminder, many of our ancestors gathered fruits that grew on trees or hunted animals -- they did not need to PAY anyone for food.

The idea of paying for food makes sense in a world where food is scarce and great effort is required to produce it. As the difficulty in producing in volume decreases, so should this artificial price we put on it.

We still don't have such food-producing machines. But that's a direction in which we're going, and we should shape our society with this kind of thing in mind.

They may not have PAID for food but they did WORK to get that food. With UBI no work required.

I agree with you on the distinction but violently disagree on the conclusion. With UBI you still pay for things and the capitalist system still functions; it just lifts a baseline for all of society.

Food these days isn’t just literally apples picked from a tree though. Putting aside the labor for harvesting and transporting the raw ingredients to you so that you didn’t have to do it, someone put labor into cooking something nice at a restaurant - I think that labor should be rewarded in some form, and I also think electing for a luxury over, say, just making the food yourself.

But putting even all that aside, I disagree that payment isn’t necessary in a world of abundance. It’s not just a means of rationing limited supplies; a main point of capitalism is to incentivize people to do things (well) in the first place, and to coordinate action between different actors in society that may not be communicating with one another. Prices do that. I don’t think we as a society have worked it out how to coordinate and incentivize labor if payment isn’t part of the process.

I honestly do not believe that a UBI is necessary nor can it solve problems that we face. The only appeal is in the simplicity and naivety that politicians will not add clauses and complexity (they will).

It's also a funding nightmare, not because of inflation or free stuff or dis-incentivising working, it's because the sheer amount of money would rival the GDP but the vast majority of people will just get most of it taxed away so that it has a net zero effect.

If you are going to throw around money it would make more sense to just give people meaningful employment and if nobody employs these people they can get a temporary job from the government. After all, a minimum wage is completely worthless if you can't get a job because of it.

> If you are going to throw around money it would make more sense to just give people meaningful employment and if nobody employs these people they can get a temporary job from the government. After all, a minimum wage is completely worthless if you can't get a job because of it.

The purpose of minimum wage is (or ought to be) to ensure that no one who is working is unable to afford the necessities of life.

UBI establishes that floor without requiring a job, which inverts the meaning of the phrase "every wage is a living wage".

Therefore, UBI can eliminate the need for a minimum wage. In practice, transactional costs establish a floor below which it is impractical to pay for work (even piecework, ala MTurk), and UBI establishes a (probably higher) floor below which people won't put up with crap jobs, but both of those are probably lower than minimum wage.

Regarding the sustainability argument, there is actually pretty solid evidence from previous trials that it it does not dis-incentivise work. It's worthwhile reading Rutger Bregman's "Utopia for Realists", many people do not now that it was Nixon of all people who wanted to implement a UBI, in the initial voting the democrats rejected it because they thought it was too low (and likely also because they did not want to give Nixon a "win", yay for a 2 party adverserial system).

It's also telling how the opposition against UBI formed (largely driven by one of his advisors). The argument were framed largely around lazyness, i.e. people become lazy. A significant motivation for the opposition is that some of the studies found that divorces increased (likely because women didn't feel tied to a relationship because of financial dependencies), which was ideologically incompatible with conservatives.

Another interesting point is that similar arguments to the "UBI is paying for itself" is used by conservatives when it comes to tax breaks. They are always assumed to pay for themselves because of increased economic activity. Both of these are likely wrong (well actually the tax one has been shown to be wrong many times).

I don’t think anyone is saying that the savings in bureaucracy are so great that UBI wouldn’t be a net cost, but that the cost may be less than one would expect.

Also having gotten clued into modern monetary theory from The Deficit Myth lately I’ve come to question all the hand-wringing about cost. If the government can just print however much money it costs to pay out a UBI, then it’s more about controlling inflation with a significant increase in deficit spending, not about if a (monetarily independent) state can “afford” it. Taxes may be a part of that to drain money from the general supply and incentivize work, but it’s not necessary to pay for it.

The cost of a system where you decide if someone should receive benefits or not is one thing - how to distribute the budget to those that most benefit. The extra cost in ensuring hose benefits are in specific vouchers for specific things tends not to be necessary from a saving money point of view.

But government benefits for poor people are not about providing poor people with the ability to live, it's about controling them - be it company towns or church poor-houses which gave free housing but banned people from say drinking or dancing, to a healthcare system which bans people from leaving their job because they won't get healthcare.

(Government benefits for rich people of course are completely different)

I remember getting into a debate with someone when Florida wanted to do drug tests for welfare recipients. She just couldn’t understand the simple math and why it is a waste of money. Also the fact the contract went to a company associated with the governor’s wife, which is probably the real reason for the policy.

The kicker? This person herself was on welfare! In her mind, she doesn’t do drugs, so she is morally right in demanding others who do, don’t get any help from government - no matter how small the percentage is. And no matter the cost. Most people (including myself) have very little idea about basic economics.

We need to change our attitude towards work, towards helping others etc. somehow it is drilled into our heads that working insane hours is holy. In my opinion, working more than 35 hours per week solely for money is just plain stupid. While sustainability is the biggest question with ideas like UBI, people’s attitude towards work is also a huge hurdle

That seems to be an exceptionally mis-managed case - for instance London’s Oyster card cost approximately 10% of that about 10 years earlier.

Depreciated over 10 years, that system was responsible for c2% of costs and presumably had some benefits, so although it’s definitely a crazy waste of money it might not be a huge cost-driver.

I suspect there are much more costs than the system for fare collection more generally though to your wider point, such as inspectors, workers assisting people at the ticketing gates, longer bus stop turnaround time as people clock into the system etc

Holland introduced a nationwide RFID based public transport pass ~13 years ago.

It had similar problems, probably mostly caused by incompetence, e.g. it was all based on an expensive, obsolete and insecure "Mifare Classic" RFID chip because the transport minister went to visit Oyster and that was what used there. Leaving aside that that system was fully deployed a decade earlier. The chip was obsolete and cracked before it was fully rolled out.

I have direct experience of that specific implementation and you are correct in that it was exceptionally mis-managed.

Even in its inception, it was stupid, some company sells to Melbourne and outsources the business logic to Switzerland and outsources the rest of the app to a UK firm.

Idk if you've ever worked on embedded but having to deal with an opaque third party component that is doing all the "business logic" and hogging resources (SqlCe makes this _really_ bad) really sucks on an embedded device that has been stripped down to its bare-bones to reduce the cost because the owners want to sell the business to some conglomerate ASAP. We couldn't even share resources with the opaque third party app so we couldn't use SqlCe ourselves because it blew the memory budget to have two connections open and we couldn't use Sqlite because of old visual basic architects that are stupid and are terrified of anything that isn't microsoft.

Also none of that matters because the architecture was so insane anyway and was never going to work because the devs didn't understand the limitations of the Compact Framework and used XmlDocument as a key part of the architecture. One transition from one screen to another would load (at a minimum) two very large Xml files and the Compact Framework and the hardware just wasn't good enough to do that all the time. The entire project was built around the hope that the hardware and framework could lift a lot more than it could in practice.

As an aside, I was brought in to help fix some of the debris and work on the next project (which they were going to do before the Melbourne money showed up). This was after they finally removed the "must have a degree" requirement which had bounced me the years previous. Having a degree or not wasn't the problem, the problem was the devs they employed didn't have enough embedded experience and they (like most people at the time) drastically underestimated the complexity of embedded as well as overestimated how effective the compact framework was (it kinda sucked ass tbh).

Thankfully most of this doesn't matter anymore because the company I'm talking about got sold to some big firm who lost the market to an up and comer some decade later.

Drivers also face violence for enforcing fares (however many agencies now ask them not to because of this).

Handling cash adds a huge cost as well in addition to the electronic systems.

Lots of friction across the board

In the town I live (Nice, FR) the drivers don't enforce fares. You can completely bypass them and they won't look twice at you.

However, there are "control" squads, basically a large group of +6 feet guys in uniform that will randomly hop on tramways, trains, buses and do ticket checks.

> +6 feet guys in uniform that will randomly hop on tramways

I know I'm adding nothing to the discussion, but I couldn't stop myself from giggling at alternative interpretations of this fragment.

I'm not familiar at all with the imperial system (as you can guess), but I tried to make it more accessible to HN

Edit: Ohhh now I get it :D

It took me a while too :-P

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/teddyruxpin/images/6/6b/...

No no, they don't have extra legs, just more feet randomly on their body.

Exactly the same in Lyon but the control squads are more around 5'6.

Edit: a ticket is around 2€ and can be used for an hour as much as you want, and then you can finish the last "trip" you started in the hour. The fine for not having a ticket validated is 60€.

Must be the mediterranean weather /s

At least where I am, they don't accept cash (you must pay for credit before boarding) and they don't enforce tickets. Separate ticket inspectors go around checking tickets.

In germany there is minimal payment infra, but civil dressed cops will make you pay randomly a heavy fine if they catch you.

Are those cops really?

Anyway, those people always act like thugs. I wish there was no need for them.

> civil dressed cops

They are not cops. The only reason they can demand showing the ticket is because of the terms of service.

It's worth mentioning it is a criminal offense but there is a scale for repeat offenders. The first time the fine is not that much but by repeatedly evading fares you can eventually end up with community service or jail time. There is talk of decriminalizing it due to the overhead of this too and the fact that it hasn't really worked and mostly targets vulnerable people.

They found out that this is cheaper and more efficient than turnstiles. I saw the paper a long time ago, because I couldn't believe it.

Cops or people employed by the transportation provider? I only saw civil employees in my life so far.

I think the fine is same as in France (60 Euros for Schwarzfahren) or at least in Munich it's 60 Euros.

I took an interview at the NYC MTA about 10 years ago to build a credit card system instead of the ridiculous ticket system. It was pretty cool. They had very simple and cheap solutions available, even some self-built prototypes, but ... politics. Everybody needs to make some money off of everything to pass each stage of approval. From then I started thinking always about the many revenue systems we employ that cost far more than they collect. Public transit is a big one because the cost of a customer not buying a ticket is not just the ticket price, but traffic time and road expansion and emissions and parking structures etc. It’s hard even for government agencies to capture those externalities across department budgets and mandates.

> Melbourne for example implementation of their chip card system ran much over budget and was 1.5 billion AUD in the end [1].

...

This is a lot! How in the world they managed to spend so much? I myself worked on a turnstile project once, and with such money you can buy 5823187.5 most feature loaded, RFID+QR reading turnstiles.

Corruption. It's rampant in infrastructure projects in Australia. They could have just not charged anyone for public transport and they'd have SAVED money. The enforcement outweighs the revenue.

Australia has a history of corruption in infrastructure and politics, it's only really started to bubble to the surface in the past 5-10 years.. But still, nothing has really been done and it's just accepted.

Let's not even get started on the private-public partnerships in Australia. Anyone want to read on a real horror-story have a look at the Sydney airport link.

TLDR: (from memory so some details might be slightly off) they build a train link to the airport in a public private partnership, but estimated passenger numbers wrong. The private owner of the train stations (essentially the airport and one other one) upped the fares, so nobody would use the train and took taxi's to the airport. So what they did was add fees for taxis at the airport, so they become more expensive. That still wasn't enough, so at the end the government at to bail the private partner out with several hundred million IIRC (and the fares are still ridiculously high for going to the airport).

> ticketing systems make up a non trivial fraction of the overall cost

I once read that fare revenue just about covers the cost of fare collection. If true, why even bother?

Also less injuries/settlements and criminal records from hiring private security with powers of police who have no police training.

'No police training' for ticket checkers might actually be a feature.

Rent seekers? Presumably the vendor gave a ticketing system in exchange for payment, so not sure how that's "rent seeking"? Are there rules that they can be the only provider?

> Presumably the vendor gave a ticketing system in exchange for payment

Normally yes. And then there are the semi-democratic countries, like Hungary, where things happen a bit differently: https://dailynewshungary.com/further-delay-in-the-introducti...

The article is from 2018, needless to say that in 2021 that system is still not in place...

The definition of a rent seeker is someone who seeks to extract payment without adding value, so I'd say fare collection systems fall in that bucket. The value is added by the actual transport system, not the fare collection system. I suppose that's just "rent" though, not "rent seeking" unless the company that makes the system is actively trying to inflate their prices, which it sounds like this one is.

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