Slight tangent but I've always wondered what the economic impact would be if public transit were just free.
If there was no monetary nor mental overhead to getting around the city could that boost commerce enough to pay for it?
If there was no monetary nor mental overhead to getting around the city could that boost commerce enough to pay for it?
There's probably a common sense solution somewhere that includes both free ridership and also fairly strong enforcement around loitering and hygeine, but I don't know if any city has managed to really nail it.
Incidentally, I think a lot of similar problems come up in cities that have free public bathrooms. A small number of abusers tend to make those bathrooms extremely unpleasant for everyone else.
If homeless people do not have ready access to shelter, but do have ready access to public transit, then you get them spending time on public transit for the shelter it provides, which means they use it a lot more then they would if they were using it for transit. Public transit isn't even particularly good shelter, but since most places don't allow loitering (with selective enforcement against the undesirables), you again get them congregating on the few places that do.
It's worse than that imho.
I live somewhere that provides a fair bit of support and free services (e.g., transitional housing) for the homeless. That doesn't get rid of the homelessness, all it means is that the remaining people without access to shelter and showers are those that are generally incompatible with polite society for a variety of reasons. (Crime, severe drug abuse, severe mental illness, etc.)
Implementing it as "anyone can hop on wherever" implements a weak filter for the worst of the homeless population using it as shelter. Those who've been refused or kicked out of available shelter.
I could see it working more as a "free transit passes" program so they could be revoked and not re-issued for people that were going to cause ongoing issues in the same way someone that shows up to transitional housing and gets high and assaults other tenants and neighbours could be removed.
You can say all you want about Castro, but he did in fact eliminate homelessness in Cuba.
The city provides studio apartments with "daily meals, laundry, showers, housing application assistance, community and health service referrals, skills building, relationship building, connection to volunteer and employment opportunities, and other support services".
It's not a home, but it certainly means that the people availing themselves fully of the opportunities presented to them aren't unwelcome on transit because of their inability to maintain basic hygiene.
I agree that potential problems should always be anticipated. But if the conclusion is "well we have homelessness so we can't offer a service that will be taken advantage of by homeless people in unintended ways" we can just as well agree that everyone with a six figure income move into a gated community and leave the rest of society to THE PURGE.
The obvious conclusion for a self-respecting society should be "let's try free public transit and also throw money and mental health support at the homeless population until they don't exist any more."
The objection isn't that homeless people will use the service, it's that they'll effectively make it unusable by everyone else.
Yes, in an ideal world that wouldn't happen. But whether or not we should have homeless people, we do, so proposals need to take this reality into account. If you think you can "just fix" homelessness, then do that first and worry about transit after.
But there are a lot of wrinkles to this kind of thinking. What if there is access to shelter, but it imposes some kind of deal breaking restriction like no drug usage? Or no felons? Let's get even more controversial - what if the shelter bans sex offenders, should homeless sex offenders be forced to shower in libraries? Things get complicated, and a lot of politicians aren't willing to die on these hills when their housed constituents have strong emotional reactions to these things.
The only way to reduce homeless is rebuild traditional value and traditional family structure. Less people get divorced, less kids get abandoned. People always get last resort from the big family and the church and family friends and church friends, etc.
Get help from the government and charity organizations should be rare cases.
But we are on the destructive path for a long time. Part of it is natural consequence of social change, but it's also partly due to some people think they are capable of design a new society from top to bottom.
Afaik, most abandoned homeless kids are queers, most often trans. Then kids with behavioral issues (yes, stemming from crappy parents in the first place). I really dont understand how return to traditional values and family structure would improve either.
The higher prices of the paid compartment would go towards subsidizing the free compartment.
The problem is political. At least in the US, this approach would be opposed by both major political ideologies: the right because it is a government hand out, and the left because it is unfair to have a "poor" section of the bus (see the reaction to mixed income apartments having a separate section 8 entrance, or restricting the amenities that section 8 residents are allowed to use, which is essentially what you are proposing).
Further, the nature of bureaucracies in our economics system (be they for profit or government) is to prioritize profit centers at the expense of cost centers, so it would be difficult to maintain the "poor" compartment to an adequate level. Compounding on this is the fact that the poor and homeless tend to be the least politically powerful groups, and maintaining adequete funding for this scheme would be difficult,
For example, I know 6 sane, smarter-than-average, old guys who drift around the SF Bay Area mid-Peninsula region who don't drink or do drugs, but are poor and cannot afford housing on their own. 2 have managed to get accommodations, 1 by the COVID lockdown. That's 4 left looking for 24-hour coffee shops, laundromats, bus stops, and diners.
The solution in my mind requires everything, at once. Homes for those who need it. Mental support for those who need it. And enforcement for those who merely want to abuse and corrupt the system.
The homeless problem lumps everyone together into one camp and while they do suffer equally, their reasons are vastly different. There is no single solution, and it certainly will be difficult.
Unfortunately i see the friction involved in _actually_ solving this problem as so great that it will never be done. Though some extreme measures may be taken.
Doesn't ghettos implies that they're all in the same place? Maybe having a few everywhere would avoid that problem.
Furthermore, what about being homeless is good? Since all i said is a way to resolve homelessness, in my eyes, yet you perceive that as hate. To me it is hateful to leave those people in this state.
> That's an incidental effect of not providing proper housing.
There are many causes, it is not only an effect of not providing proper housing, which I think was GC's point.
Where you have an issue the fare requirement is often used an excuse to enforce a minimum level of "cleanliness" if you will.
I mean there's a lot of people who would gain a lot of opportunities if they could afford to commute, so free public transit would also reduce the homeless and poverty situation.
What really makes me angry is that it's not a dichotomy; the US is the richest country in the world, they can give free health care, housing and education to everyone. But they refuse, instead (nationally) pumping it into the military while (privately) funneling it upwards to the extremely rich.
That money could be redistributed to raise the minimum wage (and if you get paid minimum wage, your employer is effectively saying "I'd pay you less if I could") and improve the lives of everyone.
But the people in power (and their voters) don't want that, because that means considering those worse off as them as equals. It boils down not to economics, but egoism, classism and racism. It's the "as long as I got mine" attitude.
I would love to use public transit in SF, but instead I'll just keep using Uber for my own sanity and health.
Making public transit broadly appealing is the way to sustain it. Finding competing services to tax to pay for it is a minor part of the overall strategy I think.
As a public service, do we ask fire departments to be profitable? What consequences happen when we try and make other essential services profitable, e.g. police?
Should armed forces be made to be profitable?
How do you define profitability in the first place... how do you define the costs and benefits?
Why does this question only ever seem to come up when we're talking about things that raise quality of life for the poor?
It doesn't need to be profitable, but if it isn't, then the money to subsidize it needs to come from somewhere. Do you think raising taxes for this would be politically popular, especially if most taxpayers wouldn't use it?
> As a public service, do we ask fire departments to be profitable?
It is politically popular to use tax dollars to fund fire departments.
> Should armed forces be made to be profitable?
This is a textbook example of a public good. You can't give national defense only to people who pay for it. Either the whole country has it or nobody does.
> How do you define profitability in the first place... how do you define the costs and benefits?
This seems fairly obvious: if the income from fares exceeds the costs to pay the drivers, maintain the vehicles, etc.
> Why does this question only ever seem to come up when we're talking about things that raise quality of life for the poor?
Because people don't like paying for things that they don't get value from, even if other people do.
Where are people opposed to taxes being used to fund fire departments, and why?
Why don't we see public transportation as one of your "public goods"?
Is it possible those people who you say are so concerned about value are maybe not seeing how they gain from having public transportation for their community, or are they more concerned about someone else deriving more value from a service than they would?
By definition, public goods must be non-excludable. Public transportation is excludable.
> Is it possible those people who you say are so concerned about value are maybe not seeing how they gain from having public transportation for their community, or are they more concerned about someone else deriving more value from a service than they would?
The problem isn't that the value to someone else is greater than the value to them. It's that what they'd pay for it in taxes is greater than the value to them.
The commenter seems to be talking about the part of public transportation that isn’t excludable.
Because in general people like paying for things that are useful to them and don't like paying for things that aren't. The poor don't pay much in the way of taxes, so things that are only used by the poor are of course less likely to get funded.
How are you measuring this?
No need to get all righteous, I'm not saying all public services need to be profitable, I'm saying we need to stop evaluating public services on strictly on their cashflow as many often are, and instead look at them in terms of the greater economic system they operate in.
Look at areas where the cost of distance is high. Rural areas. Areas with bad transit. Islands. Then reverse that.
Basically anything you do to decrease the cost (in money or time) of moving from A to B flattens the cost of living. The poor guy who just wants to hang a picture doesn't have to put up with the insane costs of some wire and nails at the local hardware store that mostly caters to yuppies and has the pricing to match. He can justify the cost in time and money of getting on the subway or get in his car and go where it's cheap. Now apply this to every economic transaction from buying milk to getting a job and everything in-between. The second and third order effects are immense. People can afford to stop transacting with bad jobs and bad landlords because they can afford to access the alternative equivalent services.
Of course improving transit never gets much support because the people with the money don't want it spend on the subways they don't use and they don't want to have to compete with the poors for access to car infrastructure so you never see that stuff democratized, just more fees and whatnot to discourage use by those not wealthy enough.
More recently Seattle's Transit Riders Union (among other groups) has advocated for more substantial free transit. Some baby steps in this direction have been realized with such things as free transit for high school students.
It makes sense too. I can get a 30 day pass to drive with public transportation as much as I want, but it is so much faster to take my car that I essentially only take it (prepandemic).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22136... ( https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cstp.2017.10.002 )
Another anecdotal one: Many companies offer travel / commute expense cover. If my commute wasn't covered by my employer, I'd be spending €250 a month out of pocket just to get to work (in addition to the time spent). It would make me reconsider working for that employer in favor of something more local.
> Findings suggest certain flaws limit the program’s potential success since the program design is misaligned with its primary stated goals, and several program goals relating to external effects of fare reform cannot be evaluated. Although it would be valuable for transport managers in other cities to learn about this experience, the Tallinn fare-free public transport program provides scant transferable evidence about how such a program can operate outside of a politicized context,
Huh? I mean, sure, enforcement is pretty lax, but most people who ride buses in SF do indeed pay. The homeless generally do not, and drivers look the other way. (Frankly, I'm ok with this, as long as they aren't violent or using the bus as a toilet.)
also the current Lab gov has promised to cap Public Transport at a maximum of $4.90.
A pretty significant saving https://twitter.com/MarkMcGowanMP/status/1350648142585217025...
*Goes into effect Jan 2022