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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

If you go that far, why stop there? What's the reason to have all the expenses and effort of fare collection if you're only going to collect fares from the occasional users of the system and not the daily users?

If you're going to make it free for all residents, you might as well just make it free for everyone.

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That would indeed cut quite a cost (monetary and environmental) due to barriers, tickets, validation machines, selling points, controllers...

I don‘t think the cost is so high here, we have covert ticket inspectors, none of those fancy electric gates.

And if you're prepared to spend that much money, I'd rather prioritise spending it on improved service first.

Aren't inspectors more expensive than gates? You don't have to pay a salary to the gates.

Well, gates need people to install/maintenance them. And they're also pretty pointless unless you have controllers, too.

Fun fact from history: here's a photo of former French president Jacques Chiraq jumping the metro https://cdn.radiofrance.fr/s3/cruiser-production/2019/09/904...

Fully unionized with a (publicly funded) pension?

Ass soon as you see a human it costs a fortune.

"a fortune" is very relative. Railway workers are not exactly known to earn a fortune. From what i could see in France (quick search), they earn between 1500 (close to minimum wage) and 2500€ per month, before taxes.

Also around here i've never heard railway unions ask for better compensation, because as you have pointed out they already have a good pension and some transport-related privileges [0]. However, they have been relentlessly asking for better working conditions in order to provide a better service, and that the government stop to try and privatize railways.

Of course the managers, directors and private contractors earn a lot more and that's how our corrupt overlords get away with siphoning much public money into private pockets. But these people, we could well do without, and unions would certainly support a move like that.

[0] Personally, i would strongly approve better compensation for those people we now call "essential workers". It appears in a capitalist system, those who work the most and provide the most services (railway/construction/food/cleaning/health workers) are those paid the less and with the most grueling working conditions. That's a shame.

Railway ticket selling and checking/enforcement are only essential jobs if rail isn't free.

Tickets may be cheap and somewhat eco-friendly if made from whatever recycled paper and a drilling machine like in the old days. But i doubt that's the case, so you have to account for the financial and ecological costs of all the electronics and magnetic tapes, and all the replacement parts you need to keep that system of control operating. Also, if your tickets are sufficiently unsophisticated to be eco-friendly, then they may well be very easy to forge.

That is, without mentioning that controllers have to be paid without providing any service. If you additionally take into consideration the social cost of the criminalization of something as banal as using public transports when you don't have money, the benefits of doing away with these systems of control arguably are even more evident.

The easy way is to make it legally free for residents and charge tourists but don’t actually enforce it. Just put up ads in the airport and all over the tourist hotspots, run a few fake stories in the media of tourists being fined etc.

You get your money for nothing and your travel for free

It seems you'd still need tickets, ticket machines, ticket scanners, ticket sellers, people to put more tickets in the machines, fix the ticket machines and scanners, people to pick up the discarded tickets, etc.

Having laws or rules you intentionally don't enforce at all can't be good for society. Why would people conditioned to steal from the state in one way not be expected to eventually steal from them in others as well?

In Europe, a tourist bed tax is collected from commercial establishments that cater to tourists.

Just increase that bed tax by 2-3 eur daily and use those 2-3 eur towards the public transport budget. Then let anyone use public transport for free, locals or not.

You will miss some people who will seek out couchsurfing opportunities at their friend's home, but you will still earn a lot from all the hotels, pensions and legal AirBnBs.

I like this idea better than most local government UBI proposals. E.g., instead of suggesting UBI in NYC just make the trains free. It's not straight currency but it's unlimited transportation on high capacity, environmentally nice(r) systems. Then people can argue over who can make the experience nicer vs who is going to raise the fares. Ridership-wise, many heavy users already have unlimited cards.

(Still, however, not a UBI fan in general).

That and free education and dare we mention the topic - free health care. Then we don't need UBI.

Well, and free housing and food. Possibly clothes. And some modicum of entertainment. Then we don't need UBI.

Somewhat ironically free iPad with internet is probably cheapest part of all of this.

I like it but the more you think about the more disturbingly it sounds like communism :|

We have something like those already. Primary and secondary education are free (and compulsory) and one cannot refuse treatment to individuals in the emergency room.

The appeal of free public transportation, to me, is that it allows more people to take advantage of public spaces and works and, marginally, allows people to bring home more money for the same amount of time worked.

Free public transportation fare incentivizes participation not tuning out like I feel many UBI proposals do. No one is going to look at, effectively, a free metro card then think "Sweet! I don't need to work!"

When I visited Germany, they had cleverly ditched most "gateline staff" like you say but then had a reasonable number of ticket inspectors who would check you had a ticket and it was stamped for the current day. Best of both worlds?

Italy does this and I've always wondered how much they must lose over it. Even as a tourist, every time I saw a ticket agent get on the bus/tram, a good number of people would instantly get off.

I do like the system better, it's faster in every way. But lost fares would definitely be a concern.

Also not sure how that has anything to do with making public transit free honestly.

The ticket usually covers only a fraction of the true price while the rest is subsidized anyways, so it shouldn't matter much

As far as I remember, in the bigger cities in Germany farebox recovery ratios are usually somewhere in the 30 to 80 % range, in some cases even higher. (According to https://www.vdv.de/vdv-statistik-2019.pdfx#page=35, the average might actually be around 75 %, it seems.)

So completely abolishing fares would mean a considerable, definitively non-trivial increase in spending requirements on public transport for cities – and if you're seriously prepared to spend that much money (or create some sort of additional tax to raise that money, or whatever), I'd rather prioritise spending it on service improvements first, because even in big cities there are enough examples of service offerings that are only borderline attractive.

They actually did some (admittedly smaller-scale) experiments in that direction recently, and as I understood it, the takeaway was that service improvements were indeed somewhat more effective in generating additional passengers than lower fares.

I've lived in a place with a system like this. The people who jump off were mostly students and people for whom tickets represented a significant expense.

The lax rules and clearly uniformed agents were seen partly as progressive price discrimination, giving free access to public transport to those who really need it.

That sounds like the worst possible outcome - you're literally teaching that poor people either don't have to be honest or are expected to be dishonest.

I would hate to live in a society formed by that ethos...

In a more broad way — it’s also a tax on conscience. Bonkers.

In Berlin, they usually enter the train in groups of 3-4, so they are able to check every person in one wagon in between two stops. You also see them pretty often at a station collecting the details of someone who didn't have a ticket.

I think both of those factors push most people in Berlin to buy a ticket. With a fine of 60 EUR the staff already pays for itself if they pick up ~2 people/hour, which sounds very realistic. If they then on top also have the effect of increasing the percentage of paying riders by a tiny amount, the whole program is quickly turning a profit.

That is what I see as well. Not sure why they just don’t give free passes to students and people with low income instead.

You forget the cost it incurs when someone gets caught (and sometimes jailed!) for chicken-shit like this.

Edit to add some context:

https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/haft-nach-schwarzfahren-u...

Consider this article from Berlin where a sizeable number of people in jail are there for riding without a ticket. The cost of that needs to be taken into account here.

In germany, they'll put you in jail for fare evasion? I've always seen it done as a fine and they kick you off the train at the next stop.

It's extremely rare that that happens. It's typically considered a criminal offence if you are caught twice in two years, but rarely anyone is following up on that. Only really frequent repeaters are really prosecuted.

The downside is that visitors who are unfamiliar with the system--especially if they don't speak the local language--can end up riding illegally by mistake.

I’m convinced that many transit/rail systems give Minimal thought to the use of the systems by occasional users some of whom may not speak the language natively.

Portland, Oregon has free light rail in the downtown area. Feels great just casually stepping onto a train.

If you're referring to Fareless Square that was discontinued in 2012.

With the way the MAX stops are designed, it's still very possible to just hop on without paying.

If you really want to charge tourists for the use of public transport, you could perhaps find ways of charging that at the border of the country. A daily tariff, either on entry, or on exit.

This isn't tenable in the EU due to the freedom of movement across borders.

This is already done today. A lot of touristy cities already charge a daily fee per night you stay there. Hotels bill you for it so compliance is complete too. Between that and taxes for residents there's really no point to charging separately for public transport.

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