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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

As someone who's willing to pay more taxes in order to make public transit in Boston free for everyone, I consider this a feature, not a bug. (FFS, make the buses free at least, 80% of bus rides connect to the T anyway, and getting rid of fares on buses makes their schedules more reliable since you no longer need to block on people rifling through their pockets and slowly feeding wrinkled dollars into the machine.)

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I've noticed that the further you get away from downtown, the more likely the bus driver is just going to tell you not to bother with it and wave you back if you reach for some dollar bills. But like you said, it'd be nice if it was just official policy for all bus rides rather than an ad hoc lottery based on the driver.

Pretty much everything in MA is like that. The jackboot of beacon hill is on the end of a short leg. Give-a-fucks about anything and everything expend rapidly the further from it you get (both physically and economically).

You have it backwards — the further from Boston you get, the more the communities are mooching off the GBA money tree.

That money comes with strings attached and that's the whole point. You could always stop paying and just let all that stuff that gets done with state money get done by the towns instead but you'd lose the ability to dictate terms and we all know that's a non-starter.

Micromanaging a bunch of people who don't care about you or your values isn't cheap. You can either pay in dollars or in blood. The wealthy suburbanites and urbanites who want to see the brown folk in Fall River or the hicks west of Worcester march to the official state tune don't really have the stomach for an endless supply of "the tragic turn of events all began when State Trooper McFakeTimeCard pulled over Mr. Lopez, 36 of Springfield for an expired inspection sticker..." type news stories so it's no surprise that the "US in Iraq" approach gets chosen over the "Russians in Syria" approach.

<shrug>

No, beacon hill sends money (via MassHealth for example) because it makes Massachusetts a better society. We don’t want Western Mass to be destitute.

Agree, I'd prefer that as well. If not that, at least make it possible to pay with your phone or smartwatch like NYC has done. That really seems to have done a lot to reduce the time to board there.

Awesome article, really enjoyed reading it.

Only thing that ruffled my feathers at the end as a MA resident was the solution being additional personnel to monitor a non-problem.

I've been mulling the question of whether fares should be free recently.

Yes it gets people out of cars, yes it's progressive.

But on the other hand, you don't get much signal of how it's actually valued. And if it is valued, surely it turns regressive by gentrifying areas served by free transport, forcing the poorest away.

Not that I think public transport should be for profit.

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