D.C. free bus bill becomes law as zero-fare transit systems take off

I don't think public transport should be entirely free just from both an economic but also ecological POV: despite how much more efficient public transport is on a per-user basis, it's still not free (both environmentally and economically). There's a recent report by a large public transportation company in Germany which illustrates some of the problems: During the pandemic Germany introduced the "€9-ticket", a ticket that, as the name suggests, costs only €9 and gave you public transportation for ~3 Months (Let's call that free for the sake of argument). After the end of that program there was a report by (I think) the state Hesse that looked at how public transportation usage and car usage behaved. The result was that there was massively increased public transportation usage, but not a massive reduction in car usage. In effect (and from personal, anecdotal experience) free public transport lead to an increase in "fun drives" (e.g. to vacation destinations), but not a decrease in work related transportation.

One of the reasons might be that public transport usage is often fundamentally misunderstood. A significant number of people use a car, not because they want to, but because it is their only option: People living in cities already use public transport, while rural areas (and I count everything with <25k citizens as "rural") often don't have sufficient public transport. You could start expanding public transport in those rural areas to match the one in cities, but that by itself would be an environmental catastrophe: Public transport is good in high density scenarios, where, even in the dead of night, buses or subways are relatively well filled. However, increasing public transport in low density areas will always have "dead times" in which few people transit. The issue is that you still need to send e.g. buses in those low utilization timezones since otherwise people still need a car as they cannot rely on public transport to fulfill their needs. If you want people to be able to rely on getting from A to B without a car, this problem is uncircumventable: You need a high density population that fills your public transport for it to be sensible.

For example, despite living in Germany (which overall has good public transportation) I couldn't travel from the close city (~20min drive) home on any weekday past 10:00PM. That is despite the fact I still live in a town of ~20k people. I don't even fault the people that made the decision not to drive busses here: If I drive in that 10:00PM bus, it's consistently half empty (or worse: I've also been in that bus with only 2-3 others, including the driver)!

The solution isn't to tax cars to high heavens, as that decreases the likelihood of people moving outside of cities. Too many people inside cities yields its own share of well-known problems, like high rent prices due to high demand for a, by definition, limited amount of space (density = people/area).

I think the solution for this is much simpler: Specifically subsidize work related transportation by giving people money proportional to the maximal transportation costs (which usually will be a car). This prevents subsidizing "fun drives", while also encouraging people to use public transport when available. This money can be clawed back from employers, which also encourages them to offer e.g. work-from-home (which from both an environmental and congestion POV trumps even public transport). Since transportation is now well supported via taxes, we can use the saved money to increase public transport where it is logical: people living outside of high density areas _should_ use a car because building a public transport system has too high of an environmental overhead (though stuff like ample parking should exist outside of any high density area to allow for a switch from car->public transport)

Stuff like luxury cars or private air travel obviously should also be taxed, but not because it's transportation, but because highly expensive items for the 1% should be taxed in _any_ case (e.g. an idea would be a progressive VAT which is low for cheap items like food, but high for expensive items like private jets).

The silver line snakes way out through Virginia, for a pretty (very) small fraction of riders every day & a handful of people going to IAD (Dulles) airport. The Purple Line has started snaking around the beltway, at least for the northern MD parts that were still willing to fund & try, but has dragged on, slated originally to open last year & still at least 4 years out & crazy over cost. It seems unlikely to make a sea change difference, but perhaps!! We want to believe, maybe after a lot of time. DC started building a new streetcar network, and seemingly gave up after realizing fixed infrastructure like this was insanely expensive and prone to constant blockage.

Most American cities highly subsidize transit. Going to fully subsidized is not really a major hurt. It's a kind of easy action we can just do, for little real pain. Much less pain than many of the expansive would be micro-mega-projects, that probably in most cases will be massive budget items with decades of debt, with only very very very long term development benefits. In DC, few of our transit systems have capacity problems. Our citywide network is quite good, very well connnected whatever direction you want in most places.

The proposal that we add more busses, that we build new lines: it feels wildly out of touch, like it's prescribing someone elses solution, that doesn't make sense here. This is a good sensible next step for DC, to make what we have work much better for many, especially those who can most benefit.

Setting that aside, this legislation also includes $10m/year in funding to further enhance bus service:

- Creating new routes

- Extending hours (all night service on key routes)

- Shortening headways between buses

This is the cost of free public transit.

Complaints like yours ring hollow when solutions have already been devised and in use for a long time. If other places don't use these solutions because of NIH or whatever, that doesn't mean these complaints are valid.

True, with emphasis on fully.

> In many cases, the systems to collect fares end up costing hundreds of millions of dollars.

That figure seems extremely high for "many cases," but the exact figure isn't really material.

> These costs are never made back. It makes sense to make it free.

No, that's just not true.

My local metro spent $17 million on fare collection to net $167 million in revenue (2019). It would have to cut $150 million in other service to go to free fares.

I suspect a lot would. Some public transit systems are shockingly expensive. And even price-insensitive people would benefit from increased ridership of price-sensitive people if it also led to improved service.

I'm sure there are people who would benefit from this, like those carpooling and relying on rides from friends and family, to those who wouldn't be able to afford to work in places that would otherwise require a car to commute to that they don't have, etc.

The same can't be said about big city transit. Just look at the demographics of where homeless people flock to.

There's a good number of limited-stop bus routes that span some pretty long routes that would require much more cross-city metro riding, and serving many places the metro doesnt conveniently service at all. My feeling is generally the opposite of yours- actual urbanites are good at & love the buses, know some real handy convenient routes, and people further afield tend to only know & try the much simpler & more limited metrorail. DC just isnt that big; a handful of stops if you're going 2-4 miles is not really a concern.

I work in the longwood area of Boston. There are private bus routes that make up for the lack of good public transit for the area. It’s also free with Id.

https://www.longwoodcollective.org/lma-shuttles/shuttle-rout...

Except it doesn't have to be zero-sum. A government can simply decide it wants to prioritize public transportation. The funding isn't inherently zero-sum.

I frankly wouldn’t mind paying more for public transit, but making it the crux feels roughly analogous to corporate ”greenwashing”: push the responsibility onto individuals and we can conveniently ignore the structural changes needed to make public transit systems grow and thrive.

This is not necessarily true. If reducing fares increases ridership it may allow a strong case to be made for increasing the system funding.

Very few people commute via bus in DC. I rarely did it because often traffic would make it take a long time even though I lived in the district.

http://google.com/search?q=dc+bus+driver+death

There are very very few incidents of bus drivers dying in DC. I would highly recommend not taking this fear-instilling anecdote as a real sign of what is.

I'm not saying to disregard this account, give it the benefit of a doubt, but it also is very new, and has had a pretty contentious first steps. I too am pretty contentious here & there my years, and I'm not at all saying to disregard one another. But this kind of high-brand FUD rather frustates me, & I feel like should set us on guard: it goes deeply to an emotional vulnerability we all have, quickly, rapidly. I genuinely want to believe this event here is not a complete fabrication. But the only bus driver gun-death I can find is linked to the 2002 DC sniper attacks. That this new account demonstrates a particular bias, from what I have seen, adds to my hestiancy to take this as real. Again, I very very much do not want to say to disregard, I do not want to attack the person, but this claim seems fundamentally suspect, & the history seems at least a bit murky, and I'd say this comment deserves caution & question, rather than acceptance.

We have some fairly notorious bus lines in DC. But like, overall, the actual scary shit nearly never ever happens. Oh look, some loud people are drinking on the 7X's or the X2 again. Generally it's not really a real problem & we kind of ignore it & eventually they get off, or, if they start causing a scene, the bus driver asks them to leave, and after a couple dozen seconds they get the point that this is not really winnable & wander off. I've seen some people get mad at each other, but someone gets off & the drama dissipates. The notoriety is more about characters & ridiculousness, thank heavens, and rarely about real actual in fact for real problems. Those, from what I have heard in my many years in DC, have been pretty few.