Cities are ending fares on transit. Here’s why
cnn.com
cnn.com
Also, there are tremendous operating cost savings to a free at the point of use transit system. No ticket machines, turnstiles, the associated maintenance, ticketing staff, fare enforcement officers/police in places where there aren't turnstiles. Additionally, without turnstiles, people can enter and exit metro stations more quickly during peak service hours. On buses, the driver doesn't need to waste time dealing with payments.
It's cheaper to fund a public transportation system through taxation. Some may make the argument that why should people that don't use it have to pay for it? Well, since it's now included in your taxes, there's an incentive for you now to use it. For the wealthy that would never use it, I argue that they benefit from it. Their workers use the system to get to work, their customers use it to arrive at their businesses, students use it to get to school. These students use that education to become employees at those businesses.
While what you say is true in principle, in practice it would quickly translate into deteriorating service.
Public transit is and should of course always be mostly tax funded, but a small fare can add money in the system, it adds demands from users and a sense of responsibility for the suppliers.
The fare is always much cheaper than operating a car and its easy to have discount programs for those that need it.
Enforcement can be as easy as random checks, all the fancy infrastructure is not really needed although for underground systems its good to have a little barrier for entry.
I can afford a car just fine but I don’t want to spend my money on it just to get to work.
The real measure of the affluence and quality of life in a city is how large a portion of the wealthy take transit. The higher the better.
That's the above poster's point; A small fare can easily cost more for infrastructure and enforcement than it brings into the system.
To the extreme, consider fare/ turnstile jumping. Requires
1. Ticket Sales (requires cash management, or credit card fees; $0.25 is a significant amount of $2.50)
2. Video or Person watching from turnstyle booth
3. Turnstile (that must be ADA, emergency, traveling with a roller bag, traveling with children compatible)
4. An officer to identify and ticket the offender.
5. A District Attorney to pursue charges
6. A judge to hear a defense
7. a courthouse bursar
8. a warrant officer to arrest someone charged with a $2.50 fare jump
9. a jail cell.
The real cost though, is criminalization of the poor, in a high income inequality country.
Most of the systems/employees you mention will be employed or paid for/installed anyways. Do you think that people go to jail or even get anywhere near the DAs desk for a parking ticket? Why would jumping a turnstile be treated different from the legal standpoint.
A parking ticket has an identification system via a license plate (or VIN number); so they can be identified later.
Jumping a fare, you've not given any identifying information until detained.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fare_evasion#Civil_and_crimina...
But it is criminalizing the poor; Someone who isn't paying $2.50 may not have $50, unless they're doing it for the fun. At best you block them from the transit system which stops them from their job, a place to sleep; at worst, it's another fee when they get arrested for something else
The point is to avoid normalizing the turnstile jumps at stations, where everyone sees them. See broken windows theory.
If you don't pay for enough enforcement (see NYC, Atlanta, Bart, etc that aren't free and have plenty of broken windows), then you still have a "broken window", only it has cost the system significantly more than your other opportunities, ie, armed security on the trains instead of staring at turnstiles; some positions may even be cheaper than your credit card fees on your profitable customers, less ridership (tourism, can't find card, uber competitor) because of fees and complexities reduces effectiveness of the system.
I have a distinct feeling that in my location there would quickly be loud voices talking about how much of a burden the cost is and the users are freeloading off the “hardworking people of our country” and they should just feel happy with whatever they’re served.
You see this class of argument often when it's pointed out that some issue is handled better in another part of the world; sometimes it seems like a posture of defeatism in the face of evidence that a better way is possible. See also: political polarization as a reason that nothing can ever get better.
Not saying that's how you mean it--I wonder, though, how we go about constructing a better culture? Are we merely victims of the culture we were given? Or are there efforts we can take to change the culture we have for the better? I'm curious what research shows about how cultural attitudes can be changed over time, either for better or worse.
Since mass transit access is something you can't badly overconsume in a sensible way, nor can you hoard and resell it in meaningful quantities, it does not noticeably suffer from the problems that plague free-to-take physical stuff. If keeping the access infrastructure is expensive, shutting it down and making access free may indeed save money. See how it works e.g. for public parks and city streets; both are toll-free.
Actually its not that easy. You need someone to check income threshold (how?), have a separate program to distribute that special fare, monitor for fraud, special fare system, etc. Tons of people that would benefit from cheaper fare end up not having access to it if the way to get that discount ends up being complicated (as many social programs are).
I agree transit should be cheaper, not free, but often cheaper helps everyone and encourage habits to change, even among the middle class.
Cast a wide net, 50% discount for students, municipalities can hook people up with free or discounted passes depending on their municipal tax returns, it can all be automated even.
Some who don’t need discounts will get them and some who need them won’t but they will get better quality of service however. And if they don’t manage to get themselves a discount by any means, if the alternative is buying a car they’re saving anyway.
The absolute amount of money collected isn’t really the point, just that there is some of it and it is a non-negligible portion of the total.
I don't think this will actually measure anything but gentrification and how few social services a city offers. Of the wealthy friends I have, the reasons they don't take public transit are always either time or the trash people. Of those categories, I know a few willing to deal with the wasted time to feel good but none willing to deal with the junkies, homeless, or hood crowd. If none of these groups are on your public transit it's either because you priced them out or the region is already hostile enough to keep them out.
Provide transit cards to those with low income budgeted through programs that are tasked with dealing with social welfare, homelessness, and rehabilitation. Let transit programs stick with transit.
I took public transit most work days using various methods in the Seattle metro area for years. The only one I didn’t frequently use (but did occasionally) were busses in the free ride zone outside of the bus tunnel.
But the difference there is that the roads are usually maintained for industry, commerce, defence or political pressure.
The people can then use them also but that’s almost an afterthought in the system, the roads will be maintained because of moneyed or political interests.
Public transit is just as important for cities but the powerful advocates are missing.
Its the poor class that uses public transit because it is substandard, and they dont have other choices.
Public transit is substandard because public transit has to fight on the regular roads, and not dedicated track/roads for transit. This means it is innately as slow or slower than driving. Because of this, it anyone who has a car WILL TAKE A CAR.
For example, it takes me 20 minutes to go from 1 side of the city to the other. Using the bus routes, its 2 hours. This is the predominant reason why people don't use public transit - 6 times longer.
Free is an essential start, though.
My coworkers thought I was crazy taking the bus thinking it was full of homeless. It was mostly lawyers, judges, jurists going to the federal court as well as medical staff at the nearby hospital. Based on the designer suits alone I can guarantee almost everyone had a European car or large body SUV sitting at home.
Free is a good start but if it still takes 2+ hours to get to a $15/hr job it's still a bad deal.
Compared to SEPTA (Philly's bus system) this seems way off base. Yes, it takes longer to take the bus than to drive yourself because the bus has to stop for passengers. But your own car will still have to stop at red lights, wait for pedestrians, etc., nearly as much as a bus. I can see 30-45 minutes for a bus ride comparable to a 20 minute direct drive, but any more than that points to some other problem with your city's roads.
I would LOVE nice public transit where I would call a taxi OR walk to the public transit station, then get to a hub, and then head to the east/west coast. That *used* to be possible, with even commuter train stations available at cities with 1000 people. No more.
I WfH, so I'm already reducing my vehicular load on the atmo. I mow perhaps 4 times a year. Again, less poison in atmo. But when I want to pop over to the nearest big city (You know, microcenter/electronics/hobby/etc) I have only 1 choice. Car.
Maybe in eastern seabed cities that actually built their cities with public transit, it just works for you, cause those cities weren't completely demolished for interstates (well, just the redlined/black population of cities; they were demolished). But past your east coast mentality, the rest of us have no real choices. And it sucks.
And also, major shoutout to "Not Just Bikes" yt channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/notjustbikes
It may be a problem with the city, but it’s still a problem.
Overall transit works great if most people are going to a few central points. It's much more difficult if the destinations are distributed. Frequent service could be a balm for that: if you had buses every ten minutes on all routes transfers would not be bad at all.
Concrete example for my city. Going from the east end to the west end took over 2 hours. And most of it was on the rail system - so not competing with traffic. But it involved one transfer for the train, and another for the bus near the end of my destination.
Frequent stops - by both the train and the bus, as well as the stops, made it take a lot longer. In my case a car would have done it in about 40 minutes.
That's a problem that cities solve by using dedicated bus lanes. We should work on making public transportation faster and car transportation slower to change which mode of transportation that people are incentivized to use. Car owners are heavily subsidized by monopolizing the roads for an extremely inefficient per person mode of transportation. Cities subsidize them for any parking that is free. We all pay for the externalities of air pollution, climate change, and city space wasted on street parking and public/private parking lots/garages.
Dedicated bus lanes don't run on regular roads, either.
Public standard is substandard when it's badly run, and not because it's public transit. People who have a car may still decide that the costs of running it are greater than the costs of using public transit.
However public transport isn't even close to being free. I fact it is quite expensive in addition to being heavily tax supported.
This is the only way to offer the high quality of service we have from over 92.5% on time trains and 98.7% connections made [1]. It also allows to offer service at infrequent stops out nowhere.
You having a ticket is based on trust. There are random checks on short trip and more regular check on longer trips. It is estimated that around 10% don't have a valid ticket from wrong ticket to people who didn't get one on purpose. To get the percentage lower would cost more than what is lost in revenue and 100% is not something anyone can achieve.
[1] https://news.sbb.ch/medien/artikel/115696/gute-puenktlichkei...
The other way would be to make drivers pay for the advantages that public transportation provides them: Significantly less traffic congestion, etc. Per-km, per-kg charges for cars could be calibrated to completely cover the cost of transit, since many people are too snobbish to ever ride it no matter what the financial situation.
Oh boy is it expensive, in particular to the poor foreigners visiting without the half-price card. And for some reason if you're in the know, you can buy all-day whole country covering travel passes for 50 something chf. Something that the foreigners can never get without insider help.
There's absolutely no way it's ever going to be cheaper, the best one can hope is that the prices don't go up very fast. Still, it's cheaper than having a car somehow.
Agree with premise about free transit, or at-least certain free routes.
Fewer other cars on the road - fewer traffic jams, faster to get places, more pleasant drives!
Public transportation benefits even people who don't use it themselves /and also don't care about any of the ways it indirectly benefits them by benefitting others/.
Taxation almost never makes anything cheaper here.
I don't expect any of this to be surfaced in the many "experiments" that are now ongoing because of course as we know any inconvenient truths can just be dropped/ignored from the final report as "anomalies" or "non-representative" or "racist".
Others have mentioned public schools, and I would agree. For as expensive as many private schools are, the average cost per student is about 60% that of public schools.
Getting rid of turnstiles and other populating recording devices spreads the gap between ridership and funding even further. Minus fare evasion, there is a direct correlation between fares and riders. Programs to provide free transportation based on income are already available in many metro areas.
Everyone loves “free” stuff, but when it’s not really free, and the cost are just hidden in taxes, most people lose. Being cheaper to fund through taxes now has nothing to do with future costs that no longer correlate to ridership.
If you paid for the bus 100% with your fare it would be completely scalable. If transit demand doubled, revenue would double and they could run twice as many buses.
A fixed amount of public spending (typically 75% of expenses in many transit systems) is not scalable. You could double or triple bus ridership but service deteriorates because you don't get buses. The municipality, bus company, etc. have every incentive for transit promotion to fail because more people taking transit blows up their budget.
Note there is a good case for subsidization in that people riding the bus create benefits for others: 20 people riding the bus can take 20 cars off the road which makes life better for drivers, pedestrians, etc.
The solution to congestion, imho, is making public transportation acceptable to the largest customer base by making it clean, convenient, and timely. That might not capture the poorest or the richest, but they still benefit from less congestion, noise, and air pollution.
Making it good would provide more benefits to most cities than making it free, imho.
The problem is that the most valuable benefits of public transit, such as reduced congestion, reduced pollution, saved lives, etc., aren't priced in such a way that the transit system can charge the beneficiaries.
Instead, the way we run things, transit systems are stuck having to recover their operating expenses from the kind people who volunteer to ride them and thereby create all the real benefits.
> Isn’t this the communist/socialist philosophy
No. This is about changing how something is paid for under capitalism, and is a very normal way of paying for things under this system.
> If a program can’t pay for itself, what incentive does it have to be efficient and operate in the interest of riders?
The main problem with making it profit-based is that skimming off the top is the basic operating principle; you have strong incentives to make it less safe, not do upgrades, abuse inelastic demand &c. One should hope that the people elected (or appointed by someone elected) would have an incentive to work in the public's interest because they won't be re-elected otherwise, though obviously this doesn't always work. But that's _already_ a problem that needs fixing, so why not two birds with one stone rather than switching over to a funding system absolutely filled to the brim with bad incentives that repeatedly fails us?
> Getting rid of turnstiles and other populating recording devices spreads the gap between ridership and funding even further.
I'm not really sure what you're arguing here.
> Everyone loves “free” stuff, but when it’s not really free, and the cost are just hidden in taxes, most people lose.
The costs are not hidden, they're in your taxes. I also strongly disagree that most people lose when you fund things through taxes. That seems completely ignorant of how a ton of infrastructure and much of society is run.
> Being cheaper to fund through taxes now has nothing to do with future costs that no longer correlate to ridership.
The argument was that funding it not through fares is already _better_ because it can be adjusted to those situations.
The ironic part is, the poor and middle class may vote for it, but it's the local property owners that pay for it.
And the local property owners that benefit in increased real estate prices.
In a low-trust world, it removes a useful excuse for enforcers to kick troublemakers off the line.
A middle ground could be tried (and I think some cities have) where they keep fares and such (and soak the tourists, of course) but then give free passes to all residents in the city.
There’s also the argument, elaborated in that article, that the main reason people (low income or not) don’t take the bus is not that they find the fare expensive but because of the quality of the service, especially frequency.
I take the bus to work maybe 80% of the time from a rural area, I work 9-5 so it works OK, but if I miss the one bus home I am in a world of hurt because I have to wait two hours for the next bus. If the bus ran every ten minutes that would be quite transformative. For instance if you miss the bus or the bus was only 90% reliable it would be no big deal.
People will say that the population is too dispersed in my area and that it couldn’t support more frequent service, but there are several population concentrations on the route and the bus is frequently close to 50% full (when they replace the full size bus with a mini-bus, they sometimes have to leave passengers on the curb). If buses ran more frequently there would certainly be some “induced demand” as more people decide buses will meet their needs.
It’s possible that more people would take transit if the service was more expensive but better quality.
There are places like the Central Valley of California where you can drive a mile and it is all the same farm. There are places like Montana. I'm a mile from a state forest and own about 65 acres, and I'm about 2 miles from the bus stop which is at this (relatively) high density development
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Boiceville+Cottages/@42.38...
there are also two small towns on the route, a subsidized housing project, and route 79 has a stretch of single family houses stacked two deep (roughly every other driveway goes to a house behind the house in front!)
It helps that Tompkins County has one dominant employer (Cornell University) that pays for a bus pass for all faculty, staff and students. Bus service on a triangle between the downtown, Cornell and the mall is absolutely excellent. (15 minutes) If you work 9-5 at Cornell it is easy to get to outlying towns like Dryden, Trumansburg, Groton, Newfield, Danby, etc. There is also bus service to nearby state parks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRi2ACqZHCI there are even songs about it.
Often they stop at the small towns, so really rural people still have to walk to town, but from there they can get "to the big city".
The underlying 'trouble' that makes someone a 'troublemaker' (e.g. aggressive panhandling, disruptive behavior, public drunkenness, etc.) are still reasons to be kicked off public transportation irrespective of how much the fare is.
That said, SCMTD bus drivers are allowed to kick anyone off that is being disruptive or a safety hazard. I have also seen them refuse to allow someone entry due to a pattern of belligerence.
The biggest obstacle at this point is the lack of drivers. With housing more and more unaffordable, many non-tech or non-boutique jobs are getting harder and harder to fill. This leaves unexpected gaps in service that can annoyingly delay your travels.
I just think, from a realpolitik perspective, your average car user (who you definitely need to persuade in order to get their representative to support transit funding) already perceives transit as unprofitable (rightly, for basically anywhere other than NYC) and would therefore find it not just unfeasible, but deeply unfair.
If they're right, then it's a dead end. If not, then it's a persuasion problem, and I don't think people who have advocated for free transit have made the case very well.
The average car user probably need to adjust their sentiments on this. Car users are being heavily invested in not only by the infrastructure they get, but also the opportunity costs of the land the roads occupy.
Even in Denmark where cars are taxed at an additional 150% (on top of a 25% VAT) I am quite sure that the regular tax payer subsidizes the car user.
I would love to see actual profitability analysis of these technologies. I am not ure the car users would benefit however.
Sure, but they also have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to buy into the ecosystem, insure their vehicle, and keep it fueled and maintained.
Your normie car driver is gonna say "I have to pay $xxx a month to go anywhere, why should others get to go somewhere for free?"
To be clear, I'm all in favor of whatever policy encourages more mass transit. I'm just trying to be pragmatic here.
> The average car user probably need to adjust their sentiments on this
That's why I said what I said. If it's a persuasion problem, then a better case needs to be made.
But at least we have a status quo where both systems are subsidized, and both systems require you to buy in to use them. Why let one group go for free?
They do? The tolls on the pike don't even cover the maintenance on the road. It's the general tax fund, paid into as well by non-drivers, that makes up the difference.
Between 2007 and 2022 they had to pay $450 million a year to fund non-turnpike things, including transit. Between 2013 and 2022 all of that money went to transit. The obligation has since been reduced to $50 million.
I’d be completely fine if 100% of transportations budget came from fees directly related to use (increase gas or mileage taxes and decrease income or property taxes). For most people it would probably be net zero, and for those that save on taxes the increased cost to businesses would be passed on to customers in increased prices.
State funding of roads doesn't nearly cover the overall costs of the freeways. The $52.5 billion in apportioned funding for Fiscal Year 2022 represents an increase of more than 20% as compared to Fiscal Year 2021 for Federal-aid Highway Program
US Taxpayers cover this.
[1] https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/fhwa-delivers-l....
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57940
So it gets federal dollars too. And things like roads and bridges are also subsidizing transit because buses will use them too.
So the idea that mass transit can go to fare-free and rely entirely on government funding via taxes is the logical conclusion.
Transit (like IT in a company) is an enabler/multiplier, not a product.
Not to mention that there are more costs to driving than just the physical road - there's the opportunity cost of lost land, injuries, deaths, health effects from exposure to exhaust, climate change....
The oil/car lobby has spent billions in advertising and popular media selling us car culture.
I think there could be success in making an argument like this, and pitching consumption taxes could help make that math more apparent without requiring any rhetoric.
> selling us car culture
I think this is a dead end, though. That's why I mentioned realpolitik - something like 92% of Americans have access to a car. A big chunk of these people like car culture, plenty don't particularly care but have built their lives around the status quo, and the ones who don't but participate anyways do so because they're priced out of communities that are walkable/have good transit.
You need ways to gradually make transit better and make people less dependent on cars. I'm an example; work from home allowed me to get rid of our family's second car five years ago.
You could argue that free transit can help with that. I don't; I'd rather see transit extract value from those who are able to pay and be more reliant on operating income, and I don't think "it's too expensive" is the primary reason why most people don't switch to transit. But regardless of what I think, if even 6 out of 10 of that 92% think it's unfair, then it's a political non-starter.
I recently visited Tucson, Arizona for a company summit and was pleasantly surprised when taking the local trolly. I didn't have to think about where to buy a fare, how much I would need, which stops I would have to get off/on at, or the fear that I might accidentally get on/off at the wrong stop and be forced to repurchase a fare. I just walked on and off.
I'm happy that my tax dollars might go to something like this that would make the lives of tourists, or those who can't afford personal transportation, that much easier.
You would think that raising property taxes along the route would pay for the streetcar — and it has to be the case that that property is skyrocketing in value.
Someone just needs to add Prohibition-era-style jazz clubs and the area will become even hotter than it is now.
Anecdotes are not data and correlation is not causations. That said, it's still useful to look at correlation between price and service all around the world, instead of making assumptions that might seem logical at first, but fail to consider the counterintuitive effects of a policy.
[1] https://nltimes.nl/2023/07/13/netherlands-public-transport-2...
Oh no, non-poor people might be seeing a benefit from the tax dollars they pay! The horror!
It's not really about transit. Kick them off transit and they'll be somewhere else. They are people, they take up space, they have to be somewhere.
Now you may have to wait 40 min for a round trip depending on when you get to the station. This makes it hard to use the bus for a lunch errand where you need to be back in an hour.
Free fares will probably simply add more of those and add a few ticket checkers into the mix when they lose their jobs.