Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike
reuters.com
reuters.com
You have all the right in the world to prefer driving and chilling on your air conditioning and stereo if you can afford it, but it shouldn't be free if you're occupying the lane space 10 people would occupy in a bus, and making the traffic slower for the bus in doing so.
Everyone, including people without cars, pays for the roads through taxes; it is only fair to do the same for public transport.
Strong agree except here, busses should have their own lanes at all expense to cars - even if this means entire roads are now no longer available to cars.
The private car should be the slowest, least convenient way to get where you're going.
Not to mention a lot of people figure out where the cameras are for the bus lane auto-fines and just dodge them when appropriate, but I guess that's a third world problem.
If you have this attitude, please never ever get into a private car. Good luck!
Thanks for the warning, but a couple decades of activism has tought me long ago to let go of the idea of winning total support from the most strident opposition. Sometimes people just need to be dragged kicking and screaming into a better world for them and their neighbors. That's ok.
Strongly disagree. There are too many perverse incentives that work against transit. If there are a lot of car commuters (which there will be - plumbers taking their tools to the job for example) they have inventive to pressure politicians to reduce that tax - any voting block will always be more powerful than the distributed masses. Your transit operators need to ensure transit doesn't become too popular: the more people taking transit the less cars there are paying that tax.
Besides almost no transit rider is worried about costs. They are all interested instead in better service, so use all the money you can get - including fares - to build better service. This is long term what everyone needs.
Yes you do need a program for the poor. However the majority of your people shouldn't be in that program.
Also, your ratios are absurdly out of wack. 79% of the country doesn't live in a ghetto and you don't need to be economically or socially privileged to maintain a nice neighborhood. Most working class neighborhoods are not ghettos, nor even resemble one in the slightest.
A) Every bank is run by racists who are sufficiently racist to ignore a profit opportunity
B) The neighborhoods are bad credit risks
When people refer to "systemic racism", the "systemic" part is typically literal.
Also, I invite you to take a step back and interrogate the examine the implicit premises of your question. I think you're saying that _in a free market of rational agents_, it doesn't make economic sense to not issue loans to people who _aren't_ credit risks, and I would agree -- except housing segregation was always about a heavily artificially manipulated (not free) market, in which people of color couldn't purchase a home in a white neighborhood regardless of their willingness to pay. Public policy bent over backwards to coerce all parties to maintain segregation (e.g. sundown towns, racial covenants, etc), ironically including during cold-war years when the US simultaneously tried to be a global advocate for free markets.
Although I was more referring to our systems more broadly (health care, education, transportation - the topic of this post), let's go with neighborhoods. Are you really trying to pretend that red-lining didn't happen? Or that de facto sundown towns didn't exist at least into the 1980s?
Both are untrue, IMO, and in the desired steady state the car tax is in fact near zero, substituted by higher taxes on everything else. Even if that ends up making the city more expensive, the variation in utility is still at least positive if we model citizens' utility functions as negatively sloped on the pollution axis, and of course if we are assuming the central planning wants to comply with global warming goals.
I would even question if tradespeople would be against paying the car tax if it gets commuters out of the road, to be honest. I'd wager a plumber would be more than willing to pay even 100$ monthly if you worded it as "you get a fast pass to avoid all traffic and get everywhere as fast as the speed limit" and not "it's a tax on your car".
You can choose the car regime if you want, the US does, but: 1- public transit is lower quality due to higher income brackets choosing cars. 2- everyone is screwed by the cars' negative externalities (noise and air pollution mainly). 3- lower income brackets are screwed by the traffic generated by the higher guys (50 minimum wage workers occupying the same lane space as 3 SUV-driving middle managers). Also you have to remember how much the mortality increases in higher car traffic areas, so that X figure isn't really true
Like if you had to drive on toll roads built underground then nobody would ever drive (see Hyperloop). I think the big mistake being made is people are arguing for free subways and really we should just go to free buses first.
How do costs compare for average people in that area is a much better metric. (understand that in transit areas I'd expect people with cars to have newer luxury cars, while in more car centric areas I'd expect more used non-luxury cars, and in poor areas worn out cars - which is itself a skew of the facts)
So, raise the tax. When nobody takes cars any more you figure out another way to pay for it. The existence of cars shouldn't come at the cost of public services.
Public transit makes the most sense to fund with property taxes proportional to the benefit that public transit brings in.
Which is essentially zero in many cities. And even in cities with transit, an expansion should result in a lot more benefit than they are currently getting, but they need that money now not in 10 years after that expansion is done and the city sees that benefit.
??? How does this make any sense at all? You have no basically economy without transit. And you get a far greater return from mass transit than from roads.
> And even in cities with transit, an expansion should result in a lot more benefit than they are currently getting, but they need that money now not in 10 years after that expansion is done and the city sees that benefit.
This is what bonds are for....
Yes. Economic centers need transport. Transport costs money to operate, so it is an external cost for an economic center. Taxes are a ways to price in external costs.
Only by choice! Hence why america has such inefficient transit even compared to other such-dense metros.
The interstates in the US alone have costed more than 25 trillion dollars. That's just the interstates, no other highways or roads.
But none of that even considers cost of using said roads. In the US, on average 15% of gross income is spent on automobile transportation.
That's a 15% tax right off the top, before your other taxes.
The reasoning of "we spend a lot of money so it must be good" is just bad. No, we spend a lot of money on stupid shit all the time. Both historically and currently.
Americans spend on average 15% of their gross income on automobile transportation. That's not including their taxes that went towards said automobiles, roads, and oil.
Nobody actually wants to do that. If you could get to work without an automobile, you would. But you can't, can you?
Automobiles are parasidic in nature. To work, they require vast amounts of space and sprawling urban design. But when you get said vast amounts of space and sprawling urban design, then automobiles are the only thing that makes sense.
We have a car centric built environment because people have rationally decided for many valid reasons that automobiles are the best way to get around. It's not because they are "parasitic", whatever that means.
Note that a large part of why cars are better is the network exists. If you had to drive on dirt (not even gravel!) roads that became impassible when it rains you would call cars a bad way to get around. However the road network is such that you can nearly anywhere in a car.
Also, they should do this without crippling cars, since that would be far easier to do than producing a compelling alternative to them as they currently exist.
Do you mean without continuing to give them 99% of available resources? Cars are by far the most privileged form of transportation worldwide. We bend over backwards to subsidize them as much as possible at all costs.
So of course, any attempts at clawing back at least some of that privilege are met with outrage, e.g. bike lanes.
I don't know if cars are subsidized more than mass transit on average. It's quite possible they are. The overwhelming majority of people find cars much more useful and enjoyable than mass transit, and politicians have to provide people with what they want to some degree. It's not a conspiracy of the oil companies.
EVs are changing that because they don't pay fuel tax. So, governments are now proposing to change how vehicles are taxed to make the roads pay for themselves again.
The USA is different to Europe because gas taxes are a political live wire there in a way they just aren't in Europe. Presidents win campaigns by promising to reduce the price of gas! So of course the road network is in deficit there, it's a populist move. The equivalent populism in Europe is to make public transport free instead, as the governments are more collectivist minded there, whereas in the US personal freedom is a major concern.
It is possible for public transport to be too popular. It looks like overloaded, crowded and constantly broken lines that can't get better because they're starved of funding.
The 9€ and Deutschlandticket reinvigorated that lobby - although that's being snuffed out again.
It becomes like the meme when people talk about nuclear power. Sure, it would had been an good idea 10-20 years ago, but there is no time to do it now and it cost too much. Next year will be even later, and it will cost even more. Any new funding need to be channeled directly to the starving short-term budget, which will continue to always be too low on funding.
What does the auto industry have in response? Jobs? The left don't care about jobs to begin with, they view anything linked to capitalism or employers to be inherently suspicious.
To see this is true, just look at which group is a net tax payer vs net tax recipient. Car drivers subsidize public transport everywhere I know of (unless you get into stupid arguments that assume world peace exists solely for the purpose of oil transport).
You have to invest in infrastructure to keep it at a high quality level. It's crowded because it has been lacking proper funding for years. It's a result of politics, nothing stops public transport from being popular and providing reasonable high quality service.
In general, governments tend to not be able to run a system efficiently, but reliably and robust while for companies it's the opposite.
And riding caltrain during peak hours for an hour twice a day would violate the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war.
But even then we have to consider marginal costs. Owning one car is better than two or three. Here in Texas, it's not uncommon to see households with 4 or 5 cars.
That's expensive.
Either way it's close, and the closer you get to Manhattan the higher that number goes. Remember, there are over 8 million people in NYC, and over 12 million during the work day.
Many components degrade simply due to time, especially things like rubber seals.
Switzerland is different though: you know the police aren’t going to put up with crap at all (and they will arrive fairly quickly if there is an incident), so free could really work. Although I was never tempted to drive while living in Switzerland (in the next city over from Geneva). I don’t think free works in the USA however.
And why is pointing out anti-Western agenda posts always met with multiple simultaneous downvotes, whereas my other unpopular opinions are downvoted one by one?
Maybe because acknowledging flaws in "y" is not necessarily "anti-y"? In fact, it is often "pro-y". I want to improve things I care about. A critical part of that is identifying flaws so they can be learned from and sometimes fixed.
Perhaps folks don’t feel as if that’s what you’re actually pointing out. The post you replied to was referring to the direct democracy of Switzerland, not castigating all of Western society. I mean, from my point of view, by “disregarding” you basically ignored the entire point of the comment to support a narrative.
Maybe consider that Switzerland is one of the best if not the best country in the world because people can choose what they want it to be.
A direct democracy could decide tomorrow that we wanted to fuck China sideways with nukes because it's funny and based all because a tiktok went viral.
Sorry, but that's just a racist dogwhistle. Switzerland has four main ethnic groups, and has had multiple rounds of migration (e.g. after the Yugoslav wars). Look at their various national sporting teams. Just because you can't look past people's skin colour that doesn't make them "homogeneous".
You need an educated and engaged populace that understands their civic duties.
> educated and engaged populace that understands their civic duties.
This describes a homogeneous group. An environment that cultivates this unilaterally (relative to an arbitrary standard), is by definition more homogeneous than one that does not. It's a politics, standard of living, and equality economics dogwhistle that has nothing to do with race.
No, it doesn't. People being educated doesn't make them homogeneous.
Not politicians, experts and administrators.
And yes, most people are limited in knowledge and vision. Look no further than Brexit, where the average UK citizen couldn't comprehend the complexity of the situation or the question, yet voted. The most asked question on Google the day after the vote was what is the EU... And it took years to begin to untangle the mess.
And again, look at Switzerland and their human rights travesty of not allowing half their population to vote because the existing voters said no.
Also, since when is a political ruling class known for long-term thinking?
Besides, cars are already taxed based on weight/power (what you considered common sense).
That's rather confusing. If women didn't have the right to vote, how would they be able to vote on the question of whether or not to grant women the right to vote?
Do you have a source for this? According to Wikipedia,
> An earlier referendum on women's suffrage was held on 1 February 1959 and was rejected by the majority (67%) of Switzerland's men.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_Switzerl...
Then let's start with the people from developed European countries who can afford this and built it out from there. "I have no choice but to pollute your planet" is a bit of a thin argument to me, surely we can (as a society) find a way to make that not necessary. Collect funds, build the system we want, use it. That's the point of a government, it doesn't exist just because we like to pay taxes
Source: I live in Texas.
Part of the problem of automobiles is that we put the industry on such extreme welfare that it makes no sense to do anything else. If we remove that welfare, the industry will be forced to shift.
In most countries cars are already taxed, in Switzerland as well. The tax is proportional to the weight of the car, so it compensates for higher fuel consumption. For similar reasons, EV's are taxed less.
There are talks about scrapping this system as more and more of the country transitions to EVs, and taxing them by vehicle weight instead (the same way driving licences are classed). This would reverse the current status quo, with EV owners paying the most due to the greater weight of their vehicles.
I'm not sure I like that idea, but I also appreciate that as the revenue goes down under the current scheme, they may feel tempted to introduce something even worse to make up the deficit instead, like a tax per mile traveled.
EDIT: There is a fixed VAT charge of 5% on electricity, as well as a currently 16% levy on electricity to cover various environmental and social benefit schemes. Which is hilarious, as the UK is moving away from fossil fuels for its electrical generation mix, while taxing electricity consumption much more than it taxes gas (5% VAT and 5.5% levies). This punishes those using electricity for heating and incentivizes people to continue using gas at home. This is on top of the fact that currently, gas is much cheaper (in unit rate, per kWh) than electricity. It's like they can't make up their mind on what they want to accomplish. For fuel, the tax is currently just under £0.53/L with 20% VAT added on top of the total as well.
PS: electricity is hard as there's a lot of volatile renewables, but I bet is still way easier than clever formulas.
We can’t determine that that is the case simply because the cost seems like a lot. California has the highest gas taxes in the US, so even if California is correctly pricing the externalities of consuming a gallon of gas (which I very much doubt), the rest of the country is under-pricing those externalities. The EU has a minimum gas tax of $1.60 per gallon, so if they are correctly pricing the externalities, California must be under-pricing them by over half.
Editorialized: US "gas" is cheap crap
from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octane_rating
It just lets higher performance cars achieve higher compression ratios. I believe technically this means it has a little bit less raw combustion potential the higher the octane rating. But none of this actually matters in practice as long as you feed your car what it asks for.
Cleetus McFarland ran a car on brake-clean which has really low octane rating so sure anything works if you care about nothing. https://youtu.be/0hYOgGYQ_c8
American big block naturally aspirated engines will be tuned for crap fuel, if you've got a modern efficient turbo engine you should buy premium fuel to not ruin your engine.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1270-dece...
Modern engines will pull back timing and decrease efficiency to prevent breaking down, raising the bar is in everyone's best interest, except the fat and happy Oil companies.
"Degree of coverage of motorised road traffic infrastructure costs: 111%"
Gasoline is regulated both by federal, local, and state laws.
https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/our-work/programs/fuels-enforcment-pr...
https://www.wearethepractitioners.com/index.php/topics/art-a...
Source? As I understand it, co2 sequestration is still in R&D and not viable at scale. We can hit neutral, like a tree does, but that doesn't improve the situation. Like desalination, it sure seems like an easy problem but is not.
I'm sure he knows. He's just tacitly saying cars should be defacto banned for anybody who's not a multimillionaire.
The reason this isn't done is because trying something like that is how you lose elections. So really it's a fantasy about having authoritarian control over everybody else.
I wonder what would be the energy cost of onboard co2 extraction for vehicles? Could there be a theoretical automobile that used a carbon-oxygen cycle fuel but which emitted nothing, where a "gas station" would push fuel into the vehicle and then pull out the stored material that was formerly emissions?
All other index such as PM10 or NO2 are not crazy high either.
They are the only public transportation available.
But from my job search there and anecdotes from mates and the internet opinions, Swiss companies have a highly mandatory in-office culture, plus the cross-border commuters from neighboring countries who drive in and out every day to benefit both from high Swiss wages and also from the cheaper living abroad. Well then no shit Sherlock your air quality goes down the shitter.
So I doubt that the public transportation not being free is what caused the higher pollution in the first place, since people drive by car not because public transportation costs too much money, but because on their commute route, it saves a lot of time despite the extra cost of car ownership (you can make more money but you can't make more time).
To me, it just feels like another way for politicians washing their hands of the elephant in the room: the forced need to commute every day for jobs that don't need it. It seems like the lessons from the pandemic have been quickly forgotten since early to mid 2020 when everyone was locked in their homes had the best air quality we ever experienced, but somehow politicians can't put this 2 and 2 together and go fight made up strawmen instand.
Exactly. On the contrary, the politicians everywhere are pushing for return to office, or at least not promoting WFH. And then some people on HN just complain that private cars are enemies of the public service.
In general free transit is a bad idea - nearly everybody is willing to pay a small fee for transit and what they really want is better service (better service meaning more routes, faster routes, and more frequent - pick as many as possible)
Like if you asked me to help you move a couch and offered me a beer, a beer isn't really a fair trade for the labor value, but I'm being nice and helping, a nice treat makes things a little better.
People in Switzerland might consider other things as the main goal (making the air cleaner), and this could be a simple nudge to change their behaviours. It’s not always monetary competitiveness that shapes behaviour.
However I think you are probably right that it won’t make much difference for a single week, since I think people tend to ignore this cost. Filling up the tank is infrequent enough and part of a routine that imo it doesn’t feel like a marginal cost and feels more like a fixed cost of car ownership
There is also a bigger difference between free and $3 than between $3 and $6. Free means you don't have to buy a ticket, deal with the app or ticket machine, or have an existing public transit card. The "power of free" is worth considering here.
Here, I found some street parking for cars: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Quai+Turrettini/@46.205451...
Alongside a gorgeous canal, with bike lanes there as well as what appears to be a train station a few blocks away, as well as what may be some kind of street car station? I can't imagine a more phenomenal waste of space given the far superior transport options surrounding this area. Go west just a bit and you can see a much more useful use of that space: some greenspace https://maps.app.goo.gl/xmDdqxob4LegGvwt5 (I don't understand why this business' pin is there but so be it).
Go east a bit and see how an entire bridge is wasted on giving cars some complicated spaghetti to let them go either north or west. https://maps.app.goo.gl/GQNMabh7d9cEf7MC7 Instead that entire middle portion could be further bike parking (you can see some is already there) or a wonderful greenspace to enjoy the river as you cross the bridge. Hell, you could probably fit a few food stands there if you really wanted to get jiggy with it.
In the era of the hyperdense city and the perfections we've brought to non-car transportation technologies, it's time to let cars go. They were a bad idea, we can see that now from how they clog our cities, kill our kids, and cause us to choke on their exhaust, let's be done and aggressively remove them!
Edit: more examples, look to the river near here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/45iLSKpVa4kLwuM69 Everyone's view of the river spoiled, and precious space wasted, all so that 28 cars, just 28 cars, can park on the street.
Or, compare this neighborhood: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Xobo9E5jjQU2Pv2f8 to this one: https://maps.app.goo.gl/SAEYTGBqFDZXUkMn9 Note how much more dense, how much more housing and businesses, fit in the former, how much easier it is to walk around and get places. Notice how in the latter, they turn all their space in the pavilions into parking lots , whereas in the former, they use them for gardens and trees. The former is for humans, the latter is for cars, which aren't people! So why do we build a city for them?
I don’t get it - is your comment pro or anti public transportation :)
But it does highlight the fact that we subsidize private transport (our taxes pay for the roads, traffic police, etc.), so why not public transport?
Yes, we as a US society are subsidizing private transport because "it's the American way". Other countries do this too but not to this extent. I'm in my 50s and never even owned a car until I moved back to the US ~7 years ago.
My car, a 2025 Hyundai Kona Electric SEL, weighs 3 800 pounds. Call it 4 000 when carrying one typical person. It has two axles so the axle weight is 2 000 pounds.
Let's call the amount of stress this puts on the road when driving from point A to point B 1 car's worth of stress.
Suppose we need to get 60 people from point A to point B. If we put them in 60 Konas that would result in 60 car's worth of stress.
A bit of Googling suggests that a typical 40-foot transit bus with 60 passengers would weigh around 36 000 pounds and has two axles which gives an axel weight of 18 000 pounds, which is 9 times that of the Kona.
The bus taking 60 people from A to B then will result in 9^4 car's worth of stress, which is a little over 6 500 car's worth of stress. That's a little over 100 times the stress from sending those people in 60 Konas.
There might be some differences due to other factors like tire types and speed, but the weight difference would be the dominant factor.
There are some good arguments for buses, but saving on road maintenance might not be one of them.
BTW, this outsized stress from heavy vehicles is also relevant to the ICE vs electric debate, since EVs usually weigh more than similar sized ICE cars.
For example the ICE version of the Kona is about 500 pounds lighter. The EV version should cause about 70% more stress on the road.
But wait! The ICE version needs gas, and gas is usually delivered to gas stations via tanker trucks. When the stress from that delivery of gas was taken into account it turned out that replacing ICE Konas with EV Konas would be a net reduction in road stress if the tanker truck that brought the gas had to drive more than just a few miles from wherever it gets filled up to the gas station.
I mean, you cant honestly believe 20 cents per gallon covers the 25 trillion in Interstate costs, right?
Or the over 1 trillion dollars in damages in Texas alone due to oil drilling.
Look up what % of infrastructure costs that tax covers wherever it is you live.
Surprised? Now consider that the infrastructure is just a tiny % of the overall cost. What about the whole car and gas supply chains? What about the externalities of burning so much fossil fuel every day? What about the healthcare costs of having to treat natural consequences of sedentary lifestyles? What about the opportunity costs of the loss of life due to the above and simply due to traffic deaths and injuries?
> we subsidize private transport (our taxes pay for the roads, traffic police, etc.)
My point is: this "we" includes all those drivers too. That is, whatever the $$ that gets paid into maintaining the infra, it comes from "we", which include the drivers. And since the non-drivers also need private companies/drivers to move things around, they are also part of the story. They do not subsidize anything.