Buses should not be "free" | Hacker News Reader

Buses should not be "free"

mleverything.substack.com

4 pointsbko10 comments

    > "Prices are information"
    > "Is a particular route lightly used? Is it overcrowded?"

There are plenty of ways to evaluate that without charging a fee. You can track utilisation without needing to charge for it.

There's also a qualitative vs quantitive element to it. Only one person uses the bus each day? Eliminate the bus route. Oh, that person is a student who uses the bus to travel to college, and without the bus they would have to drop out of schooling.

The equation isn't necessarily "Is the bus worth a $1.50 bus fare for one person", but rather, is the bus generating a much greater future value by ensuring a student can get to college?

> There are plenty of ways to evaluate that without charging a fee. You can track utilisation without needing to charge for it.

The point is that utilization is dramatically different when something is "free". Many times the marginal user values it just above 0, and having that person on reduces the value for everyone else. Charging something, anything, weeds out the very marginal people you don't want using the service. Same concept with emails. If we had a marginal fee to send emails (fraction of a cent) it would love spam pretty much overnight. Things shouldn't be "free".

That student in your example would gladly pay as he has no other options.

> Things shouldn't be "free"

More good reasons to hate this government.

    > "people you don't want using the service"

That's a subjective evaluation, which doesn't have a clear criteria.

There's also the adjacent phenomenon that when you have a bus that operates, say, every twenty minutes per day which is already inconvenient not least because of inevitable delays and the occasional early bus (meaning your average passenger will wait at least 15min just to make sure they don't miss the ride), and you then start to streamline efficiency by cancelling the worst-performing trips, now you have a schedule people can't easily memorize which is another hassle. As an effect, because transporting passengers is not exactly like herding cattle, people will try to find other means to do the commute, so thinning out your service will likely reduce ridership on all the other tours, too.

> When public buses charge fares, private operators and alternative transportation services can compete. If they can move people more efficiently or cheaply, that is valuable information.

> When buses are “free,” competition evaporates. No private operator can compete with zero. You lock the system into a permanent political funding battle.

Well, they can - maybe the free buses have bad stops because allegedly nobody can evaluate whether they're good or not. Maybe to someone, a $3 van ride is worth more than the free bus ride.

This is sort of inconsistent, and I don't really understand why the assault-theory even rated a mention.

Agreed.

> You lock the system into a permanent political funding battle

Which is the way that things are tending to evolve into in much of Europe because after decades of touting and mandating "private-public partnerships" and mandatory "open-market" policies, now communes and cities find it difficult or impossible to maintain their municipality-based and owned utilities, including gas, water, electricity and public transportation, because they get basically forced to sell to the lowest bidder. In electricity, that's frequently simply the biggest and baddest competitor like Vattenfall or RWE, replacing century-old locally-owned operators that have had very good track records across two world wars and generations of consumers, operators that never had ANY need of being replaced, except for neo-liberal demagogues and improved opportunities of syphoning off profits from the public into already rich private pockets. It's just stealing made legal.

I suppose at the margin they can compete. But there's also a lot of uncertainty when adding a single route can wipe out your entire business. Also private services often pick off the most profitable opportunities leaving the leftovers most undesirable services to the public option. Consider student debt. If you're going to Harvard MBA or Yale law school, there are private options like Sofi that will give you a rate better than federal loans, and that serves as a selection bias and leaves the worst highest risk loans that no private lender would fund to be backed by the government.

Or another example: Google Analytics. It's awful service in many ways, but because they're free and can afford to be free, they captured 80-90% of web analytics. I would not want to compete with GA.

The real problem with "free" is its emotional appeal to idealists who should never be allowed near transit policy, nor transit system management.

This is 90% BS. People from the US should not be allowed to comment on public transport on the internet. They are traumatized by whatever is considered normal in the US but hardly anywhere else. As a monthly card holder from Europe I can tell you my life has improved from before when I payed per ride. I am fortunate to be able to afford the price of the monthly card, so in effect for me this feels almost like zero fare. The article argues that the price is valuable as a signal, but of course that completely ignores that transport providers can at any time count riderships if they want to, and they also have to because a ticket sold tells you only so much about the passengers' routes. When you buy a ticket from the driver of Line A and then use that ticket when you change to Line B, where does the price signal get picked up for Line B? But then in the US we can maybe safely assume that where there is any public transport at all you probably cannot buy a ticket that covers your journey across more than 1 line. It is also possible that you can cover more than a single line but you have to announce your destination, which is also horribly inconvenient for both the driver and the passengers. Now each halt turns into a small plane-boarding procedure, and although the passengers has maybe bought a ticket to the city center to go shopping, they still don't have the freedom to get around without having to pay again. The solution are time-based tickets that give you one or a few hours or the entire day, but now, again, that cherished price signal is more or less gone in that case. The entire ticket-price-as-signal idea is a moron's idea of how public transport can and does work in many parts of the world. Well, outside the US anyways.

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