If you don’t have public transportation that I feel safe having a 10-year-old ride on unaccompanied by an adult then you do not have public transportation. You have a very expensive drug addict shelter on wheels/rails.
The area clinics were participating in this, because they could procure "Reduced Fare" passes that they would distribute to mentally ill patients, and we could get unlimited transit rides all month long, as long as we were still checking in, on the regular, with our case managers. Our providers would ensure that they qualified us for the "Reduced Fare" program.
After a while, the bus stops became camping grounds for street people who didn't ride. And the trains became camping grounds for people who needed to sleep. Literally, early in the morning, I would board the train and see people zonked out, with pillows, blankets, the whole bit.
Then a campaign began to clean up behavior aboard the transit system. Riders would need a destination, and fares were checked, and people were booted if they hadn't paid fares. So the vehicles themselves became quite sparse, and safer, and smelled better. But oh, the bus stops again. Everyone camped with impunity at the bus stops, and for paying passengers, it was intimidating just to beg for one place to sit down.
The transit system is undeniably safe. I am sure that 10-year-olds can ride unaccompanied. Any violence or fights, those seem to be between gangstas or people who know one another already, not just random outbursts.
Thankfully, too, they open up centers where people can chill, and get drinks of water and use the bathroom, which is honestly preferable to riding buses on false pretenses.
In 18 years, I’ve literally never ever seen an inspector giving a stiffer penalty than that!
I also think this is relatively orthogonal to cost; cost is nice because it helps keep the people you don't want in the train (crazy people with knives, people smoking weed in the train, people who yell at everyone on the train and make them feel unsafe, etc.), but it's also important to create at least a small barrier so that people don't 'waste' the transit system! In general, when things are completely free, they will be taken advantage of; even a very small tax / friction helps stop this. If the subway is completely free, there's no reason to not just sit on it all day (taking up space and making it worse for everyone). I think subsidizing the subway is net beneficial given that we subsidize cars and things already with road upkeep and such, but free is not what you want.
The only point I was trying to make here was that cost isn't the reason public transit doesn't work in American cities, and making public transit free will in fact make it worse rather than better. I want good public transit too, don't worry!
What an escalation. If I don’t feel safe having a 10 year old drive a car is that just a drug addict shelter on wheels?
I live in Montpellier France and all transit has become free 2 years ago. I didn't notice any change in people's behavior at all. Transit is also free in Talinn IIRC and I wonder if they saw something there?
Then you'll ask for receipts of what they pay to use the roads and they'll be out.
Regarding free transit, I think part of the reason it can fail is the socioeconomic situation. In places that rewards the rich and abandon the less fortunate, it's deemed to fail.
But also, I think that when people have to pay to use transit, they'll be less willing to act as a warden, so if they see someone doing something negative, they'll keep out, thinking that it's the responsibility of whoever is taking their money. Meanwhile, when we see public transit as a common good, we are more willing to act to keep it great.
The maintenance cost graph is very eye-opening.
You know what I think helps? Treating people like grown-ups
Treating these people like adults would be best, but I’ll take getting them off of public transportation first.
https://x.com/SFBART/status/2020952977180328184
https://growsf.org/news/2026-02-12-bart-fare-gates-10-millio...
Sometimes you see trains with graffiti on one side and a stern duct-taped paper notice offering a reward for turning in whoever drew the graffiti to the police. Which is retarded, it's just paint. They seem to have stopped doing those notices now.
If you think graffiti is vandalism I don't care. If they were smashing the windows then it actually matters.
- open drug use (literally smoking crack on the bus) - screaming threat of violence to everyone one around - purposefully urinating or defecating on the seats. - literally lighting things on fire - deliberately smashing glass at bus stops (somehow very endemic in SF)
I do think graffiti is a public notice of: “this is a place you can treat poorly and behave terribly in with no consequence”
Some graffiti I think is quite artistic and a sincere cultural contribution, but most on the sides of buses are more of the bathroom stall variety.
Just as importantly, you need to stop arresting people who aren't doing those things. Otherwise there's no differential and no reason not to do them.
> I do think graffiti is a public notice of: “this is a place you can treat poorly and behave terribly in with no consequence”
I think that's only true in authoritarian regimes. The kind of place where all crimes are considered fatally bad, resulting in no differential. Otherwise, if there's graffiti but no feces on the sidewalk, it signals that you can paint graffiti, but you can't defecate on the sidewalk. You see the difference?
In fact, most cities can operate just fine without barrier-esque fare gates. However, when you are trying to pull a city out of a societal doom loop, you need to do what you can when you can.
I think it would blow your mind if you knew the types of crimes a criminal can commit and be released.
The US does over incarcerate on average. There is clearly a problem there! The solution is not abdicating prosecution and the rule of law to make up for it in “progressive” cities.
Taking the Iryna Zarutska case as an extreme example, I don’t think anyone would argue that the killer should have been on that train. He should have been imprisoned/involuntarily committed a long time ago.
It is not progressive or empathetic to allow predators to with severe mental or drug issues with long histories of violence to repeatedly prey on a specific community regardless of the national incarceration rate.
Having people who come across as crazy or violent on public transportation makes the average citizen vote for the very policies that produce over incarceration (or defund public transportation) because they look around and their lived experience is that there are not enough police or bad people in jail and that the taxpayer dollars are wasted on public transportation because it becomes a cesspool of crime and drug use.
If you want to lower incarceration and you want people to use public transportation, it must be clean and orderly and socially sustainable.
Not maintaining existing public transportation and making it dirty, difficult or dangerous to use is what prevents the construction of more. Voters vote against throwing more money into what seems like a lost cause or at least something they wouldn’t use if they had any other option. In the US any class besides the lowest classes typically does so they avoid public transportation and use cars and so it gets worse.
The transportation must be somewhat appealing to the middle class in order for it to be scalable and sustainable from a tax-policy perspective.
I am very pro public transportation! Would love it if ours and the rider behavior on it was held to the same standard as Amsterdam.
Free transit is a downward cycle, where increased ridership just increases costs, creating a negative flywheel.
The positive "flywheel effect" where transport connectivity enables network effects does exist, but it does not follow that free public transport leads to negative effects.
The 17 year old dodging fares becomes the 34 year old doing the same.
The percentage of fare dodgers who aren't pieces of shit in other parts of their life is zero.