Maybe buses should be free

I see a lot of people in this thread state unjustified assumptions as if they are proven facts. I'll try and comment on a few of these, judging from my experience with how things transpired here.

* This will make it a shelter for the homeless *

There have always been homeless people on the busses, and I didn't notice a markedly increase. The fact that you still need a legitimate ID card and a fare card might help this point.

* This will multiply users of the buses, and lead to frustration and long queue lines *

Utilisation of public transportation increased by 15% since becoming free. I noticed somewhat more people, but nothing annoyingly so. On the other hand, the main goal as I could see was to get cars off the road. A drop in traffic of 14% was observed.

Because this is a low-wage country, the €12 million in lost revenue this cost is quite low in absolute terms, compared to what it would be in more western, bigger cities, but it's still a large chunk of money relative to GDP here. Due to the requirement that you need to be a resident of this city, 10000 more people have "migrated" to Tallinn from other cities, now paying taxes here, and adding a predicted €9 million in tax revenue for Tallinn.

Personally I love it of course. I use it in ways that others might deem "uneconomically" i.e. take the tram for 2 stops instead of walking 15 minutes, but I also notice I travel further distance more often, exploring the city, because I don't feel annoyed with having to either find parking space, or pay a taxi, or pay a bus fare.

Busses became makeshift homeless shelters, which probably ended up driving away actual commuters.

Seattle also bought fancy self-cleaning toilets many years ago in order to give tourists a place to go and to reduce public urination by the homeless.

They ended up selling those toilets on eBay a few years later because the toilets had become a place for addicts to shoot up and for prostitutes to take their customers.

Free is probably a bad idea...

The good news is locally the bus service is approx 75% subsidized anyway, so they'd only "lose" 25% of revenue but the substantial gain of no more cash handling etc would help.

The other problem is you can tell the author lives in California. Where I live, the weather outdoors is at least somewhat foul about 10 months out of the year, so they would become rolling homeless shelters at least 10 months out of the year, maybe more by habit. That leads to even more expensive systems for what amounts to loitering ticketing, enforcement of no sleeping on the bus, etc.

The problem is this might even lead to politically sensitive ideas, like having enough homeless shelters to hold our homeless, or even having mental health treatment so our nuts are not just tossed out on the street as human debris until they die, instead we might try actually treating them. The criminal justice-industrial system would protest at the lack of revenue. It would be a little disruptive.

The central question is two-fold: How much of a shift would result from a given decrease in price? And how do we relate the (primarily:) monetary cost of making it free-to-ride with the (primarily:) non-monetary benefits of any given shift? The result of this question could give you an answer if making it free would be worthwhile.

Some thoughts:

I think decreasing the price per ride from e.g. 1 USD to 0 USD would make for a bigger shift in uptake than decreasing it from 2 USD to 1 USD. Not having to think about whether each single tour is worth the price of admission makes it a viable default way of getting around. This is just the usual flat rate argument that also applies to things like internet usage.

Making public transport free would invariably result not just in a shift towards it from other modes of transportation, it would also lead to an overall increase in mobility, which in terms of some resources reduced the gains in efficiency.

There's a valid argument that the efficiency of public transport is highly dependant on the amount of utilization: big buses and trains carrying single digit amounts of passengers can use up more energy than individual transportation. An increase in overall uptake would tend to reduce such problems since you'd get a small bus load full of people in cases where you'd have only a few now.

Obviously, free to ride public transportation is a particularly huge potential improvement for people who otherwise could not afford to get around. And since mobility is such an important part of life in modern society (minus us nerds who manage to leave the house only once per week), free-to-ride public transport has a massive impact in terms of social equalization.

In SF, BART is pay-per-ride throughout the system, while MUNI is proof-of-payment in many locations. One thing that I've noticed is that there are significantly more homeless people on MUNI than on BART. As a rider, this negatively influences my experience and desire to ride (mostly because of potential for screaming/attacking).

Especially if public transportation is free, I can imagine that the homeless would take shelter there in case of inclement weather. Not a huge issue in SF, but comes into play in other cities.

I can see how this would be an implementational detail, but I don't think that should be the primary argument.

It's a radical old theory (from 1956), which is still ignored by most of the people who talk about economics. It states, in HN terms, that economic systems can have local optima; and that if the global optimum can't be reached then doing stupid things can actually be smart.

In theory a free market is best. But if a market can't be made completely free (for whatever reason) then making the market freer may actually make things worse, because you're moving away from the local optimal point into a trough.

When you consider any aspect of the system, you can make it more like a free market, or less like a free market. Maybe the internet libertarians are usually right, when they say "make it more like a free market". Or maybe real systems have been optimised towards that local optimum point, then driven away from it by free market advice, and the internet libertarians are usually wrong. But I don't think there's a hard and fast rule.

Whatever the case, imperfect economic systems are a little bit complicated, and there's not always a simple answer.

So it's not a free market. Cities subsidise buses. They subsidise cars. Payments for buses are so annoying that they may outweigh the amount of money changing hands. Unions want to protect their turf. Poor people like buses, while rich people like cars. And buses are much more useful when they are full. Its complicated, so figuring out what the locally optimal solution is isn't really easy.

Maintaining a bus and subway system is extremely expensive in terms of resources, both in terms of equipment expenses, salaries (for employees who could be providing other benefits to society instead of operating a bus) fuel, and use of land.

There is no 100% certainty that buses/subways are more efficient than cars. Luckily however, we have a way to tell which is more efficient: The free market! The free market is not perfect, but it is likely that a person who pays a fare to ride a bus is getting significant value from that bus ride, and if the fare CAN COVER THE EXPENSES of running the buses, then we can be confident that buses are an efficient mode of transportation.

If you just make the buses free, people may take more roundabout trips to get to where they need to go, just to be able to make use of the free bus, causing inefficiency and waste. Or, it may cause people to take more inefficient taxi trips (because the bus doesn't take them to their precise destination like a personal car would) or they may do a million other things that are damaging to the environment and wasteful (like eating out more because they can take free bus trips to restaurants.) These scenarios may sound silly, but the fact is that removing price signals from public transportation is a terrible idea because it can have a multitude of unexpected consequences.

If you read this post and think I'm crazy and say to yourself "What an idiot, cars are obviously guaranteed to be less efficient than buses" I would argue you don't understand how incentives behave in a complex system.

If you think cars are so horrible, you should work to stop subsidies to oil companies so that gas prices reflect the true cost of energy. But in my view there is absolutely no way making public buses free is going to make cities more efficient and/or help the environment.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm not saying we should get rid of all public transport subsidies (this is a harder argument to make, I'm not sure where I stand on it.) I'm just saying we shouldn't make them 100% free because price signals are valuable.

As my friend told it, the proposal was made internally inside Capital Metro (the transit agency; my friend was on some kind of committee) and the response from higher up was very simple: not gonna happen, not ever, and please don't ever mention this in public unless you really want to hurt the future of bus transit in this city. The symbolism of fares, he was told, is very important in two ways. First, the public image of bus riders is that they are people who aren't willing or capable of taking care of themselves (why don't they have a car?) The symbolism of giving somebody something for nothing is very different from making them pay to ride. Bus fare is a symbolic way of teaching them that they have to work for what they get, and they can't freeload off of other people. If we're forced to take care of them, we can at least make them play-act like they're responsible people paying their own way, and the lesson might sink in eventually. Second, people tend to incorrectly assume that the operating expenses of the bus system are covered by fares. Many people hate buses and hate the complicated urban society they represent, and the more of those people who became aware that buses run largely on their tax dollars, the harder it is for city bus programs to get the money and political support they need. Charging fares makes it easy for them to make the wrong assumption and prevents them from becoming vocal enemies of public transit.

Those attitudes are from 10-20 years ago, and one hopes they have changed since then. The idea seems fundamentally sound, so I imagine it will keep resurfacing until pragmatism overcomes the bias and stereotypes surrounding mass transit.

[1] As you can see here, passenger fares cover only a small fraction of expenses: http://www.capmetro.org/transparency/

I like the idea of pushing the costs more onto the community as a whole, not just users. Make it kind of like most school systems: everyone pays through taxes whether or not they have kids or if they send their kids to private school.

(for those thinking that I would waste the time anyway, I would counter that time not spent working is time spent with my wife and son, or learning, or sleeping, and I'd much, much rather do those things than be in a bus.)

I live in Los Angeles.

"A lot of money" is awfully vague. Especially for a publication called The Economist.

Turns out farebox revenue is 41% of the MTA's operating revenue. That is indeed a lot of money to be giving up. Here is a breakdown, via http://www.mta.info/mta/budget/pdf/Adopted_Budget_Feb_Financ...

  Operating revenue, 2013, projected
  -Farebox revenue 41%
  -Dedicated taxes 35%
  -Toll revenue 12%
  -State and local subsidies 7%

So dropping fares will cost about $4.7 billion after accounting for fare collection savings but before accounting for any extra costs associated with increased ridership (35% of 13.5b). The total NYC city budget is about $69 billion, in comparison(http://www.nyc.gov/html/omb/downloads/pdf/fp6_12.pdf), so maybe it's possible, but I'd hate to be the financial planner asked to come up with ways to cover the shortfall.

The very first issue is regulatory. Because the addition of passangers does present a real cost to bus companies, no tracking device on how many passengers it has has difficulties from a regulatory standpoint. This may sound silly, but its a reality of life, such as when you give a free trial product to people owning a creditcard.

Currently, buses in buenos aires are ridicolously cheaper than cars, yet by culture, people really love buying cars. An hour's parking lot fee in the center of the city costs more than a week of bus fare. Making it free would not be a change of paradigm.

Buses are packed, and so are trains and subways. If subsidizing increased not only to cover fares, but to improve infrastructure and service, you are also servicing people with cars, making those more interesting. (less traffic -> also better to go around in cars).

Although this could help a lot, i dont think its a paradigm shift unless people with cars are paying the public transportation.

But that of course, present the other challenges, which is, what about people not having public transportation coverage from one point to another, and how would you administer such a route in a way that you dont charge him penalties.

I honestly believe that in big cities, cars are an expensive hinderance. Using a cab every single time you go out is still cheaper than buying one.

In my home town for instance the local operator regularly cancelled buses without notification, ran late all the time and repeatedly made hugely over the top above-inflation/fuel price fluctuation price rises every year. On more than one occasion they cancelled last buses stranding people.

The company would cheat the monitoring of punctuality by having buses wait at certain points along the route (notably the points at which punctuality measures were made) for sometimes 10 - 15 minutes, whereas wherever you actually wanted to catch a bus from you'd often be left waiting 20-30 minutes for a bus to turn up.

The bottom line is, if you want to live there + have any kind of quality of life, you have to own + run a car. Full stop. This is pretty well true for anywhere outside of London (not sure about other major cities, however.)

A lot of the issue is the monopolistic nature of any bus service, and the lack of teeth of the government regulator. Personally I think it ought to be run as a public service with some means of ensuring quality (ok so that's a tough problem :) or at least improve the regulator's ability to fine companies that fail to provide a decent service + have some oversight over (already subsidised!) fares.

For NYC, it has been estimated that every car driving in lower Manhattan incurs ... goddammit I can't find a reference so I'm going with memory here ... at least ~$3 in social costs due to increased pollution, congestion, road wear, etc.. That's in addition to the costs paid by the driver (car depreciation, gas, insurance, opportunity costs, etc.). If that memory is really true, then subsidizing transit to eliminate these social costs ends up being a huge net win!

If we want people to do something, we should subsidize it and (in the case of transit) make it free[1]. If we don't want people to do something, we should tax it (Pigouvian taxes FTW!).

[1] - Transit will never be as fast as driving due to the extra stops and walk required at either end, so we need to keep it free to minimise the total cost of fare + extra_time_wasted*salary, which corresponds to opportunity cost to riders. Riders whose total cost is too high will not ride, and riding transit is a social good (or is at least much less of a social bad then driving).

While not collecting fares would decrease the stop times, it isn't going to get anywhere near what I would need to ride the bus more often.

To go about 7.5 miles on one bus in San Francisco (basically from the bay to the ocean) takes 56 minutes on a bus. There are marathon runners who can literally run the route and arrive nearly 20 minutes before the bus!

The light rail is considerably better at 42 minutes for roughly the same route (the more your trip is underground, the more it makes sense to take). In fact, the only time I take public transit is when heading downtown in the subway since it is actually fast.

The same trip takes 28 minutes in a car (less if you know where the timed lights are).

Now, if we had Personal Rapid Transit* instead of buses, then at least the comfort level and speed might be high enough for me to switch over.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit

The thing that has stopped me from ever reaching that point is not the cost of public transit, but the long term reliability. When I buy a house or rent an apartment, I need to be able to base that decision partly on the mass transit options, and then rely on those options not changing out from under me--no bean counter deciding that the bus that comes by my house does not have enough riders and canceling it. That bus needs to keep running, even if it has few riders. Even if it is often completely empty. Bean counting has to be done at the level of the complete system, not the individual bus line.

From their site: "annual revenue will fall $75 million short of what is necessary to maintain current service after temporary funding runs out in mid-2014" http://www.kingcounty.gov/transportation/kcdot/Future.aspx

Serious changes would have to occur for something like completely free public transit to become a reality.

However, you can use pricing to discourage paying to the driver. Where I live (belgium) I can pay 2 euro per ride to the driver, or 80 euro for unlimited travel during a whole year (partially subsidized by my employer, which they're legally required to do), or any of a range of payment options in between. Paying cash to the driver is so much more expensive than the alternatives that almost nobody does it.

Even right now, I feel like a major problem with buses is that they really don't need or even want customers. Customers are a liability. Fares don't cover expenses. Political capital is useful, but indirect, and bus systems have lost most customers that might provide political capital.

My bus system isn't particularly bad. The drivers are okay, but mostly they just don't want any trouble. The bureaucracy has smoothed out certain edges. The buses are clean. But the crowded bus lines stay crowded, until they get further out then they become empty and useless. Lines don't evolve, they aren't adjusted, there's no attempt to maximize ridership. They can't experiment with pricing; really they can't do much of anything without approval from a political structure that doesn't much care about buses. Customers don't fit into any equation.

Oh, and did I mention they are slow? Buses are so terribly painfully incredible slow that only people who place very little value in their own time can justify being on a bus. Door-to-door times on a bus range from 2x a car to 6x, often walking speed, almost never faster than biking. But as time goes on the buses just get slower.

Making buses free maybe could help. It might draw customers who actually have a way of effecting positive operational change through the political process. It might diversify the ridership in a way that positively effects social standards of civility on buses. I certainly wouldn't fight it, but it's a long shot.

In fact this has been tried numerous (perhaps hundreds) of times, both in the past and ongoing(2,3). You would think that the pluses and minuses would be well understood by now. Why is it so hard for transportation systems to learn from each other?

(1) - http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-transformation-of-urban-lif...

(2) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_public_transport#List_of_t...

(3) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_public_transport_r...

I'm certain people can come up with ideas, but usually when I hear these sorts of discussions, it's not from those who rely on public transportation. I think the answers would be different if those having discussions had their licenses revoked until a decision was made :-)

Wouldn't this more sedentary life have a significant negative impact on public health? Studies seem to show that an additional 150-299 minutes of walking each week (20-40 minutes a day) can increase lifespan by 3.5 years [1].

[1] http://www.gizmag.com/physical-activity-live-longer/24972/

If your area has a service where buses are coming in every 15 minutes at least, then there's a benefit to it. I live good sized city in the Seattle area, and to get to my work, 20 minute commute becomes 90 minute commute.

Particularly in the Seattle area, what making whole issues nasty is that the lack of transit backbone -- the problem is that are people commuting between the city of Seattle and neighboring city often separated by the lake.

I don't know if this is the case for other cities, but as far as my observation goes, making buses free doesn't solve much problem at least where I live.

Compiegne is also a fairly rich middle-sized town, so the cases are different, but it's just to give an example of a place where it was successfully implemented.

A tax system could simply charge employers based on the commutes of all employees and offer free to board public transit. Then it could stop allowing commute expense to be deducted in the covered areas..

I find tolls to be a little backward since virtually everyone traveling during the max capacity times can deduct them, while leasure travelers can not.

The problem is the homeless; I tend to avoid most Muni buses for reasons including the population of homeless/crazy who seem to live on them already. If you could figure out a way to avoid becoming mobile homeless shelters, I'd be happy to increase vehicle registration or (property?) taxes to pay for free mass transit in some areas.

Another advantage that I did not see mentioned: The pricing systems are often complicated (how long you can ride, how far, are you allowed to change etc.). With a flat fee more people would be encouraged to just take public transport without needing to comprehend a complicated pricing system.

There's got to be a better way. Especially considering I pay 4 digits in taxes every year to the city.

My conclusion is that, though I like the idea of free buses, there should at least be a token fee to discourage people taking a ride for the roof.

But the reasoning is that the bus system is a complete taxpayer money think, and the fare collection system is just adding more drag than easing the bill. It's not sure it's always the case, like sometimes the collected fares pays a bit more than the collection system. There is no hope in paying the whole system with fares in a medium size city tho, it's always money coming from somewhere else (mostly taxes).

A large share of my time at the grocery store is spent scanning and paying for the groceries too.

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