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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

I would expect better of the Economist, but the buses would be fully tax-payer and advertising subsidized and most definitely not free.

[edit: added advertising]

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The article clearly used the term "free" to mean "zero fare." This is a strawman criticism.

No, a straw man is when you construct an easy target to shoot down. This commenter is simply the title for its improper (or possibly vague) use of the word free.

That's like saying commenting on YCombinator is not free because the hosting is paid for by someone.

YCombinator clearly believes paying for the servers and bandwidth is beneficial. Commenting is not free, its just paid for by someone else. The buses are already paid for (in part) by taxpayers. So, neither is free. Someone pays.

That is the meaning of the word "free", though: no charge for the exchange. A store gives a "free sample" of cheese, for example, when they offer pieces of cheese to customers without charging them. The Dropbox "free tier" gives you a certain amount of storage space "for free", i.e. without you having to pay a fee. It does not imply that the cheese or the storage space materialized out of thin air without using anyone's resources.

Funding through advertising is fallacious.

As a case study: Transport for London have a very thorough advertising suite on buses and underground trains (and others).

Advertising and rent contribute £179m revenue. Ticket sales contribute £3533m revenue. Government grants contribute £3438m revenue.

So, a full suite of advertising may save almost 5% on ticket prices, as it stands.

Figures taken from TfL annual report 2012, relevant figures start page 36: http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/investorrelations/...

I didn't say (or think) is was significant, but it seems to be something a lot of public buses use.

Nitpicking, and you didn't read the article, either.

Yes, I read the article. I am just very sick of the concept of "free" being used when it puts an additional burden on everyone. The problem with collecting money is not unique to buses. Many businesses are struggling with higher fees and collection costs.

The government is a paid service of the tax payer, no more holy than paying someone to mow your lawn. The sooner we realize the retroact of free is an illusion, the better. We need to pay for the infrastructure.

With a tight enough definition, nothing is free, since it's always someone or something that spent resources creating the "thing" or service. And hence the word "free" can be erased from the dictionary.

You're the only one who seems to have a problem with realizing that your taxes pay for government services. Everyone else has figured out that free in this case means you don't either plop some change in a box when you get on or are not buying a monthly pass.

> You're the only one who seems to have a problem with realizing that your taxes pay for government services.

Them and the entirety of the Libertarian and Tea Parties, not to mention whatever Anarchists still exist.

No. They have a problem with the taxes and the services, but they don't have a problem with realizing that taxes pay for services the way protomyth here seems to.

I know taxes pay for services. That is my point. The services must be paid for. You can have the people using the service pay for them, have an alternate revenue stream (e.g. advertising), or have them subsidized by other tax payers. There is no free.

You were bitching about the use of the word 'free city-provided service' as if people didn't realize that meant 'tax-based'. There is no reason to do that. It's arguing that a term everyone already understands is misleading. Just treat it like an idiom or something and stop being a distraction from the actual topic of discussion.

The article's last paragraph mentions bridge & tunnel fares and congestion charges as a suggested way of making up the lost revenue.

> The government is a paid service of the tax payer

Government (including, inter alia, the provision of public transit) is a paid service to the tax payer, but that's not the service we are talking about. We're talking about delivering transit rides to commuters, which is currently also in most places a paid service to the commuter, and the suggestion is to change it to a free service to the commuter. (Largely on the basis that making transit rides a paid service to the commuter is undermining the goal of government provision of public transit as a paid service to the taxpayer by discouraging utilization.)

Much of the proposed funding would come from polluting cars and trucks pay for externalities and this fee would go to ensure mass transit has zero fare.

Taking the money from cars and trucks also takes it from infrastructure. We need that money put back into bridges and roads before more things collapse.

I currently pay a $15 round trip toll for bridges I use in the NYC area. The bridges cost a fraction of that to operate and maintain. The remainder of the toll goes to support public transit in the city. So you are right: TINSTAAFL.

Tolls should go away as well. Everyone in the economy benefits from transportation whether you're on the road or not (people on the road the personal reasons are a fraction of those on the road for business ones.) That plus toll roads hurt local economies everywhere by suppressing the ability for people to start businesses off exits, and giving monopoly to businesses running inside rest stops. I'm sure everyone has driven on roads that become toll roads only to quickly notice the death of all residence and businesses along these roads.

>Everyone in the economy benefits from transportation whether you're on the road or not //

It's more complex than that. If you take journeys that aren't necessary or use transportation in otherwise inefficient manners - ship flowers from halfway around the world in an aeroplane for example - then that's to everyone's detriment as it wastes non-renewable resources.

Everyone benefits from transportation to some extent but that certainly doesn't mean that encouraging more of it increases the benefit.

In places like Manhattan as described above one wants to incentivize people to take the very efficient mass transit over using vehicles because of the traffic as well as the air pollution. The tolls help to do this.

In theory perhaps, but in practice, no. The tolls are used to protect politicians from the backlash of public transit fare hikes.

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