Comment by relix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by relix | Hacker News Reader

I live in a city where this has recently been implemented. In Tallinn, population 400K, public transportation is free since January 2013, for all residents (not tourists or people living in other cities). You need to have a valid ID and a valid RFID card that is connected with your ID.

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.

My anectodal observation is that these types of social programs tend to be much better received in countries other than the US. In the US, we're all raised on the idea of earning everything you get, and dependence on government is equivalent to surrendering freedom. We're also such a large and culturally diverse place that doesn't have a very long history compared to many counties, so there is more of a sense of "take what's yours" than "we're all in this together". This is a cultural bias which is hard ingrained in people (despite the clearly flawed fundamentals). Consequently, the same benevolent social programs that enjoy successes elsewhere tend to do poorly here.

Thank you for providing this real world feedback. (I am not fond of hot air type remarks but often I do not quite know how to sort the wheat from the chafe.)

Great story. Did the increase in tax revenue offset the loss of fare revenue?

No: -12 million + 9 million = -3 million.

What's the dollar value of getting 14% of the city's cars off the roads?

That would be difficult to compute, but probably less than you might figure. A 15% increase in bus ridership is going to increase either bus weight or bus frequency, and a bus is harder on the road than a passenger car. Not 15% harder, of course, but not 0% harder either.

yes, but a person in the bus weighs (person's weight) but a person in a car weighs (person's weight)+(weight of the car) which is about 10 times more. And since road damage is proportional to (at least) the 4th power [1] of weight you get 10.000 times less damage from person travelling by bus. And that doesn't even count the worse effects - pollution, parking places, streets necessary for the cars to get to downtown, ...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_axle_weight_rating

If wear is really weight to the 4th power, than buses are horrible ideas.

A 20 ton bus starts out 160,000 times worse than a 1 ton car.

If you get 13.3 people off the road, and people weigh 150 pounds, then you have taken off 13.3 units of car wear, but added 34,000 units of bus-wear (going from 20-to-the-4th to 21-to-the-4th).

If the argument is "reduce road wear" and damage is proportional to weight to the 4th power, you want lots and lots of smaller units over bigger units.

EDIT: I did some more math. Assuming a very light 5-ton bus, adding a 90-pound person to it is the same road wear as adding a 2.18 ton vehicle to the road. O(n^4) is nasty.

Yes, wear really is to the 4th power, and yread got his conclusion exactly backward.

(Someone once evoked it like this: Would you rather have 300 1lb kittens walk on you, or one 300lb human?)

But the wear is per tire, not per vehicle. So you have to divide the bus weight by the ratio of number of wheels compared to a car.

Weren't we talking about an almost empty bus with fare versus almost full bus without fare? Of course buses damage road much more than cars, just look at an asphalt bus stop - sometimes it looks like tracks in the mud (that's why they are sometimes made with concrete surface)

They would for sure end up havingb to add more buses.

The wear is per axle, not per wheel.

It looks like the conclusion was read exactly right. A car with 2000lbs per axle will put sixteen times more wear on the road than one with 1000lbs.

Added to the fact that wear is per tire, it's also per time, thus any vehicle causes more wear when waiting or moving at very small speeds in a congestion.

And the wear increases again at very high speeds, for unrelated reasons.

It's even harder than that to compute, if you're trying to estimate the net value to the city, because you have to account for further effects beyond road wear and tear.

Like increased pedestrian traffic to shops, thus increasing tax revenue. Or less land dedicated to parking.

Yeah, but a single bus is the equivalent of many cars.

http://www.copenhagenize.com/2012/02/street-cars-named-desir...

Most of the cost of traffic congestion isn't in road wear, it's in lost productivity to those stuck in it.

No, on top of that, it's probable that a lot of these people were already living in Tallinn, yet registered elsewhere, or are still living in a nearby city, and just registered with a relative/friend with an address in Tallinn. I'm not sure which would be the case more often, but depending on that it might be a positive or negative for the cities.

Also, the 15% increase in public transportation would probably demand more busses/trams to be run. There should be some extra marginal costs.

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