Why only public traffic commuters pay if all benefit from the fact that they are not on the street crawling in 1.5 tonne of steel each?
Fares also act as a congestion control mechanism. Higher rush-hour and central prices push information into the rest of the market.
Also, cars are not the only alternative to public transport. In central London where I work, cars face congestion charges that normally exceed the cost of a day ticket on public transport (if a single occupant). But bicycles and motorcycles are not charged, since they don't create congestion in the same way. Bicycles are cheaper than public transport, and governments have an incentive to encourage their use, since they hopefully have health benefits too - reducing healthcare costs.
Motorcycles can be cheaper than public transport too, but the calculation is much more complicated, owing to depreciation, maintenance, increased risk, increased fun factor, etc. A scooter is my personal choice.
That isn't a problem with public transport, it's a problem with social services.
Without accounting, we can't tell where to divert resources to maintain or improve the equipment. It's also not possible to limit the use of the equipment beyond its stress limits without using money. Trains in particular require additional staff to handle high passenger loads. Some passenger trains are not set up to handle high traffic loads. Charging money limits the ridership to the people who want/need to use the train more than others. It also limits ridership of likely bad actors who will do things like key the windows or spray graffiti in the tunnels or on the trains themselves.
>Why would city spend significant resources to discourage usage of public transport?
Because then they would otherwise need to rely entirely upon the political process to maintain needed funding to the system, and there would be other spill-over impacts to the quality of the rail network.
>Do they really prefer for the people to buy cars and stand in traffic for hours on overcrowded streets and subsequently be disgruntled and pressure local governments for more roads?
I'm unfamiliar with road policy in Sweden. I imagine that the fares are paid through taxes on gasoline, tickets for driving violations, licensing fees for commercial vehicles, and other fees. The two transportation methods are not completely interchangeable. You can't run heavy freight on a passenger rail line. It's a bit easier to have shared freight and passenger traffic a highway. Expanding rail coverage to other regions is much more capital intensive than expanding road coverage, and much more challenging to estimate (see: the underutilized light rail projects all over the United States).
In a magical world of infinite resources and immortal human beings and infinite time, then there would be no reason to charge fees on anything. Because we live in a finite world of finite time and resources, we use money as a measurement tool to make better decisions with how we allocate our resources.
>Why only public traffic commuters pay if all benefit from the fact that they are not on the street crawling in 1.5 tonne of steel each?
Not all benefit at all times to the same degree. Also, it is probably also partially funded by taxes. That people are rebelling probably indicates other problems with the system outside the scope of the article.
Trains of course do require additional staff to handle higher loads, as do all modes of transportation, but with trains the staff/passenger ratio is ridiculously low, and it gets lower as they are used more. Of course there's a resource allocation problem there, but again, fares don't seem to be very useful there, at least in the realm of local public transport.
Charging money does limit the ridership, which was GP's point, and which is the opposite of what sensible minds would want, namely less cars on the roads. Vandalising trains carries with it much harsher penalties than free-riding, so I doubt fares are a very effective deterrent; you don't need to pay a fare to spray a tunnel wall, just a disregard for the law and maybe your own safety. Other people you might describe as bad actors might be affected by fares, but I'd hold that if homeless people have no better recourse than abusing trains, you might want to solve that problem instead of making it less publicly visible.
That depends on the system: many do track the routes purchased and use it to optimize scheduling (and that includes some systems with monthly riders). It's not the same as in a private sector system in which there are no public subsidies but it does make it easier to allocate the resources more efficiently.
So I could either spend roughly $5 on the metro, or $20 in gas (plus a long ass commute and gridlock wait time). For what you get, most metro costs ARE planned to be at a significant advantage to most people.
In the UK people over 65 now receive a Senior Citizen card that permits them free use of public transport. The respective local governments pay a subsidy to the transport operators when each card is used.
Anecdotally, the result is that people take public transport for 'something to do'. Going 120 miles on the cross-border train to Dublin because it is warm and they are bored at home ( they stay on the train when it turns-around ). Catching the bus down into town to post a letter, instead of using the postal box at the end of their street.
I have been on buses to my work where I am literally the only passenger paying and I have had to stand on the journey, even at peak rush-hours.
On that basis I think that if public transport were made totally free for everyone it would also become unusable for everyone. Unfortunate as it is, paying is the only mechanism to control demand.
It might be worth sending an email to your LA and local bus company to get information about their rules. (Let them know what bus route you use).
It would be nice if drivers were allowed to use a bit of discretion, but paying customers need to be actively encouraged to use public transport.
EDIT: forgot to say that the cards are sometimes given to people with a disability. So in theory it's possible for a bus full of non-paying passengers are using their cards to travel to work. I'm not sure if that is worse or better.
If this is an extremely common problem (as you seem to say it is), it points to a deep underlying social problem. Most senior citizens I know are pretty well immersed in their own lives; which include those of their children and grandchildren.