161–170 of 236 posts
Why not make it just free for everybody? Public transportation typically has profit margins of -50% to -90% anyway... just take it to -100% and get a huge boost in ridership! (And probably save some expenses relating to collecting payment/enforcement.)
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> The alternative to a boost in ridership is a boost in car commutes. Or walking... Do you walk a quarter mile or do you ride the bus? If the bus is free the number of able bodied people using the bus for trivial distances could increase.
You walk. Riding a bus means you have to wait for one first. A 5 minute walk isn't worth the wait unless there are extra conditions (no walkways, ice on the walkways, heat wave...).
Above a certain frequency buses become extremely unreliable and dwell times start impacting travel time because bus stops only have so much room. With trains you have more room to work with, but once you run out the marginal cost of building new lines runs in the hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars.
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Your numbers are from the city of Paris. Most people riding in the metro during working rush hours are not from the city of Paris, but from the suburb. The suburb population in 1921 was 4.8 M in 1921 and 12.2 M in 2010. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Paris#Historic...
The RER was created in the 60s for this purpose and continually expanded since, no?
The government is currently investing $25B in building more relief capacity, but who knows how much investment you’d need to handle the unlimited travel demand caused by a free fare.
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There is absolutely no "shortcut" for cities to skimp on having sufficient transit infrastructure to get people where they need to go. If you underbuild, people drive cars. If you overcharge, people drive cars. If you restrict car traffic, people simply don't move or work in your city and your economy dies. One way to balance between free ride abuse and people not using the trains because they have a car is to give r…
> most of the US government is designed to self-sabotage things like publicly run transit anyway What level of US government is sabotaging transit? The federal government doles out at least $2.3B every year for transit projects[0], meanwhile state and local governments throughout the US are approving tax increases for more transit. [0]: https://www.transit.dot.gov/funding/grant-programs/capital-i...
That's about a fifth of what just Paris spends per year. For a 300-million inhabitants country, it seems a bit low.
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must be nice to live in a country that's not even have half the size of Washington state and has a smaller population than one county (King, to be specific, has more than two million if I remember) in it.
I truly do not see why that matters. For the most part, such things are just an excuse to avoid installing a public robust transportation system. Yes, the amount of people you have, size of area, and terrain makes different sorts of stresses on your system - which is why they need to be somewhat customized to an area. Businesses do this all the time, and I don't see how it is too big of a hurdle to overcome.
Guangzhou had to pull the plug on free transit during the 2010 Asian Games because queue times for the metro increased by half an hour just to get into the station, let alone board a train. What’s the use of a free train if you can’t board it?
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Usually the alternative is that the money from building rent is just going into the pocket of some real estate company. So it’s kinda like a big tax on real estate companies (which sounds like a hell of a good policy to me. Rent seekers and all that)
Then just tax that. Effectively giving public transport the ability to collect taxes in small pockets of your land around public transport stations seems like an odd way to go about it. You could similarly run the police at a profit instead of being a cost center by gifting 100 hectares around every police station to the police, and have them collect rent on it. That doesn't make sense either. For one, it creates a p…
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When I was in Lille several years ago, you were supposed to buy a ticket but it really wasn't enforced at all. The ticket machines were to the side of the train entry, and there were no turnstiles or anything like that. My first time I got on without even realizing I was supposed to pay.
This is the norm for nearly every form of transit in Switzerland and Germany, among a few other countries. I use buses and trams daily as well as urban trains and seem to be checked every 1-2 months, on average. It works partly because the fines are relatively significant and levels of public trust and integrity are likely more universal, so there are few "Schwarzfahrers" (fare dodgers, literally "black travelers").
In Prague (Czech Republic), public transport is completely free for people under 11 and above 70 :)
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> The alternative to a boost in ridership is a boost in car commutes. Or walking... Do you walk a quarter mile or do you ride the bus? If the bus is free the number of able bodied people using the bus for trivial distances could increase.
You walk. Riding a bus means you have to wait for one first. A 5 minute walk isn't worth the wait unless there are extra conditions (no walkways, ice on the walkways, heat wave...).