Kansas City is first major city in U.S. to offer no-cost public transportation

I am trying to formulate a theory of wealth in modern society - I think that the vast vast majority of wealth resides in, or useless without, huge reservoirs of public wealth - from aqueducts still supplying Rome after 2000 years to public roads and rail.

The active capitalist stuff going on, is mostly the frothy but as water fills up the reservoir - it the deep water is public, social wealth.

It's a bit nebulous but I think it is worth us asking when is the right time to stop treating something as "frothy capitalism" and needs to be left of the free market and when it is deep water and needs to be just free to all.

Seattle used to have this for an area of the city. It was called the "Free Ride Zone" - and it had some unexpected consequences.

The primary problem is that homeless people would get on the bus because it's warm, and would fall asleep. The busses became rolling homeless shelters.

This caused other people to take the bus less, because of public safety concerns, as well as simple quality-of-life issues like unpleasant smells.

Eventually it was scrapped.

But this issue has been returning as it's now common knowledge that Seattle bus drivers are instructed not to collect fares from anyone that declines to pay.

Well, marginal dollar on road yields greater than marginal dollar to economy. Current political structures in the US means that marginal dollar on passenger rail is absorbed by the agents in charge of ensuring the rail existence. i.e. the $500 million railway and the $1 billion version of (say) the Central Subway will both yield probably the same economic benefit. Rent-seekers know that they can extract a large amount of economic rent because of government propensity to spend and political reasons that require governments to chase sunk costs.

Because of the large amount of roadway in America, the number of parties you can call to get more road built is pretty big (as Thiel says, competition is the enemy of profit). And the primary place you put more road is out where there's nothing. Because of the existence of a large network of roads, you could build roads where there is nothing and it's easy to get to where there's something.

Personally far prefer public transit so I'm pretty interested in ideas that change the structure of the interactions to pursue efficient construction.

Public transit follows the law of utility. Shitty transport cheap or free is used less than expensive but good.

Tfl could hike the fare wuite a bit and after the riots have died down people will use it the same.

And you could make Emirates Air Line free and I doubt it will bump ridership substantially.

Not all of the ROI can be captured with fares.

For example, public transit takes people off the road and keeps commutes for other people reasonable (or at least makes them less bad). Which is why it makes sense for public transit to be subsidized by people working in a region even if they aren’t necessarily using it.

If public transit is good enough, it can even make it so people don’t need to purchase their own cars+gas+insurance, which is a huge cost savings. You can argue that this would be more fairly priced with fares than taxes, but again, cars off the road (less parking infra, less air pollution, etc). Only capturing this value via fares turns this from a global optimization problem for a region into a local optimization problem for each agent

Also some public transit does pretty well with fares anyway. Caltrain covers about 75% of its operating budget with fares (and parking and some other minor income sources).