Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

citylab.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 401 posts

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

#41

Post by justinmk »

yegle wrote: post #30

The small town of my alma mater is entirely built around the university. There's school bus serves everyone in the town (not limited to student, no validation required), and is basically no-cost public transit. I suspect this applies to many other college towns across US.

Indeed. "No price signal[1]" is very different from "no cost". It will cost plenty. Any service priced at zero simply has no back-pressure mechanism to respond to demand, nor to forecast demand, nor to measure demand in relation to alternative transportation options.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem

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

#42

Post by acchow »

noobermin wrote: post #33
nostromo wrote: post #23

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…

That is essentially treating the symptoms, not the cause.

Right. So of course we're supposed to solve homelessness. Know how this can be accomplished in Seattle?

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

#43

Post by JoshTriplett »

mrep wrote: post #17
matchbok wrote: post #2

Great to see. Our tax money subsidizes car ownership (quite massively) already, glad to see some equity here. Everyone kicks and screams about transit systems "paying for themselves" but nobody asks the same of huge highways in the middle of nowhere.

> Everyone kicks and screams about transit systems "paying for themselves" If you mean paying for themselves with fares, then no, as most public transportation does not cover the costs with just fares [0]. For example, I'm in Seattle currently and the fares only cover 20-40% of costs [1]. Not that I am complaining as I take the bus to work everyday, but it's not a slam dunk case of invest more because it has a positi…

Interestingly, in some cases the amount of subsidy required may go down by eliminating fares and the associated collection and ticketing infrastructure. (That doesn't account for changes in ridership level. On the other hand, it also doesn't account for speeding up pickup times by not worrying about fare collection.)

On balance, it's likely more efficient to pay for public transit via approaches like taxes on businesses served by that transit (who will get increased business).

At this point, I don't think fares serve much of a revenue function; they serve as a filtering function, excluding people who can't afford them, and as a PR function, making transit get more votes.

Also, I have a lot of sympathy for "should we subsidize this or not" arguments, but any such argument also needs to take into account how much we subsidize roads. Gas taxes and registration fees don't fully cover the costs of roads, any more than transit fares fully cover the costs of transit.

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

#44

Post by huebomont »

baddox wrote: post #7
huebomont wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is there's no additional investment into the system to make it attractive to riders. The KC transit system is poorly designed and making it free isn't going to make it good. Better to keep charging the fare and use the revenue to improve service, then reevaluate when ridership is growing. Transit investment has a LOT of catching up to do to even get close to the types of subsidizing and handouts we give d…

> The problem is there's no additional investment into the system to make it attractive to riders. It seems to me that public transit probably follows the law of demand fairly strongly, and reducing the price will almost certainly make it more attractive to riders. Of course this won't fix all problems with public transit, and I don't think that's the goal. It sounds like the goal is to increase ridership (and specif…

Better and more frequent service is the number one ridership driver. Free transit is a nice perk but there's some convincing argument and survey data indicating that most people aren't avoiding transit because of the price, but because of perceived lack of utility or reliability.

(And yes, obviously continue to use tax revenue as well, just like we charge tolls for some roads but that doesn't pay for all their upkeep.)

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

#45

Post by huebomont »

baddox wrote: post #39
bobthepanda wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is whether or not $9M annually would be better off making more useful transit. As it stands, very little of KC is covered by frequent transit throughout the day, and in fact much of it is covered by services that don't run the entire day. https://ridekc.org/assets/uploads/route-maps/SystemMap.pdf A free bus that runs every hour is still going to screw you over if you mistime your walk to the bus stop and…

But the point is to offer rides for free and use other money (presumably tax money) to maintain (and hopefully invest in more) infrastructure. I don't see how the current quality of the KC infrastructure is relevant: if it's bad, then they clearly the $9m in fare revenue isn't cutting it, and they already need tax revenue to make it better. If they can't or don't get the tax revenue they need, then that's definitely…

You leave out the possibility that they could run much better service with the money they have and they need to plan better. I don't know if that's the case here, but it's always the first thing to ask. Too many poorly run transit systems skip right over that to dumping more money into a poorly planned system and wonder why it doesnt work.

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

#46

Post by danans »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #21

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…

> 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.

Even privately held capital is underpinned by public, social "wealth" in the form of a system of property rights and the means to arbitrate those.

Society, as manifested in government and the courts, is protecting all our claims to ownership of property with the threat of force. If it stops doing that, the value of much of our property/capital will plummet quickly.

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

#47

Post by huebomont »

bobthepanda wrote: post #5
huebomont wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is there's no additional investment into the system to make it attractive to riders. The KC transit system is poorly designed and making it free isn't going to make it good. Better to keep charging the fare and use the revenue to improve service, then reevaluate when ridership is growing. Transit investment has a LOT of catching up to do to even get close to the types of subsidizing and handouts we give d…

Past experience shows generally that things like tolling or road pricing only become politically palatable if an alternative with existing capacity already exists. But funding such alternatives is hard and usually road pricing is proposed in part for the funding. So it's a very chicken vs egg situation.

It's not a hard chicken/egg situation though - put money into making transit a viable alternative for these roads, then start charging for the roads when there's another option. We don't think twice about spending billions eternally digging up and reconfiguring our highways, so we could do the same to transit, for much more bang for the buck.

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

#48

Post by runarberg »

acchow wrote: post #42
noobermin wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is essentially treating the symptoms, not the cause.

Right. So of course we're supposed to solve homelessness. Know how this can be accomplished in Seattle?

You don’t need to solve it. But there are numerous tried and proven ways of significantly reducing homelessness. We could start by evaluating and employing some of these.

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

#49

Post by CuriousSkeptic »

acchow wrote: post #42
noobermin wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is essentially treating the symptoms, not the cause.

Right. So of course we're supposed to solve homelessness. Know how this can be accomplished in Seattle?

You don’t need to solve all of homelessness, just providing something competitive with a bus could be a start one would think.

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

#50

Post by dsfyu404ed »

huebomont wrote: post #3
matchbok wrote: post #2

Great to see. Our tax money subsidizes car ownership (quite massively) already, glad to see some equity here. Everyone kicks and screams about transit systems "paying for themselves" but nobody asks the same of huge highways in the middle of nowhere.

The problem is there's no additional investment into the system to make it attractive to riders. The KC transit system is poorly designed and making it free isn't going to make it good. Better to keep charging the fare and use the revenue to improve service, then reevaluate when ridership is growing. Transit investment has a LOT of catching up to do to even get close to the types of subsidizing and handouts we give d…

Being free makes it a hell of a lot more attractive to a lot of people.
Post reply on HN