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

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

#51

Post by bobthepanda »

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…

Or, you could use the tax money that you could use for free rides (that only makes bad service marginally more useful) and put it towards more useful service? It's not as if this money came out of a box labeled "only for free fares." Right now this is a $9M opportunity cost, annually. To get both the free fares and $9M of better transit would double the cost of this, but then you'd have to ask why not use all $18M on better transit, etc.

Making a service that isn't usable most of the day free still makes it unusable for most of the day.

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

#52

Post by dsfyu404ed »

lacker wrote: post #12

Unfortunately, I think this is a step backwards. According to the US Census, about 1% of commuters in Kansas City use public transportation. https://censusreporter.org/profiles/31000US28140-kansas-city... It's hardly "public" transportation at all, if it's only useful to 1% of residents. If public transportation is going to make any impact on the lives of Kansas City residents, it first has to be providing a useful s…

1% of commuters is not the same thing 1% of trips.

For a less dense city like KC you can't really expect many commuters to use buses unless the city is carpet bombed with bus lines since the low density makes car ownership not suck (there's probably free parking at your job) and buses suck more (the bus is less likely to go where you need it). Bus lines do however generally do a good job going to places like schools, grocery stores, senior centers, etc, etc, and all sorts of places demographics other than "commuters" want to go.

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

#53

Post by proc0 »

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…

It's so infuriating to see big cities completely incapable of dealing with homeless people as if they are delicate creatures that can't be touched, and then have the majority of people ignore them even though they are assholes that make a scene every single time. Most of these people act that way because no one has taught them any better and therefore they have no incentive to act otherwise.

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

#54

Post by runarberg »

milkytron wrote: post #26
mrep wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think what the original commenter meant was that people get upset because they don't want to subsidize transit systems, and would rather have them break even or turn a profit. What a lot of those same people don't understand, is that taxes pay for the road systems. The people that understand public transit realize that it's hard to recover the costs without assistance (taxes).

I think exactly that happened in the last Washington state election. The state legislator put on the ballot a measure that would limit the amount the state could tax each car owner. Proponents would claim that the tax was going towards public transit infrastructure (like Sound Transit 3) and that it was unfair to tax car owners for that.

The measure was approved.

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

#55

Post by clairity »

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.

it's true that public transportation has a net societal benefit, and that portion of the benefit should be paid for by all (through taxes or whatnot). however, fares shouldn't be zero.

riders should pay too, not just because we should bear our portion of the direct benefit (we should), but also because it gives us a sense of ownership for the system. those fare revenues give transit agencies funds to improve service, and riders legitimacy in demanding better service. public transit needs to get better in every dimension: frequency, timeliness, coverage, capacity, cleanliness, etc.

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

#56

Post by rayiner »

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…

> Transit investment has a LOT of catching up to do to even get close to the types of subsidizing and handouts we give drivers in every corner of this country.

That’s completely untrue. Yes we spend more on vehicles than transit. But way more people drive than use transit. There is not even a comparison.

In 2016 federal and state spending on road, transit, and water infrastructure was $416 billion: https://www.bidnet.com/resources/business-insights/us-govern.... Water is about 1/3 of that, leaving $276 billion for transportation. Spending on transit was $65 billion, or 1/4 the transportation spend.

Transit, however, accounts for just 5% of commutes: https://www.bts.gov/content/commute-mode-share-2015. 85% is driving alone or in a car pool. So we spend 3x as much on road infrastructure, but 17x as many people drive to work as take transit.

If you run the numbers on a cents of subsidy per passenger mile basis, busses and subway trains come out to $0.50+ per passenger mile. Roads are just $0.02 per passenger mile. Even adding in CO2 footprint and pollution (assuming that cars are all ICE) puts you at about $0.25.

Transit is incredibly expensive.

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

#58

Post by ksec »

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…

Arh, is this why why people in US hate public transport and prefer to drive themselves or go by taxi?

For those of us living in the "outside" world where public transport are the norm, it is sometimes hard to understand why public transport is treated so differently in US.

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

#59

Post by troydavis »

runarberg wrote: post #48
acchow wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That statement is the equivalent of inserting “just” into technical advice, as in “It’s just code” or “Just scale out.” If it was that simple, the problem would have been solved.

Here’s the laundry list of things Seattle has tried and is trying: https://www.seattle.gov/homelessness, https://www.seattle.gov/homelessness/addressing-the-crisis

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

#60

Post by reaperducer »

edmundsauto wrote: post #36
reaperducer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If public transportation is going to make any impact on the lives of Kansas City residents, it first has to be providing a useful service to them. Why does that have to be "first?" Why not make it free, and also make it useful? If the goal is to increase ridership, making the rides free lowers the barrier for people in transit-served areas. Then you can subsequently or simultaneously expand it. It makes no sense to k…

What if making it free makes it less useful to most people? There's another comment talking about how they became rolling homeless shelters when they went to free, and use dropped because of hygiene issues.

I've seen people speculate about homeless use of transit as a deterrent to ridership, but I've never seen any actual numbers on that, and I think it's mostly overblown.

Either way, homeless people making homes on transit isn't a transportation issue, it's a law enforcement/social services issue.

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