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D.C. free bus bill becomes law as zero-fare transit systems take off

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Re: D.C. free bus bill becomes law as zero-fare transit systems take off

#111

Post by Broken_Hippo »

acomjean wrote: post #12
0xB31B1B wrote: post #5

Free transit is stupid. When surveyed, the huge majority (98%) of weekday transit riders say they want increased service over decreased prices. Everyone wants 10 minute or less headways. People will pay 3 dollars for a bus ride if the line has 10 minute headways or less and signal priority, but they won't take the bus if its stuck in traffic and has 30 minute headways. The reality is that transit funding for free tra…

I went to umass amherst which had a free bus system which I used regularly. It was pretty great, you didn’t have to think about it. Also without having to make sure fairs paid up people could get on from the middle of the bus instead of just the front door which seemed to speed the boarding process. I work in the longwood area of Boston. There are private bus routes that make up for the lack of good public transit fo…

Also without having to make sure fairs paid up people could get on from the middle of the bus instead of just the front door which seemed to speed the boarding process

This is just a rule they've made: You can have both fares and boarding at any door in the bus. I know this because this is how the busses in Trondheim, Norway are. You can't always pay on the bus, so everyone has their ticket before they get on. They have spot checks by folks that aren't bus drivers. Does it cause some folks to risk not buying a ticket? Yes, but it is obviously not worth doing more checks.

Re: D.C. free bus bill becomes law as zero-fare transit systems take off

#112

Post by dools »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #103
dools wrote: post #92

By enforcing a "user pays" model on public transport, we are requiring that the most disadvantaged support their own transport system, which they use to get around to go to jobs to support the wealthy. Meanwhile, the richest people, who are benefitting from the availability and mobility of labour, can afford to move around in luxury vehicles (sometimes driven by others). This is a negative feedback loop which renders…

Like the car tax idea, but free attracts the destitute and mentally ill. Offer the working poor and looking a transit pass instead.

If free attracts the "destitute and mentally ill", then probably we should be:

1) Not allowing anyone to be destitute and;

2) Also providing free and comprehensive mental health care

Re: D.C. free bus bill becomes law as zero-fare transit systems take off

#113

Post by Broken_Hippo »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #103
dools wrote: post #92

By enforcing a "user pays" model on public transport, we are requiring that the most disadvantaged support their own transport system, which they use to get around to go to jobs to support the wealthy. Meanwhile, the richest people, who are benefitting from the availability and mobility of labour, can afford to move around in luxury vehicles (sometimes driven by others). This is a negative feedback loop which renders…

Like the car tax idea, but free attracts the destitute and mentally ill. Offer the working poor and looking a transit pass instead.

Oh, no, poor people might share the bus with me. Wouldn't want poor or mentally ill folks to do things like get to a doctors appointment, buy food, or visit family if they can't get there invisibly. /s.

Now is when I'd like to remind you that you share spaces with mentally ill folks every single day and you don't notice a thing: A lot of destitute folks are disable and being destitute shouldn't mean that you have to have a lonely and hard life. And I'd also like to mention that you can both be destitute and have a job. You can be mentally ill and have a job.

Re: D.C. free bus bill becomes law as zero-fare transit systems take off

#114

Post by siruncledrew »

As someone who has ridden the DC bus before (mostly when the Metro broke), "free" meets the mark on the only price I'd pay to use it again.

Aside from the other stuff you can probably picture, it's slow AF and takes longer to move between popular spots than drudging through traffic in a car or Uber.

Now making the Metro free... that would pique people's interest.

Re: D.C. free bus bill becomes law as zero-fare transit systems take off

#115

Post by midoridensha »

rektide wrote: post #102
aquarium87 wrote: post #63

I knew a woman in DC who was late for work because a guy tried to get on the bus, was denied entry because he couldnt/wouldn't pay, and so he pulled out a gun and shot the bus driver dead. She wasn't even phased. This was about 15 years ago. Proof of fare is better than having transit employees be the enforcers. Free is even better, theoretically. But be wary, transit in DC may turn into moving homeless encampment as…

With apologies & respect, this is not anything near a common occurrence in DC. http://google.com/search?q=dc+bus+driver+death There are very very few incidents of bus drivers dying in DC. I would highly recommend not taking this fear-instilling anecdote as a real sign of what is. I'm not saying to disregard this account, give it the benefit of a doubt, but it also is very new, and has had a pretty contentious first s…

It's FAR more common that in other countries where people aren't allowed to walk around with guns.

Re: D.C. free bus bill becomes law as zero-fare transit systems take off

#116

Post by incone123 »

arcticbull wrote: post #88
woodruffw wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did you get that from? WMATA’s farebox recovery ratio is 24%, as of 2020[1]. Edit: And from a quick look, that’s high for the US. The average seems closer to 10-15%. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio

fwiw, Caltrain's farebox recovery rate going into COVID was among the highest in the US at around 73%. Bart around 72%. WMATA was about 33%. Muni is among the lowest at 23%. [1] I agree farebox recovery rate is not something to optimize for. Public services don't lose money, they cost money. Nobody talks about how much the army loses. However. The choice was between (a) eliminating the $666M farebox recovery and taki…

The average spend on a new car per year is not the same thing as what the 'average American' actually buys. Lots of people keep the same car for many years, or buy used, or even don't have a car.

Re: D.C. free bus bill becomes law as zero-fare transit systems take off

#117

Post by arcticbull »

incone123 wrote: post #116
arcticbull wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fwiw, Caltrain's farebox recovery rate going into COVID was among the highest in the US at around 73%. Bart around 72%. WMATA was about 33%. Muni is among the lowest at 23%. [1] I agree farebox recovery rate is not something to optimize for. Public services don't lose money, they cost money. Nobody talks about how much the army loses. However. The choice was between (a) eliminating the $666M farebox recovery and taki…

The average spend on a new car per year is not the same thing as what the 'average American' actually buys. Lots of people keep the same car for many years, or buy used, or even don't have a car.

Used cars cost roughly what new cars cost still, interest rates are higher than ever - insurance, gas, maintenance, car payments, parking, tickets, tolls, registration, license, etc, etc, it adds up really fast. Since it's so diffuse people aren't as sensitive. Not to mention with a used car w/o warranty you're on the hook for the whole cost if something goes wrong.

Of course there will be outliers, but owning a car is a massive money sinkhole and a disproportionate burden on the poor.

The average car insurance payment alone is $136 (and significantly more for those with 'bad credit' - i.e. the poor). Gas is another $150-200 per month. That's almost $4000 per year right there.

The average monthly transit pass in the US is $83. [1, 2]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/990891/us-average-monthl...

[2] https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/insurance/how-much-is-car...

Re: D.C. free bus bill becomes law as zero-fare transit systems take off

#118

Post by wahern »

arcticbull wrote: post #105
wahern wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fuel tax is complicated by the fact that poorer families tend to live further away from work and thus drive more, both because housing is cheaper the further away from a city you get, but also because non-skilled labor doesn't aggregate along transit corridors the same way it does for office workers. So a low fuel tax is in effect a subsidy to the poor, notwithstanding that it also benefits corporations which maintai…

> Public transit can be a remedy, but outside Manhattan I don't think any locale in the U.S. has remotely the density to make it truly viable at scale for the poor and working classes. Chicken and egg. Density is built along transit because transit supports dense houses. Build transit, get density. Fail to build transit, get sprawl.

> Build transit, get density.

Building transit does not guarantee you get density. There are regulatory hurdles at play. In California, for example, cities will often be forced to up-zone the immediate couple of blocks around a station, but then everything else beyond that remains zoned for single-family housing, or at least zoned for far less density than the market could support.

Moreover, there's a time gap between when housing is built and when it becomes economically accessible lower down the income ladder. New housing is expensive, even absent regulatory hurdles, and affordability mandates can't magically change financial viability. New housing can have immediate effects on housing costs, but indirectly on the costs of older housing; and on a regional scale it takes awhile to incentivize people at the periphery to move inward.

Long-story short, to get from the current equilibrium to a more optimal equilibrium requires careful, coordinated policy management across decades. We could and should start, but we live in an age where if people don't see results in 6 weeks, they complain; and even when there are results, they still complain. They complain, vote people out, and vote in new people that promise more immediate results, but invariably can't deliver meaningful results.[1] I mean, this is how democracy has always worked, but the public reactions are far more compressed, while the necessary time spans for effective change are no shorter than they were before.

[1] Case in point: rather than improving public transit, the popular panacea du jure is free fares. Free fares will not improve public transit in any way shape or form; if anything, they'll hasten its degradation. They'll make it cheaper for some, but for the most part not those at the bottom of the ladder, who already enjoy free transit. These gimmicks are popular because they're immediate.

Re: D.C. free bus bill becomes law as zero-fare transit systems take off

#119

Post by Xylakant »

sien wrote: post #82
loeg wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The farebox recovery ratio in many western nations are not enough to ever fully fund public transport. True, with emphasis on fully . > In many cases, the systems to collect fares end up costing hundreds of millions of dollars. That figure seems extremely high for "many cases," but the exact figure isn't really material. > These costs are never made back. It makes sense to make it free. No, that's just not true. My…

For people interested - Farebox Recovery Ratios around the world : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio In many parts of the developed world the ratio is 30% plus which can be an enormous amount of money. In Boston fare revenue is 500M . Making things free would cause big issues for many of them as you say.

The calculation is not that simple, though. One expected effect is less car rides, which would require less car infrastructure and maintenance. That would also result in significant savings, car infrastructure is expensive.

Re: D.C. free bus bill becomes law as zero-fare transit systems take off

#120

Post by pugworthy »

What gets me about the comments is that some of you who are the most negative are in big cities. Us little town folks with free bus service? We just don't have those negatives and we don't necessarily have the same negative opinions of it.

At least if you are going to call it bad, preface your opinion with what your reality is, and acknowledge your reality isn't necessarily universal.

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