21–30 of 32 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How dare the hoi polloi confuse "good for the public (everyone)" with "public good"! /s Maybe we should call it "republic good" so is not to enrage the economists.
It is an amenity. Why wouldn't businesses want to move into areas that had such... amenities.
A public service in the public good.
Free transit can discourage even poor people from riding transit as service is what they need: most can afford the fares and so not charging it means you have less money to put into better service. Almost everyone who uses transit would benefit ffrom more routes and more frequent service. Even in cities like Tokyo or Paris where people use transit a lot there are missing services that more money is needed to provide.
> means you have less money to put into better service Not really. It just means you're using taxes instead of fares. The cost doesn't go away. You only get less money for transit if the politicians holding the purse strings are not the ones deciding to make the transit free, which would be indicative of a very broken system. Similarly, if the service is bad, you don't get riders, and you get less in fares. If you're…
Fares + subsidy it not a zero sum game.
> And on top of all of that, there's no positive feedback loop created by charging a fare
Sure, but it isn't a negative loop either. So long as the fares are small of course. People mostly are fine with paying a small fare. So you should charge that small price and get that additional money. You can subside a few riders who are really poor, but for the most part your focus should be on riders who can afford the fare.
More money is needed to build/run more transit. If you are spending money to replace fares that is money you are not spending to build/run more transit.
Free transit can discourage even poor people from riding transit as service is what they need: most can afford the fares and so not charging it means you have less money to put into better service. Almost everyone who uses transit would benefit ffrom more routes and more frequent service. Even in cities like Tokyo or Paris where people use transit a lot there are missing services that more money is needed to provide.
I bet a transit system can save a lot of money by eliminating the overhead costs of fare collection.
Free transit can discourage even poor people from riding transit as service is what they need: most can afford the fares and so not charging it means you have less money to put into better service. Almost everyone who uses transit would benefit ffrom more routes and more frequent service. Even in cities like Tokyo or Paris where people use transit a lot there are missing services that more money is needed to provide.
Your first sentence is wrong. Not charging for service does not necessarily mean less money for investing into better service. It’s possible for government to fund the service well enough that revenue from fares becomes insignificant. In effect, the fares would be paid by all taxpayers instead of just those who use the service. This is similar in concept to how public schools are funded. We don’t charge people at the…
Free transit can discourage even poor people from riding transit as service is what they need: most can afford the fares and so not charging it means you have less money to put into better service. Almost everyone who uses transit would benefit ffrom more routes and more frequent service. Even in cities like Tokyo or Paris where people use transit a lot there are missing services that more money is needed to provide.
>most can afford the fares and so not charging it means you have less money to put into better service. No, you could take the money from somewhere else. You don't have to finance transit by transit fares.
> This isn’t just about semantics It really is. What people mean is "it's for the public good". Write it like that and the premise for the article is gone. EDIT: I want to add that this looks to me like a fallacy that is very common in mathematical circles: appropriate a term that is in common use, give it a formal definition that works for your theory, and then go back to the public and tell them they're using the t…
And, as I explain in another comment [1], I think that transit actually is a "public good" in econ-speak: Not the transit itself for the individual traveller, but the availability of good transit for businesses and communities.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your first sentence is wrong. Not charging for service does not necessarily mean less money for investing into better service. It’s possible for government to fund the service well enough that revenue from fares becomes insignificant. In effect, the fares would be paid by all taxpayers instead of just those who use the service. This is similar in concept to how public schools are funded. We don’t charge people at the…
Nobody is seriously proposing to add enough money to transit systems that they can run a system with such great coverage and frequency that there isn't anyplace more service wold be needed. Until you are funding transit to that levels we should charge fares.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Back in the Slashdot day's we'd call this FUD (Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt.) and move to the next discussion. What happened? Why is this stuff so consistently making it to the front page? Has an Enteral September crept over the online tech community while I was bust living?
Maybe HN can take a page out of that Slashdot history and add some categories to the front page which can be disabled or demoted based on user preferences. Keep the default 2-dimensional list for those not logged in and those who did not edit their preferences so the default experience remains the same - just a flat list. Each item gets a category - start simple with 'Tech', 'Business´, 'Politics', 'Current events' o…
There is zero new revelation here.
There is zero advancement in thought, science, anything.
The only tag we need is tabolid / not tabloid
There are hundreds of news aggregators that are glorified rss readers.
HN is not that, should not be that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe HN can take a page out of that Slashdot history and add some categories to the front page which can be disabled or demoted based on user preferences. Keep the default 2-dimensional list for those not logged in and those who did not edit their preferences so the default experience remains the same - just a flat list. Each item gets a category - start simple with 'Tech', 'Business´, 'Politics', 'Current events' o…
It's noise for the sake of noise. There is zero new revelation here. There is zero advancement in thought, science, anything. The only tag we need is tabolid / not tabloid There are hundreds of news aggregators that are glorified rss readers. HN is not that, should not be that.
HN is what its users make it.
> should not be that.
...which would be solved by something like I mentioned above.
But then there's a law that holds all property owners liable to care for snow removal. Meaning when it snows there's a huge number of small snow sweeping engines scurrying the cities' streets, each plodding through a few meters of sidewalk before this house number and then lift the broom to continue a few hundred meters down the street in front of another building. When it snows a lot, these guys just push the snow aside, onto the bicycle paths.
This procedure means that you can no longer use bicycle paths and pedestrians have to navigate a patchy pattern of perfectly, less perfectly and altogether not at all cleaned paths.
This is so crazy but the craziest thing is that people still have to pay for the meter of roadside in front of the house. They seemingly do not get out of the liability as the road cleaning firms will not assume responsibility, so you have to keep your fingers crossed. Even crazier people seem to assume this is normal. Hell we could just keep all those little private enterprises that do snow removal and just award them with entire blocks so they can work more efficiently.
In other words, make snow removal on sidewalks as much of a public good as is regular cleaning of sidewalks and snow removal on roadways already is for crying out loud.
This sounds easy, right? Turns out it's apparently a delicate, sensitive issue that people get to hotly debate, there will be concerns raised from the concerned, and someone will yell "all that money would be better spent on $my_favorite_thing". Nothing will ever change, except when someone comes up with a Really Stupid Idea like privatizing municipal water and electricity.
So yeah I'm strongly in favor of making public transport a public good. I feel duped by my government in that they were willing to introduce a 9€ monthly ticket last year (for only 3 months alas) and promised to continue that one-time thing somehow. Now there's a 49€ ticket but it's only a yearly subscription with monthly payments through your bank account. In other words, as shitty as all of neoliberal politics, designed by the same people how sold off our water and our electricity providers.