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Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

reuters.com

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Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#101

Post by bluGill »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #87
ferguess_k wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. Free for the poor people but don't give free stuffs to the other people (including me). Public services are NEVER really free - they take $$ from taxes. Looks like many people simply don't care about taxes.

You either spend the tax money on roads, or on public transit. Roads aren't free either.

Roads are cheaper than transit as far as taxes go. Most of the costs of driving isn't supported by taxes - you buy and maintain your own car (the large share of the costs), and park in private parking lots. Transit not only needs the roads/rails (granted much less), but also needs to buy and maintain all the vehicles plus pay operators for them. The total costs of transit are far less, but the cost to governments is more.

Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#102

Post by IshKebab »

bluGill wrote: post #30
mvieira38 wrote: post #10

Public transportation should always be free in cities, with car commuters paying the operation costs. Not saying it can be implemented right away, but it should be a policy goal for cities. You have all the right in the world to prefer driving and chilling on your air conditioning and stereo if you can afford it, but it shouldn't be free if you're occupying the lane space 10 people would occupy in a bus, and making t…

> Public transportation should always be free in cities, with car commuters paying the operation costs Strongly disagree. There are too many perverse incentives that work against transit. If there are a lot of car commuters (which there will be - plumbers taking their tools to the job for example) they have inventive to pressure politicians to reduce that tax - any voting block will always be more powerful than the d…

If your public transport is so popular that it's becoming infeasible to fund it from car taxes... mission fucking accomplished! That is such a wild and nonsensical fear. "But what if it's too successful?!"

Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#103

Post by IshKebab »

kccqzy wrote: post #45
aqme28 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to comment on if it should be free or not, but public transit and micromobility should always be cheaper than owning+driving a car. Even with NYC's controversial new congestion pricing, it's still cheaper to drive your family to the city than to take them via train.

No it's absolutely not cheaper to drive your family into the city. You said owning+driving a car; did you really take into account ownership costs (maintenance, insurance etc) and driving costs (tolls, parking)? Just the cost of parking alone dwarfs the cost of the train.

Sure but most families need a car anyway, and once you have one the costs of ownership, maintenance, insurance etc. are irrelevant to the costs of individual trips.

Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#104

Post by abeppu »

lupusreal wrote: post #96
jewayne wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to guess that you're a fellow American. That's our answer to everything - build a ghetto. Why make anything nice for everybody when you can make it suck for 79% of us, Hell on Earth for another 20+%, and nice for the privileged few?

Most ghettos aren't built to be ghettos. They were built as nice neighborhoods and have nothing structurally wrong with them, but then had criminals and shitbags wreck the place. Ghettoification can in fact be reversed without any changes to infrastructure by simply having nice people move in who give a shit and make an effort to clean up and maintain their properties. This is derogatorily called "gentrification". Al…

I mean in the US a bunch of them are still the remaining product of redlining policies where racial minorities were allowed to live but banks would not give loans. Housing segregation was planned and enforced. That sounds a lot like intentional creation of a ghetto. And later when cities need to invest in building amenities, or raze neighborhoods to make way for infrastructure, often it's been the minority neighborhoods that are neglected or destroyed respectively. Of _course_ ghettos are the result of planning and intentional policy.

Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#105

Post by svpk »

Switzerland has its act together with public transit as far as I'm aware, so the following doesn't actually apply to them. But something to note is that when trying to increase ridership the two most important things are reduced head times (ie a train shows up every 5 minutes, not every hour) and being consistently on-time. Only after those are sorted should transit look at eliminating fares. As if you eliminate fares first you're cutting into revenue that could be used to reduce head times and increase timeliness.

Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#106

Post by jewayne »

lupusreal wrote: post #96
jewayne wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to guess that you're a fellow American. That's our answer to everything - build a ghetto. Why make anything nice for everybody when you can make it suck for 79% of us, Hell on Earth for another 20+%, and nice for the privileged few?

Most ghettos aren't built to be ghettos. They were built as nice neighborhoods and have nothing structurally wrong with them, but then had criminals and shitbags wreck the place. Ghettoification can in fact be reversed without any changes to infrastructure by simply having nice people move in who give a shit and make an effort to clean up and maintain their properties. This is derogatorily called "gentrification". Al…

The ghetto is that bottom 20% living in Hell, not the 79% who merely deal with things that suck.

Although I was more referring to our systems more broadly (health care, education, transportation - the topic of this post), let's go with neighborhoods. Are you really trying to pretend that red-lining didn't happen? Or that de facto sundown towns didn't exist at least into the 1980s?

Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#107

Post by qcnguy »

IshKebab wrote: post #102
bluGill wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Public transportation should always be free in cities, with car commuters paying the operation costs Strongly disagree. There are too many perverse incentives that work against transit. If there are a lot of car commuters (which there will be - plumbers taking their tools to the job for example) they have inventive to pressure politicians to reduce that tax - any voting block will always be more powerful than the d…

If your public transport is so popular that it's becoming infeasible to fund it from car taxes... mission fucking accomplished! That is such a wild and nonsensical fear. "But what if it's too successful?!"

Eh no, that is an actual failure mode. Germany is experiencing it right now. What it means is everyone ends up being forced to use horribly broken public transport and it screws up everyone's business and personal lives.

It is possible for public transport to be too popular. It looks like overloaded, crowded and constantly broken lines that can't get better because they're starved of funding.

Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#108

Post by qcnguy »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #87
ferguess_k wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. Free for the poor people but don't give free stuffs to the other people (including me). Public services are NEVER really free - they take $$ from taxes. Looks like many people simply don't care about taxes.

You either spend the tax money on roads, or on public transit. Roads aren't free either.

Roads are much cheaper and more useful. They can be used for moving freight whereas good public transport keeps freight off the lines to avoid timetabling problems caused by blockage.

Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#109

Post by qcnguy »

sofixa wrote: post #31
dfxm12 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments do a lot of wildly unpopular things. I can't speak specifically for Switzerland, but one recent example is UK's Online Safety Act 2023. Even related to drivers, speed cameras are enabled despite being unpopular.

Unfortunately, that's not how Switzerland operates, because it's a very direct democracy where the status quo and the will of the majority takes priority over common sense and long term thinking. Full franchise (women being allowed to vote) didn't happen in all cantons until the 1990s (after it being made possible in the 1970s), because the existing voters (men) just voted against it.

That's because women themselves voted against it. Which is actually the history of the female franchise everywhere. The suffragettes were reduced to bombing campaigns because fellow women did not agree that women should be allowed to vote. In the UK it was only WW1 that changed things. Maybe in the UK female franchise would also have been much delayed if not for the huge social upheavals caused by the world wars.

Re: Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike

#110

Post by MangoToupe »

bluGill wrote: post #68
MangoToupe wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your transit operators need to ensure transit doesn't become too popular: the more people taking transit the less cars there are paying that tax. So, raise the tax. When nobody takes cars any more you figure out another way to pay for it. The existence of cars shouldn't come at the cost of public services. Public transit makes the most sense to fund with property taxes proportional to the benefit that public transi…

> Public transit makes the most sense to fund with property taxes proportional to the benefit that public transit brings in. Which is essentially zero in many cities. And even in cities with transit, an expansion should result in a lot more benefit than they are currently getting, but they need that money now not in 10 years after that expansion is done and the city sees that benefit.

> Which is essentially zero in many cities.

??? How does this make any sense at all? You have no basically economy without transit. And you get a far greater return from mass transit than from roads.

> And even in cities with transit, an expansion should result in a lot more benefit than they are currently getting, but they need that money now not in 10 years after that expansion is done and the city sees that benefit.

This is what bonds are for....

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