131–140 of 183 posts
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I drive a cheap EV which I charge for free. A marginal mile costs me about 18 cents. On top of that I'm usually traveling to SF to visit friends with my wife. Hard to justify taking the train.
What about car insurance, tolls, wear and tear, potential tickets, etc?
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Note that generally public transportation funding is already <25% covered by fares and so to the extent that you think "paid for by taxpayers" is positive or negative, this doesn't actually have that much impact on that aspect.
Where do you see that 25% number? According to Wikipedia, most systems around the world seem to be >50%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio
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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.
I'm not opposed to gun control & the general idea here, not at all. And I'm more than willing to accept evidence that guns really are a bit of a menace & problem with some real & regular reocurrence on this transit system I use. Certainly there are problems beyond people getting killed, but so far my attempts to dig up real data to show meaningful problems has surfaced nothing (and no one else has pointed to verifiable problems either). So far it feels- to me- that this is barking up the wrong tree. That there isn't strong data portraying a real transit-gun problem; there isn't evidence, and there isn't actually a problem here, and that this is an imposition of concerns that have an incredibly miniscule factor in the reality of this system. I really want to support the questioning of guns, which I broadly disagree with, but right now I really don't see the data nor hear the anecdotes for this being a real/regular concern. These emotions being projected read to me like anti-urban heresay, which I want to believe/take as real, but am not finding evidence of.
Also note so far our metro/subway system has a gun ban. Penalties for fucking with DC metro or DC busses in any moderately significant way is pretty severe, and the city will spend pretty significant effort to track shit down if stuff does go bad, it feels like, from the every couple years drama that makes our local digital rags.
Worth noting of course that the bans & commensurate penalties/enforcement are under semi-regular legal threat, like a recent challenge here (https://dcist.com/story/23/01/04/judge-tosses-out-lawsuit-se...). It feels like it's all gotten especially wild since the latest Supreme Court took the activist position of overturning New York's requirement to have a license to conceal carry. But so far, a number of rulings have kept various DC laws & protections intact.
To you all complaining about free transit, I invite you to actually look the next time you take the bus or metro at the amount of infrastructure dedicated to ticketing, validation and enforcement. I invite you to think about the amount of money spent on it. I invite you to think about the amount of time wasted by people on ticketing. The queues at ticket booths, people spending time researching what pass they want. S…
Over here in Japan, the transit systems are profitable , and there's no trouble with fare collection despite having more ridership than anywhere on the planet thanks to the IC cards normally used for storing money. It doesn't take any time at all to go through the gates with these; even during rush-hour they're not a problem, and it's been this way for many years now. Complaints like yours ring hollow when solutions…
You know Tokyo is the most populated city in the world, right. The solutions in place there will HAVE to be different to anywhere else on the planet.
It's like a Google engineer talking about how some random SaaS's complaints about Heroku or whatever are "hollow, because here at Google we use solution X and it works fine and we have more traffic than anywhere on the planet so obviously solution X is best".
Not saying whatever solution it is you're using isn't good, or couldn't fit in another city. But Japanese customs, payment systems, administrations, densities, and incomes are vastly different to the rest of the world's. The numbers to justify free transit will be very different for you.
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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
I love this idea in theory, but recognize that you are moving the discussion from providing effective, safe, and equitable transportation towards solving homelessness. Both issues are important, but in the context of this article one must ask, "what is best for the majority of public transit users?". It's certainly possible that a $2 rate improves quality or security meaningful ways. The problem of "sketchy homeless…
Sure, but if the objection to "public transport should be free" is "then there will be a bunch of scary homeless people there" shouldn't be "let's charge enough so they can't ride the bus" it should be "hey let's fix that too!"
We can fix two things. More even!
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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…
The biggest bus service where I live doesn’t really enforce fares. I’d say that 95% of people who cause problems on those busses haven’t paid. There are 2 smaller services that do enforce fares, and unsurprisingly they don’t have nearly as many problems.
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Over here in Japan, the transit systems are profitable , and there's no trouble with fare collection despite having more ridership than anywhere on the planet thanks to the IC cards normally used for storing money. It doesn't take any time at all to go through the gates with these; even during rush-hour they're not a problem, and it's been this way for many years now. Complaints like yours ring hollow when solutions…
Things working / not working in one outlier city is not grounds for "complaints like yours ring hollow". You know Tokyo is the most populated city in the world, right. The solutions in place there will HAVE to be different to anywhere else on the planet. It's like a Google engineer talking about how some random SaaS's complaints about Heroku or whatever are "hollow, because here at Google we use solution X and it wor…
Wrong. The laws of physics are not different in other places. The complaint was that it takes too long to collect fares. This is factually untrue, and Japan's system (it uses the same system nationwide) proves this. It's a solved problem. In other places, it can be even better because it's less populated (crowded) than here.
>It's like a Google engineer talking about how some random SaaS's complaints
No, it's really not. It's like someone complaining that encoding WAVs into Oggs is too big a problem, and someone else saying, "no, all you have to do is download libogg and libvorbis and oggtools and use it." The solution is right there, you just need to use it.
>But Japanese customs, payment systems,
The custom of swiping a card to go through a turnstile is too foreign to you?
The card is a stored-value card. You put money on the card, and spend it as you go through the turnstiles. You don't even need a payment system: I charge mine with cash.
Edit: just to add to this, there are other transit systems that use this same technology, such as in China.
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It's FAR more common that in other countries where people aren't allowed to walk around with guns.
I'm saying there are thusfar zero cases in DC that we have any real evidence of, so this "FAR more common" is trying to compare a 0% vs 0% empirical chance. I'm not opposed to gun control & the general idea here, not at all. And I'm more than willing to accept evidence that guns really are a bit of a menace & problem with some real & regular reocurrence on this transit system I use. Certainly there are problems beyon…
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…
Maybe we should think about providing houses for homeless people instead of trying to kick them off public transport then ...