221–230 of 299 posts
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how do you keep people from just riding the train perpetually?
why would you keep people from doing that? are so many people going to be doing that as to actually cause a problem?
This should be the preferred way to ride all local transit systems. One price for the whole family, ride as much as you want for the month (I think month is better then year - easier to budget, and if you move you are not out as much). If people aren't willing to pay for the pass, your system isn't useful and you need to fix that. Because it is unlimited rides people are less likely to think about using the car for t…
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Tom Scott did a great video on Luxembourg's switch to free public transport. They were already covering 90% of the cost, so upping that to 100% was easy. London's network, on the other hand, gets roughly 50% of its funding from fares. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feCQPD9DSOA
San Francisco city council voted in favor of making public transit free, even Muni was on board. Total cost was something like $20 million a year (city budget is measured in the Billions) to get rid of fares completely, forever. That happened about two months ago. Mayor vetoed it, on the grounds that "it would be too popular and overtax muni's capacity". I'm not sure I buy that, my guess is that the local tour bus/to…
Which honestly is probably the best outcome any way, at least from an environmental and personal health perspective.
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As an American I had always heard that public transportation was super inexpensive in essentially all of Western Europe. Is that not the case generally?
Train travel in the UK is absurdly expensive unless you're willing to book a few months in advance and travel off-peak. Train travel in Spain is much better and cheaper. AFAIK in terms of price it mostly has to do with how much governments are willing to subsidise rail transport.
Sadly when there was a plane option instead - that always tended to be way cheaper (London to Scotland for example).
Personally I'd subsidise it more on less used routes just to push people out of cars more, sadly London commuter routes have kinda hit the wall in capacity ad legacy limitations of the old layout/station platform lengths, rail gauge, bridge heights etc of which much was planned for in an era 100 years ago.
I'm an American who studied abroad in France for a bit a decade ago and did a little traveling around Europe, including to Austria. The Austrian train system was the best by far even without Klimaticket. Specifically, you bought a ticket that entitled you to a set number of kilometers and you could use it any time in the month. Moreover, the trains actually ran on time and customer service was helpful. By comparison,…
> As a parenthetical, when I was planning to fly to Austria from Paris, I put my luggage in a 24-hour locker in Gare du Nord the evening before the early-morning flight, but the room the locker was in was closed from 10pm to 6am and the flight left CDG at 7am, so I was devastated when I had to eat the cost of the flight ticket. I begged the staff to unlock the door for me in my best, most polite French, but they woul…
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As an American I had always heard that public transportation was super inexpensive in essentially all of Western Europe. Is that not the case generally?
700€/year is about 60€/month, which is fairly typical for a regional monthly public transport pass. Considering we pay around 7 USD/gal for fuel (1.6€/l), if your work is more than about 30 car-minutes away it's cheaper to commute by public transit (assuming you park for free). And that's not even considering that you might be able to have fewer cars in the household: just owning the car is a lot more expensive than…
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Ok, so the Austrian version costs less than a third of that for a considerably larger country. And the public transportation system is pretty good in Austria too...
... it's Switzerland. Everything is 3x more expensive and salaries are 4x higher. Just don't travel there.
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I still think it should be cheaper. The rail card thing is just a scheme to overcharge casual riders and tourists. It's reasonable for people who regularly go by train, but for people like me who do just one or two trips a year it feels like a rip-off. Especially if I want to take my kids, I need to get a different rail card for families, and when you add it all up it's a lot more expensive than taking my car. For so…
I have a family of 6, and with that it's almost always going to be cheaper to drive than to take any other form of transportation. Before kids, the math was very different.
There'll be various reasons why a large family can't take a train, but drastically fewer reasons why a person or a commuter travelling alone cannot (or, a group of friends, or a couple, etc.)
Maybe one day that'll change again, but at least now it helps reduce the amount of pointless traffic on the road.
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If you go that far, why stop there? What's the reason to have all the expenses and effort of fare collection if you're only going to collect fares from the occasional users of the system and not the daily users? If you're going to make it free for all residents, you might as well just make it free for everyone.
I like this idea better than most local government UBI proposals. E.g., instead of suggesting UBI in NYC just make the trains free. It's not straight currency but it's unlimited transportation on high capacity, environmentally nice(r) systems. Then people can argue over who can make the experience nicer vs who is going to raise the fares. Ridership-wise, many heavy users already have unlimited cards. (Still, however,…
Next stop: Just make public transport free for all reasonably permanent residents (for example, you could get a free ticket for next year when you file your taxes). Anyone who rides public transport instead of expensive and polluting cars is doing a service for the environment.