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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

#31

Post by ravel-bar-foo »

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…

> The reality is that transit funding for free transit is zero sum

This is not necessarily true. If reducing fares increases ridership it may allow a strong case to be made for increasing the system funding.

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

#32

Post by woodruffw »

raldi wrote: post #30
woodruffw wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is in conflict with public transit in many European cities, which is (1) free or nominally priced, (2) has favorable headways compared to nearly every US city, and (3) is more sustainably funded than public transit in the US. I frankly wouldn’t mind paying more for public transit, but making it the crux feels roughly analogous to corporate ”greenwashing”: push the responsibility onto individuals and we can conve…

First make it good, then make it free.

There’s no intrinsic ordering here: making a public transit system better requires justification through ridership numbers, and making your system free is a fantastic way to improve those numbers.

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

#33

Post by CuriousCosmic »

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…

Worth noting that university transit systems are very much not free. The fees are just included in your tuition. For Amherst specifically, this is covered by undergrad students' tuition and graduate students' service fees.

For context the grad student service fee is around 300-700USD per semester depending on how many credits you take.

So by no means is it free. I do agree with you though that universal access to transit makes it a lot more pleasant and speeds up boarding quite substantially.

https://www.umass.edu/bursar/fee-explanation

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

#34

Post by akandiah »

The farebox recovery ratio in many western nations are not enough to ever fully fund public transport. In many cases, the systems to collect fares end up costing hundreds of millions of dollars. These costs are never made back. It makes sense to make it free.

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

#35

Post by BuyMyBitcoins »

tshaddox wrote: post #18
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…

Are the fees there to actually provide a meaningful portion of the funding, or just to make rich people who don’t use public transit feel like it’s more fair because the poor people don’t get to ride for free? I’d be surprised if the fees are meaningful on many transit systems, especially if you also throw out the costs of selling the tickets and enforcement.

>”Are the fees there to actually provide a meaningful portion of the funding, or just to make rich people who don’t use public transit feel like it’s more fair because the poor people don’t get to ride for free?”

It is entirely the first reason - mass transit is not cheap and fares help alleviate the burden of the subsidy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio

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

#36

Post by heavyset_go »

charlieyu1 wrote: post #21
Scoundreller wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

98% of consumers of any product/service would be willing to pay more but most places don’t allow this kind of price discrimination.

I mean this can be solved by giving discounts to elderly/disabled/poor people

At some point, means testing for a $1.50 bus ride is going to cost more than it saves and can become a barrier to the ridership that it's intended to encourage.

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

#37

Post by greggarious »

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…

It's not free transit unless they include WMATA (the subway).

Very few people commute via bus in DC. I rarely did it because often traffic would make it take a long time even though I lived in the district.

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

#39

Post by woodruffw »

rayiner wrote: post #19
kennywinker wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your issue seems to be with funding. Fares are usually quite a small component of transit system’s budgets. We don’t require users of city streets to pay fares to use that transportation infrastructure, with exception of the occasional toll-funded highway/bridge/tunnel, and we spend many many billions of tax dollars more on those than we do on public transit. If free transit is a bad idea so are free city streets.

Fares revenues make up half of WMATA’s operating budget, which is on the low side. The London Tube fully covers its operating costs.

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

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

#40

Post by chimeracoder »

tshaddox wrote: post #18
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…

Are the fees there to actually provide a meaningful portion of the funding, or just to make rich people who don’t use public transit feel like it’s more fair because the poor people don’t get to ride for free? I’d be surprised if the fees are meaningful on many transit systems, especially if you also throw out the costs of selling the tickets and enforcement.

> I’d be surprised if the fees are meaningful on many transit systems, especially if you also throw out the costs of selling the tickets and enforcement.

Almost no public transit system has a farebox recovery rate even close to 100%. For municipal service (ie, excluding specialty transit), even 50% is almost unheard-of in the US, and only a few systems in Europe exceed 50% as well. In the US, the better transit systems have a farebox recovery ratio of 25% or less. In other words, over 75% is already funded by taxes, not by point-of-service.

Enforcement is a huge cost. In fact, in NY, the government has decided to spend increasing amounts of money over the last five years on police presence to combat "fare evasion", even though their own numbers show that the amount of money they are "losing" to fare evasion is less than the amount they have decided to spend on the additional police dedicated specifically to fare evasion.

So yes, it's a political, choice, not a fiscally rational one.

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