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

Meanwhile, the richest people, who are benefitting from the availability and mobility of labour, can afford to move around in luxury vehicles (sometimes driven by others).

This is a negative feedback loop which renders public transportation increasingly dangerous and decreasingly effective.

If you want to "fund" public transport, you should do it through increased taxation on cars (especially luxury cars) and air travel (in particular private aviation), but ultimately public money doesn't necessarily need to be entirely offset through taxation if it's federally supplied.

There would be a lot to be said for a federal infrastructure spending bill that targeted uniformly effective and free public transport.

- MTA heavy rail was 70%.

- Commuter rail was 55%.

- Commuter bus was 32%.

- BRT and Bus was 30%.

[1] https://www.enotrans.org/article/the-mass-transit-fiscal-cli...

The silver line snakes way out through Virginia, for a pretty (very) small fraction of riders every day & a handful of people going to IAD (Dulles) airport. The Purple Line has started snaking around the beltway, at least for the northern MD parts that were still willing to fund & try, but has dragged on, slated originally to open last year & still at least 4 years out & crazy over cost. It seems unlikely to make a sea change difference, but perhaps!! We want to believe, maybe after a lot of time. DC started building a new streetcar network, and seemingly gave up after realizing fixed infrastructure like this was insanely expensive and prone to constant blockage.

Most American cities highly subsidize transit. Going to fully subsidized is not really a major hurt. It's a kind of easy action we can just do, for little real pain. Much less pain than many of the expansive would be micro-mega-projects, that probably in most cases will be massive budget items with decades of debt, with only very very very long term development benefits. In DC, few of our transit systems have capacity problems. Our citywide network is quite good, very well connnected whatever direction you want in most places.

The proposal that we add more busses, that we build new lines: it feels wildly out of touch, like it's prescribing someone elses solution, that doesn't make sense here. This is a good sensible next step for DC, to make what we have work much better for many, especially those who can most benefit.

https://2019.stib-activityreports.brussels/en/a-high-perform...

The STIB is the Brussels metro & bus company.

As you can see, subsidies represent 54 percent of the STIB's revenue: Subsidies of almost 400M EUR. The figure you want is "traffic revenue": 225M EUR.

So now, the calculation is: Is ticketing and enforcement worth 225M EUR / year in Brussels? The answer on paper is yes, because we're not taking into account the costs I outlined above. Breaking them down by line item is impossible because the figures are not public, but going by related figures, it's not looking good for proponents of ticketing.

Let's just go with sibling comment's ticket gate price: 250MM EUR. They are replaced every 8 years roughly. So, 31MM / year. Now down to under half of the subsidies.

Direct costs: Ticket enforcement staff + equipment, gate maintenance, automated sales booths + maintenance + software, in-person sales booths + maintenance, payment processing fees, contract costs

Externalities: Ticket littering + cleanup costs, inefficient purchases by customers (bought the wrong tickets/too many)

Time costs: Validation time, gate bottlenecking (especially at peak time), reduced opportunities for those who can't afford tickets...

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Okay, so let's say you do all those calculations, and you end up finding out they're all zero (they won't be, but w/e), and actually you're still making decent tax revenue from public transit (0.2bn eur). What is the lesson here?

The lesson, is that all these are insignificant compared to the investment that same city wants to make into public transport: 5.2 bn EUR. (ref. https://www.stib-mivb.be/article.html?l=en&_guid=0035aa30-f3...). Or compared to the costs of road maintenance (50-100bn EUR / year in BE). Or, or ...

Make no mistake, removing costs would increase ridership which would increase costs. But it would also increase national productivity output which increases tax revenue. This is not a simple calculation to run, and my girlfriend is using my parallel universe simulator right now so I can't check. Public transit should be free (AS IN PAID BY TAXES), because it's the right thing to do, when the roads are financed the same way.