French city makes its buses free, spurring new ridership and decreasing car use

[tuhu]

@anon73192581

Name one major city where the cost of running a ticketing system is the equivalent of even 10% of running a public transport system and I’ll eat my hat.

You’re moving the goal posts considerably here. It’s not about comparing the cost of the ticketing system to the total cost of operating the entire system.

The price of fares (zero, high, or otherwise) has no effect on the price of oil, tires, and other capital and maintenance costs. (Ditching fares would lower wage costs, of course.)

It’s whether the net social benefit of fare systems is less than the net social benefit from not spending money on fare systems.

@anon73192581

Sure some toll roads don’t make money (most do…) - but that’s because the roads cost more than expected for a lower number of vehicles than expected - not because staff sitting in a toll booth earn the equivalent of the user charges!

Tolls depress usage. The net benefit of a toll road is less than a public road. You’re right that they can cost society more overall than roads funded in other ways. (And “operators of toll booths” wasn’t meant to mean a single lonely minimum wage attendant, it’s the owners and private corporations that win these kind of contracts)

@anon73192581

Melbourne (home) is a good example.

In 2017 the total income (before expenses) of the line item “Supply of transport services” was 227 million dollars. That is less than the 160 million you’re estimating is paid on just the Myki system (less other fare-based capital outlays, wages, and maintenance) and enforcement.

It’s still arguably not as good a deal as foregoing the 60 million as a society and seeing that same money get circulated in the local consumer economy, even beyond any other benefits from having a frictionless public transport system.

[sean0]

Thanks, that article has some useful looking links down near the bottom of the comments section.

As far as I can tell, most of it is just a realistic description of how the money system actually works, looking at it from the top down.

With having a fiat currency, when the government spends on things it is spending new currency into existence by instructing its central bank to change the balance on the relevant bank accounts upward. When you pay taxes to central government, the numbers are changed in the opposite direction again.

So, statements like “Tax money is scarce” and questions like “How are you going to pay for that?” and worrying about the value of the deficit in isolation don’t make sense. (They would have made more sense in the gold standard days but that ended in 1971 for USA, 1931 for UK).

The government debt is all the money that has been created by paying into the economy but hasn’t yet been taxed out.

The other part of it seems to be based on the idea of using otherwise idle resources as a buffer stock to stabilize the economy.

As the private sector’s purpose is to be profitable and labor is a cost, it will be minimized, so they will not create a job for every willing worker.

Rather than just let people go unemployed, with all the problems and waste of resources this causes, it suggests a “federal job guarantee” or “transition job”, essentially paying anyone that wants to do a job to do the non-profitable but socially useful activities the private sector doesn’t want (caring / teaching assistants, building
infrastructure, training, …). As the economy picks up (these previously unemployed people will now have some money to spend, someones spending is someone else’s earnings), the private sector will start hiring more and a proportion of these will move to the private sector, automatically reducing government spending, etc.

It would be nice to see a mathematical simulation to show if this could actually work, but I haven’t found anything like that.

These are amusing and give a summary:

[anon73192581]

@tuhu

You’re moving the goal posts considerably here. It’s not about comparing the cost of the ticketing system to the total cost of operating the entire system .

Not moving the goal posts at all, I’m responding to your assertion that farebox recovery only pays for ticketing related costs. If farebox revenue pays for 20-40% of total public transport expendature and ticketing related expendature is less than 10% of overall costs then…

@tuhu

It’s whether the net social benefit of fare systems is less than the net social benefit from not spending money on fare systems.

Its whether the net social benefit of providing frequent, reliable, services that aren’t chronically overcrowded is provided - and whether a city can do that after forgoing ticket revenue…

@tuhu

even beyond any other benefits from having a frictionless public transport system

Just because there aren’t tickets involved doesn’t mean it’s not frictionless. See above.

@tuhu

And “operators of toll booths” wasn’t meant to mean a single lonely minimum wage attendant, it’s the owners and private corporations that win these kind of contracts)

Ok understood. I’m certainly not going to argue that tollways are a bad investment for governments. But depressing usage isn’t necessarily a bad thing… Congested roads benefit no one.

[smulder]

@anon73192581

that meandering bus that runs every 43 minutes

Trying to get anywhere in Silicon Valley on the bus in the '80s and '90s was barely faster than walking

[i_have_feet]

@anon73192581

Melbourne (home) is a good example.

I’m in Melbourne too, and yeah, ridership is already high especially at peak times. Increasing PT use is going to add challenges, from that specific angle. And we’ll never get those wasted Myki billions back.

It might be better (fairer) to ditch the fares anyway. 1) Add a progressive tax (make richer people pay to improve/increase services for everyone, create infrastructure that actually serves the suburbs). (NOT more roads. Ideally, dig up some roads and restore them to public lands/green space/bike paths).

And/or 2) add a congestion charge to car registration (make drivers subsidise free public transport). Administration for taxes and rego are already in place, why not bundle it together and forget the hassle of PT ticketing and enforcement altogether.

[moortaktheundea]

@tlwest

compare the benefits free transit brings as compared to the benefits of spending that money elsewhere.

This sounds a lot easier than it is. The first order effects are easy enough and come out somewhat close to budget neutral for smaller cities (larger cities tend to be slightly budget negative in free transit situations, but not as bad as you would guess). The cost of fare collection already eats up a huge percentage of the rider fares in most small systems and the reduced load time shaves a percentage off other capital costs. Subsidizing transit passes to the poorest doesn’t get those savings and can actually be a more expensive option. So even what appears to be spending it on the middle class might not be.

The real trouble with doing a nice cost benefit analysis has to do with the behavior changes that come with the behavior changes and pollution. To give an example of one of the things that is easy to understand and matters, but is really hard to measure on a city budget consider asthma. A small reduction in the number of vehicle miles traveled tends to lead to large drops in asthma, with the biggest drops usually concentrated among the poor (highway infrastructure is more likely to run through poor neighborhoods). We can extrapolate to some extent that the increased ridership is responsible for the decline, but until we know how many of those rides were car replacement trips and some idea of the driving routes they would have taken, a strict accounting isn’t possible. That savings will also probably not show on the same budget entity that makes the decision, because health costs and public transit are almost always at different levels of government. This type of clear effect and incredibly hard to quantify budget is everywhere when you’re dealing with public goods.

[shmello]

@DavidVincent

With a free bus ride, maybe some safeguard should also be implemented

You say that like it’s some minor detail that might be addressed. If the bus has a bunch of folks on it that are just trying to stay out of the weather and have no access to address personal hygene, your other riders will suffer and so will ridership. Also, you lose civic support, which you need in the US to have any hope of a decent transit system.

Agree that our old and young could use less cars and more transit, but this has to be considered with affordable housing, equitable policing, mental health care, and a bunch of other things.

[marence]

Same happened in Cleveland. So they then cut the number of trips per day and disappeared a bunch of routes, and then wondered why fewer people were taking the bus.
But corporate sponsors allowed for free trolleys during the weekdays in downtown, so it’s a wash?
Sigh.

[marence]

Free transit sounds heavenly to me. I’m pretty happy with having access to the better parts of Cleveland’s RTA system, and I use it often. The nearest bus route has trips during morning and evening rush hour, but it’s only a 5 minute walk to a line that runs at least twice and hour, 24/7.

So it’s great for someone who lives on a bus route, or within walking distance of one. There’s also the great Park-N-Ride transport, where you park in a far-flung suburban lot and ride downtown on cushy buses. But if you’re carless in the suburbs, or in the pockets of poverty removed from the main east-west thoroughfares, you’re still faced with the transportation paradox of no car, no job; no job, no car.

There are so many solutions to the problems of internal combustion & alternate transport, but they’re really hard to implement in a country where most of the post WWII expansion was predicated on 2-car families.

[tlwest]

@moortaktheundea

This sounds a lot easier than it is.

Actually, i thought it sounded nearly impossible

I was discussing the idea of free fares with a friend, who doesn’t live relatively downtown, and his first reaction is that if we had a billion dollars to throw on transit that in our case is already bursting at the seams, we should be using the money to increase capacity.

His contention is that better service would attract more passengers than free service. (Or as he put it “real” passengers rather than those who would now taking transit for a stop instead of walking.)

At that point my admiration for the transit planners went up. Not only is it almost impossible to compare between spending money on two completely different things - it’s almost impossible to evaluate which element to allocate to even if you’ve decided to spend the money on transit!

[fuzzyfungus]

It obviously doesn’t solve the problem directly; but I suspect that the bigger the success story of a given transit system is(in terms of ridership and how much more valuable housing on transit lines is than similar housing away from transit lines is); the easier it is to sell the (sometimes nontrivial) up-front costs of expanding it.

If it’s widely perceived as a failure, or only viable for that one chunk of subway in the super-dense bit; selling expansion is going to be tricky. If it works well where implemented, greater degrees of apathy or overt opposition(not at all hypothetically to increasing ‘their’ mobility and risking respectable people having to risk their presence…) are required to argue against covering additional areas.

[moortaktheundea]

In answer to your friend’s question and quickly looking at the numbers in TTC’s reports, average service times are good enough that their would likely not be a huge influx of new people based on them already being close to some of the benchmarks for service levels, if they put more money into cutting service times. You hit diminishing returns on ridership once you’re already under 15 minutes. On the other hand, using TTC’s assumptions on number of customers per dollar spent on transit subsidy, you would be seeing an absolutely mammoth shift. They currently assume .12 rider change per dollar of subsidy change. Changes like that are already pretty well modeled for larger transit systems.

[tlwest]

@moortaktheundea

You hit diminishing returns on ridership once you’re already under 15 minutes.

Since this poor soul is on one of the overwhelmed lines for which it’s not uncommon to have to wait past 2-3 filled streetcars, I suspect he wasn’t enamored with increasing ridership at all :-).

Personally, I think the best long-term spending is probably not on Toronto at all, but on its suburbs. Density can be a problem, but there are lots of places where it’s 20 minutes to walk to a bus stop followed by a half hour wait if your unlucky. Then if you are actually going into Toronto, you need to spend another fare.

Doesn’t help me (if successful, might make we have to wait past more subways), but it would be putting the money where most New Canadians are actually living.