A brief glance at rising road homicide rates suggests that individual car travel attracts too many “dangerous” (read entitled arseholes carrying their house around with them and feeling they should be allowed do whatever they want on them) people.
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And people say handwaving doesn’t achieve anything.
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Most of the MTA’s budget comes from public funds. Most transit systems in the USA only cover a small fraction of their budgets from farebox recapture.
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I’m going to be awkward, and argue both sides of the “no fares” idea.
First of all, there’s this that I’ve linked before.
But while that’s a great end goal, going fares free is just one tool in getting people to take public transit, and it might not be the best next step for every city right now. Sadly, public transit is constrained by politics- the local transit agency is going to have to fight for budget with every other service, and the best way to get more people using transit in many places is to push for better coverage, better frequency of service, and investment in higher-order transit (rails rather than buses, and higher speed and capacity).
Fare discounts or free transit works best when there’s already a good, robust service, and you just need to drive ridership. Sadly, in most of the Anglo-American world at the moment (outside a few particularly well-served cities), we’re far from having the network we need right now.
In short- build it, and they will come. More of them will come if it’s free.
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Though a number of cities introduced fare-free transit recently during covid (though most are likely to drop it, now that federal covid funds have dried up).
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We can’t make transit free, bc then people who don’t use transit will be all angry that part of their tax dollars are funding something else, that poor people might use. The same people are never annoyed at funding aircraft carriers, even though the Navy never lets them borrow one.
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Yep, we want to make that wheel rounder!
It’s like officials can’t learn anything until they fail themselves. Learn from other people’s success dammit!
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That point comes earlier than you might guess, but half measures don’t get you much closer and the exact break even point depends heavily on definitions. If we define the transit system as the agency that administers the busses or trains, most systems would not break even financially switching to fare free, but would only lose something like 10-20% of their revenue. Unfortunately that would shatter most North American systems. You only lose that little because the increased speed of boarding, lack of enforcement costs, and other savings add up. Free fares are usually a better financial deal than subsidized fares for low income residents, because you still end up with most of the fare subsidy, but lose the increased speed and have to pay for enforcement.
If however you define a transit system as the entire outlay of public funds for transportation, you very very quickly get a net positive with free fares, even in systems where every other thing is stacked against it. The ability to offset even one major road project due to reduced congestion can pay for a lot of bus rides. My local transit authority has an annual budget of about a half billion dollars, of which about 6% is farebox revenue. Just avoiding one highway interchange upgrade will pay for several years of lost farebox revenue. That’s before you get to the increased land values, reduced public health costs (obesity and asthma reductions).
Fare discounts are funny, because they can actually end up being more expensive than straight free fares. You don’t get any of the side benefits of free fares (increased frequency and no enforcement costs), but lots of the ridership will already qualify for any subsidized program.
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There are transit systems with >100% farebox recovery (i.e. the fares they collect cover the entire operating cost of the transit system), but this usually requires very high ridership. The New York subway’s farebox recovery rate is around 25%.
Usually systems like this do in fact have fare enforcement - but instead of using expensive fare gates at every station, they rely on roaming fare inspectors, who will walk through trains on a random/unpredictable schedule, checking each passenger’s ticket and issuing citations to anyone who doesn’t have one. The fine is set sufficiently high to make up for the low probability of encountering a fare inspector on any given trip: if you take enough free rides, you’ll eventually get hit with the fine and end up paying more than if you’d just paid the fare. This approach is called “proof of payment”.
This can save a lot of money by replacing expensive faregates (with many moving parts, motors, and sensors) with a simple tap-on-tap-off terminal, and is also great on bus systems where it can enable all-doors boarding, speeding up high-traffic bus routes significantly.
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… you can ride the bus for a dollar in Vancouver, Wash., but in Portland the fare just went up to $2.80 from $2.50, and you can bet every rider who is paying cash just puts in three dollars 
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That’s American Exceptionalism, baby!
But really, it’s more of a problem with American capitalism and sticky institutions than it is with “Americans having a problem with other countries doing things better.” We would have better healthcare if it weren’t for the private insurance industry. And we would have better public transportation if it weren’t for the influence of the auto industry. Some of those institutions do influence a vocal, generally uninformed part of the population, but it’s a structural problem, not an individual one.
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They could have all been given jobs doing more useful things, like keeping the bathrooms and other parts of the stations clean, answering patron questions, and just generally being helpful, riding on the trains and buses as attendants.
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Well sure, but trace it back farther. Bad policy (in part) created the private insurance industry, a bit in the early 1900s but mostly after it became a way around WWII wage freezes. One of the early drivers for favoring roads over railroads (in stark contrast to the mid-1800s policy) was the Post Office needing a nationwide road system for mail delivery, which then made subsequent lobbying for roads and cars over public transit and pedestrians a lot more feasible. I won’t pretend to be sure who “started it” and I definitely don’t just blame policy but it has gone back and forth.
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Possibly, but telling someone who is basically a cop “you clean the toilets now” is still a hard sell. A lot of people get grumpy when you tell them the job they signed up for isn’t going to exist anymore even if it’s kind of a shitty job. I mean, look at all those coal miners who vote Republican because they hate the idea of taking one of the job training programs the Democrats keep pushing.
At any rate the premise of Newsom’s proposal (“The city could theoretically save enough money by getting rid of fare enforcement to let people ride for free”) wouldn’t work without the layoffs part.
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The NYC subway and other cities transit systems already had a decades old turnstile design which foiled fare beaters. It consisted of a barred floor to ceiling cage of bars with a full height lattice of bars for the turnstile inside. I even got my coat tangled in one on the Cleveland Rapid and had to take it off to exit the turnstile and then untangle it.
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Those same people are usually handwringing about public transportation bringing ‘undesirables.’
Of course, they’re right: you should never let those finance bros out of their business districts into more affordable spaces.
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Well I think your anecdote with the coat shows one obvious downside to that design and helps explain why cities are phasing them out. Any kind of rotating turnstile (and especially the full-height types) could pose serious problems for anyone with mobility issues. Not to mention possible choke points if you ever needed to evacuate people in a fire or whatever.
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Right; any fare gate that can accomodate a wheelchair user or a parent with a stroller can accomodate any other pedestrian so it doesn’t really make sense to design a completely different kind of gate for everyone else.
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Yes, that type had many flaws. However, it did provide examples of the features which are needed to foil fare evaders. Anyone designing a device, for any purpose, should study devices previously used.
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It’s far from perfect, but the london underground has specific entrances for people with baggage, buggies, or wheelchairs, almost always staffed.
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