Comment by ProfessorLayton
5 hours ago
>I wish they could do something about fare evasion.
Reminder that vast majority of the fare is covered by taxes (Roughly 87%). I wish they just funded the remaining 13% instead.
It might not even cost that much more considering all of the expenses involved with hiring more staff (Salary/healthcare/pensions etc.) to collect the last 13 cents on the dollar.
This doesn't feel like the right way of thinking about it---if you went from 20% of people paying fares to 80%, that's 4x the revenue with the same fixed costs, and farebox recovery goes from 13% to 52%. Now, I don't think compliance is actually that low, but the point is that you shouldn't think of fares as collecting a fixed share of the operating costs.
The costs may be fixed but so is ~87% of the revenue via tax money.
Muni can be 100% free without increasing taxes too. The people using public land to store their private vehicles are not paying their fair share. Proper parking pricing and enforcement could easily pay for Muni’s deficit.