Comment by slyall
16 days ago
Free public transport takes away money that can be used to improve service for everyone. Someone on minimum wage would prefer a bus they can actually use to get to work rather than having to buy/maintain a car because the free bus only comes once an hour.
Have targeted low fares for the poor etc.
Of course it doesn't. The cost of public transport is a cost to society. It will be paid regardless of ticket fees. Hence the word 'public' in 'public transport'. The difference is that by making the users of public transport pay you give people a good reason not to use it when there are alternatives available. But those alternatives have a hard time competing with free.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_public_transport
It exists, and it works. And the best bit: all the money spent on the whole administration around tickets, making tickets, enforcing laws, gates and so on can be spent on improving the system.
> It will be paid regardless of ticket fees.
This is unfortunately not the way many systems in the US are funded. Many have to balance their fares with the service provided because they are reliant on external political factors for their public funding.
> all the money spent
you mean all the money saved? The unspent money are only a factor in the year following the year when the non-spend started. After that, no one will remember that they used to spend to some big figure on all the things you listed and assume that the operating budget of the transport agency has always been the lower figure.
Go have a look what percentage of the operating costs are covered by fares in your city. I wouldn't be surprised if the costs relating to fare enforcement were more than the revenue from fares.
You aren't taking into account that transport agencies can raise a lot of funding based on yearly revenue so multiplying fares out in terms of the debt that can be serviced yearly can easily reach billions which can be used for capital investment.
So additional costs to taxpayers and/or users of the system to cover interest repayable to lenders? How does this justify anything?
I can't tell what you're saying; are you saying that "yearly revenue from fares is big", even when someone says "fares aren't the major revenue source, and sometimes doesn't even exceed the cost to implement"?