And if you reverse the situation, and imagine a city with free public transit that is then considering adding a fare to it, said fare would be extremely regressive and would hit the worst off the hardest.
I never understood why. This study from Talinn, Estonia[1] shows that the overall impact on passenger numbers was very small (+1.2% increase) and that most of it is due to a decrease in pedestrian traffic and bicycle use.
> And if you reverse the situation, and imagine a city with free public transit that is then considering adding a fare to it, said fare would be extremely regressive and would hit the worst off the hardest.
Personally, I believe that cash transfers are more ethical and less paternalistic than in-kind benefits, but if you want, you can still give poor people a high discount on public transport or simply limit free public transport to poor people.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Oded_Cats/publication/2...
I'm also really curious to know what "less desirable" means, exactly.
https://ftp.fdot.gov/file/d/FTP/FDOT%20LTS/CO/research/Compl... is the research I remember that was more critical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_public_transport is also good.
Less desirable means people that other riders are less likely to want to ride with. From the paper above:
> In the Austin, Texas fare-free demonstration, both anecdotal and official data suggest that problem riders increased substantially and drove away other riders. Joy-riding youth and inebriated adults, as well as vagrants, increased. In addition, in both the Mercer Metro and the Austin, Texas experiences, problem riders actually drove away many of the regular bus commuters. In none of the experiments did the increase in transit ridership include automobile commuters enticed by the fare-free service (Connor, 1979; Kounes, 1993; People for Modern Transit Technical Committee, 2001).