Subway fares disproportionately penalize the poor and force them into encounters with police. Transit should be free.
Fares are already too low to cover operational costs, so at this point it's practically theater.
On the "free transit" point, unless you convince bus drivers and train operators and the tens of thousands of people that operate MTA to work for nothing, then it cannot be free. It can be paid for by someone else (e.g. taxpayers), but in general if you have a third party paying for something, you run into big problems related to expense growth, under investment, and inefficient use of resources in general.
Seeing your fare go up due to bloated expenses and mismanagement is an important signal. Hiding it and hoping everyone is honest and diligent with resources is naive.
Users should pay for the services they use.
Highway system is mostly funded through gasoline tax, which although not perfect, is pretty good proxy for how much you use public roads.
Regarding police, private security does exist and works pretty well. Whether you're installing an alarm on your home or paying off-duty police to escort you around, it's an option and often provides better service and more options due to the profit incentive.
I wish more public services had a profit incentive as long as there was a choice. Like with fire insurance, I can choose my coverage and its priced competitively. The insurance company also has an incentive to not have your house burn down, so they mandate you have fire detectors and other such preventative measures. Seems like a pretty good system.
You say this like it's a fact I have to accept but it simply isn't. It's an ideological position I wasn't convinced of at the beginning of this conversation and still am not.
guess what's built in to the tax code? means testing
we eliminate piles of bureaucracy when we eliminate fare systems