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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

My experience has been the same. I was on a grand jury, so pre-indictment and no voir dire, and there were many BS cases like this. We returned "no true bill" on all of them, which made me really proud of my randomly-selected neighbors. Cops were trying to railroad so many people over subway fare evasion, upgrading stealing $2.50 from the MTA to felony drug charges. We didn't bite. I did remark that I would just give them the $2.50 rather than ruining some high school student's life. (Seriously, just take it out of my taxes. I'm happy to work to fund public transportation.)

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MTA already has a half-price program for low-income people. I agree fare jumpers don't need jail but they need some punishment. Make them clean the station and pick up trash for an hour, right then and there (I'm just spitballing). Otherwise it's unfair to law-abiding people.

There should be some teeth, but also we should be prepared for a small amount of "unfairness" baked into the system. If there are no controls, everyone will cheat. But if there's too many obstacles (turnstiles, checkpoints, conductors, cameras, etc) then people won't want to ride.

> If there are no controls, everyone will cheat.

That just isn't true. Not even remotely.

Or make the transportation free, then you don't have to worry about policing infractions and instead spend the low effort policing money on cleaning, security, and improvement.

There's an argument that making people pay a fare improves cleanliness and security to an extent. I don't know if there are studies about it. But it's a persuasive argument.

At that point just make separate no fee, low fee, and high fee train cars with varying levels of poor people and/or cleanliness.

Ah yes, a caste system on tracks. That will surely work

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowpiercer

Surely you're aware airplanes and cruise ships have different ticket classes and no one considers it a caste system.

Your comment might be deeply offensive to people who have suffered in actual caste systems.

long distance trains too. and in germany even some local trains have (or used to have) first class compartments.

We paid for a first class ride (but through a discount website, for like $10 difference? I still don't understand the pricing) that had us on a regional train then a local train in Germany. It was a new experience for us and came after about 20 hours of flights and layovers so we didn't want to have a challenge to arrive.

On the local train we were unable to take luggage into first class (a small number of seats blocked off by a plexiglass entrance), but folks were very accommodating of some clueless Americans just trying to go a few stops down the track.

The regional train was nice, but second class on the way back from our destination was just as comfortable.

Long story short, the claims of comfort and cleanliness between the classes didn't really seem apparent.

on long distance trains first class seats are wider and usually only three per row instead of four.

on regional and local trains i have to agree the difference is less apparent.

i guess the main benefit is that first class areas are going to be less packed. i am not sure but it may be the case that you are not even allowed to stand in first class if you have a second class ticket.

so if the train is crowded then that crowd won't be allowed in the first class area, and it is unlikely that you buy a first class ticket without a seat. but if the train is only lightly filled it probably makes no difference at all.

The class system… such a classic!

You kid, and it would be kinda horrible in certain ways, but I genuinely think it would increase ridership significantly.

Let's face it, classism right now manifests as:

* poor folk use terrible public transit

* med income folk drive cars

* high income/wealth folk get driven around by robots or staff

At least with the classist train you cut down on emissions and public funds spent fixing roads. And I'd argue it's a bit less unequal than the status quo in 95% of the US.

Do you not take flights to travel between cities because they are classist?

Now that you mention it, I don’t fly much, and would do so more if airlines standardized on a single level of service somewhere around business class in terms of convenience and basic comfort, but with lower prices in exchange for unbundled luggage, food, and beverage options.

Have you considered that first class passengers may be subsidizing fares for other tiers?

A fellow aficionado of German trains, I see.

> But it's a persuasive argument.

Persuasive to what type of people?

Even to a lefty liberal like me. But I'm open to data that, actually, it'll turn out fine.

What doesn't work is laws that aren't enforced. Either enforce them or repeal them.

> Even to a lefty liberal like me. But I'm open to data that, actually, it'll turn out fine.

So conclusion before evidence?

At least the founders had the foresight to codify innocent-until-proven-guilty.

People are allowed to have gut feelings about how things will turn out, based on their internal "world model". Nowhere did I say I had reached a conclusion. Since we don't have data either way, you're doing the same thing as me, but in the other direction.

This isn't anything like innocent-until-proven-guilty.

People who understand budget constraints. Economics applies even outside of capitalism and democratic states.

I don’t find this claim persuasive in the least. I could just as easily assert without evidence that fees reduce cleanliness because patrons feel they’ve prepaid for their messes to be cleaned up, and security because resources that could be applied to safety and reducing crimes against patrons are used to enforce fare collection and secure methods of payment instead.

For a first order argument, yes, because people won't use free very often.

But if the collected fares are paying for enhanced police brutality or other deleterious second-order system behavior, it's not so cut and dry.

Ah, yes, the cost of the price is rarely considered. Think of the money society would save just in not having to pay up for the payment system!

There is too much communism in this sentence.

I take your comment in the sardonic humor it conveys, hopefully it matches your intent.

The robber barons built libraries. Yes, it took some heat off of their reputation, but, they weren't idiots and neither were the people for whom they were driving wages down or driving prices up. They and municipal orgs of the time and other civic minded groups built libraries and schools because society is better off have more education. Capitalism, done right, actually can have good outcomes.

In a similar vein, healthcare makes people healthier as a general outcome. "Socialized medicine" (more properly understand of as healthcare as a publicly-provided good) enables a more healthy population -- business owners benefit because the people they can hire from are healthier, so more productive.

Public transportation in dense areas should be seen similarly. More efficient, lower pollution when expanded and widely available, easier to police, less of the nasties like PM2.5 from tires and asphalt, less road deaths, and so forth.

> Capitalism, done right, actually can have good outcomes

Elon Musk and the whole capital serving US government is not a good outcome.

There was a fun take on it on r/comics recently: https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/1x4toay/the_day_all...

> business owners benefit because the people they can hire from are healthier, so more productive.

As we can see now - capitalism would prefer "stupid", way productive robots running 24/7 in a dark warehouses to a healthier, more productive population. Lighting savings are already cover most of difference (/s but only so slightly).

This is a great way to destroy public transit!

The plan is to let anyone on the subway, with no fares. It turns out that the violent, unstable people who make public spaces unwelcoming are disproportionately represented among those who cannot pay $2.50 for a fare. So they scare off regular transit riders who mode shift to something else. It's vastly more expensive and difficult to react to violence on the subway than to keep violent people out with a small fare, so it's financially and logistically impossible to actually keep it safe. Then your transit ridership tanks and people who hate funding transit can declare the whole thing a giant waste of money and any new funding dies politically because now there's no public ridership constituency left.

Nobody cares about the revenue gained from $2.50 fares. What matters is the tiny amount of resistance that offers to the small number of people who are largely responsible for making public transit unwelcoming.

> It's vastly more expensive and difficult to react to violence on the subway than to keep violent people out with a small fare

Are you making a case that a violent person, who ignores the stringent laws of society against violence, will diligently follow the laws of society requiring $2.50 prior to riding public transport?

LOL

Your argument is like saying I won't put a basic privacy lock on my gym locker because, you know, a creep wanting to sift through my things is going to do it anyway.

There is a cost benefit analysis that even serial offenders go through to pick a victim. If a transit system insists on fares, it is likely they are watching out for fare dodgers which increases the risk of getting caught even before the offender gets a chance to offend.

> There is a cost benefit analysis that even serial offenders go through to pick a victim

Are you making the case that a society unable to protect its denizens from violent offenders in broader society will be able to protect its denizens on public transport from those same violent offenders through the application of a $2.50 fare?

Hmm.

I’m saying that knowing that you’re being (potentially) being watched for fare evasion has a deterrent effect on wanting to commit a crime.

How many times have you heard of road rage incidents which deescalate as soon as one party realises that they are being recorded by a dashcam? People’s behavior under surveillance is different from their private behavior.

This claim seems suspect.

Surveillance doesn’t require fee collection.

Is violent crime in Target stores higher than it is in Costco locations because the latter charges an admission fee?

I think the issue is loitering. Target and Costco can remove people from premises who loiter, but a public transportation system might not be able to do that *assuming no loitering statutes for the stations are in place.

I would personally be surprised if violent attacks are differentiated in rate between the two.

> I think the issue is loitering

Why is loitering an issue/crime? Should it be?

It's not always. I think there are cases where it should be. A transit center probably should have some wait areas, but generally should not be for loitering. Similar to airport pickup/dropoff.

> generally should not be for loitering.

What does loitering mean? Why is it a problem?

Loitering is well defined topic, I think if we bog ourselves into a semantic wrestling match we'll lose valuable time from our lives for little value trying to convince the unpersuadable.

So I'll only go as deep as a quick search for "loitering definition" -- the first hit aligns to what I hold as my personal understanding:

    Loitering is the act of standing, lingering, or waiting around idly in a public or private place for an extended period without a clear, lawful, or obvious purpose.

Looks like there isn't anything critically important in the definition.

Why is loitering a problem?

Maybe someone at the transit center is there to enjoy the architecture without needing to go somewhere. We ask artists to design a beautiful space transit space, and then want to exclude someone that wants to just imbibe the vibe. Others may have some other purpose for that space. The spectrum of experience for 7 billion humans is unlikely to be fathomable to allow for enumeration as 'allowed activities'. "Loitering" is a silly, unserious, approach to managing criminality, as is a $2.50 fee. A $2.50 fee isn't going to stop anyone with criminal intent.

Either it is a public space or it isn't. If no harm is being caused, no reason to exclude anyone from public spaces.

> Why is loitering a problem?

Are you pretending to be a space alien unfamiliar with how crime works on Earth? OK, let me spell it out for you.

Various forms of crime require previous periods of observing the target. For example, if you want to rob a shop, you want to know how many employees are inside, whether most of the leave at a certain time for a lunch and leave one of them in the shop alone, whether they leave together at evening or again one of them stays behind and closes the shop. Similarly, if you want to assault a person, you wait until you find someone walking alone, and make sure that the rest of the group is not walking a few meters behind them. If you sell drugs, you need to stay on the street, waiting for the customers to approach you. etc.

On the other hand, there are almost no good reasons to stand for one hour in front of the shop, observing what goes on inside. There are almost no good reason for a group of adult men to stand in front of a school at evening. Etc.

I am not saying that anyone who stands at a weird place should be immediately arrested. But it makes sense for other people to be concerned about that, and call the cops, who will ID the people who stand there, and tell them to go away. Which they cannot do if standing there is perfectly legal. Hence, the "crime" of loitering.

> I’m saying that knowing that you’re being (potentially) being watched for fare evasion has a deterrent effect on wanting to commit a crime.

Are you suggesting that society can reduce crime by charging a fee to be out in public and surveilling public spaces for fare evasion?

Brilliant!

It means you can kick out an unstable person who has not paid $2.50 before they become violent.

Why not? Surely you can have defined intervention protocols and standards of care for mental health that don't require violence to initiate. Also, mental health issues is not equivalent to "poor."

I feel like you've argued from a false dichotomy -- we can't do X because of bad things, so we have to put up with Y and bad things.

The cop made me call my mom on a pay phone and 40 years later I still have to hear about it. Cruel and unusual.

One made me call my Dad to spite my psycho mother who dragged me tothe Station thinking the cop was gonna scare me straight ratherthen the outcome of him seeing her insanity and pleading with me to stay in contact with the only responsible adult in the room who wouldnt screw me over for the rest of my natura life

It was all very vindicating

I think public transport should be free. That solves the whole problem because it makes no sense to dis-incentivize the use of public transport to begin with and the fares are disproportionally hard on the lowest earners.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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"?

So additional costs to taxpayers and/or users of the system to cover interest repayable to lenders? How does this justify anything?

The problem with free public transport is that it turns into a de facto homeless shelter. And then it isn't safe to use anymore. You let people evade fares and then those people go onto stab people like Zarutska.

That's a different problem, and it requires a solution by itself.

> You let people evade fares and then those people go onto stab people like Zarutska.

That has nothing to do with it. The guy that committed that murder wasn't going to be deterred by a ticket fee. But it is interesting that you should right away jump from the one to the other, effectively using the poor dead girl for your agenda. Crime and homelessness are complex problems some parts of which are easy to solve and some of which are much harder.

You can't simply jump from 'someone got murdered on public transport' to 'public transport can't be free'.

https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2026/news20260908

You can cut crime all the way down to zero by shutting down all transport. You could decrease it to a very low minimum by setting a $100 / trip fare. But then it wouldn't be public transport anymore.

I ride BART. I'm two blocks from a busy transfer station. It's great for going to a show and getting home without driving (drunk).

Arguing that modern fare gates lowered crime is a pretty terrible response to the comment to which you responded. It shows a real lack of articulation ("crime bad, crime down here, therefore I don't need to refute what you said").

The original poster said:

> The guy that committed that murder wasn't going to be deterred by a ticket fee.

I don't see how lower crime on BART due to fewer people hopping the turnstiles refutes that at all. (Huh, I just learned turnstiles is spelled with an I and not a Y. At least your comment led to me learning something.) It just seems defeatist, which is what the people looting this country want.

> "crime bad, crime down here, therefore I don't need to refute what you said"

You're literally making up entire sentences, are you OK?

> The original poster said:

>> The guy that committed that murder wasn't going to be deterred by a ticket fee.

> I don't see how lower crime on BART...

Maybe you didn't read the link, but it's a 67% reduction in crimes against _riders_. Not property, not soliciting, but crimes against other humans.

The murderer in question was unemployed, homeless and aimlessly riding public transit. We (as a society) should have done a lot more for him, but (see stats above) it seems clear to me that making it easier to be in a confined space with the rest of society wasn't solving his problems and certainly didn't help her.

He might've been deterred from committing the murder if he wasn't on the train at all but was instead in jail because he got immediately arrested by the cops for fare-jumping. Also murder isn't the only crime I don't want to happen on transit, that is most likely to be committed by someone who is already breaking the law against fare-jumping to be there at all.

so we should put fare-jumpers in jail because they could be murderers?

that's a strange argument.

No, we should put them in jail in order to keep them off the subway in the moment as well as to disincentivize other people who are considering fare-jumping. Murder is not the only additional crime an antisocial person who is already committing the crime of fare-jumping might commit, that affects the well-being of everyone else using public transit.

> The problem with free public transport is that it turns into a de facto homeless shelter.

I don't think $2.50 is what's preventing this from happening today.

> The problem with free public transport is that it turns into a de facto homeless shelter.

Perhaps there's something broken about a society that has a significant homelessness issue. The free public transport isn't the problem, it's likely that society has a surplus of citizens that prevent economic progress and/or the deployment of solutions known to be effective against homelessness.

It's unfortunate, but one problem with free public transport absent other changes is that then it becomes de facto free shelter, which degrades the service for people using it as transport.

Another commenter already made the same observation. See reply there.

That wouldn't be an issue if we also provided shelter to the most distressed people in our society. As if we don't have the technology to build housing on the cheap. Our lack of communal will to help fellow people is a real shame.

to offer free public transport to people, we now have to solve housing at a societal level. To solve housing, we have to fix zoning laws. to fix zoning laws, we have to fix NIMBY-ism which needs partisanship to be solved. To fix partisanship...

I absolutely despise the world we live in where the default answer to everything is effectively “no.”

I wish we could get to a point where we default to “yes” and find solutions rather than making it easier to say “no.”

It's worse than that even. It is 'things are bad, therefore we can't begin to improve'. Weirdly enough that never goes in the other direction. The day that people realize that people without a lot of money are also people things will start to improve. And this is rather more than less likely to happen because I suspect there will be a lot more people without a lot of money soon compared to today.

Shelter should be, but doesn't need to be housing. When people fear that public transportation becomes shelter they're not arguing houses will be built in train stations.

Having other places with a roof, some security and some public amenities should go a long way to avoid other services getting bogged down by homelessness.

homeless people are already trying to build that but the so-called "protectors of law and order" keep showing up with bulldozers for some reason, as if they actually want people to be sleeping on public transportation instead of in their own private tents. This is probably because they get paid proportionally to how many people they catch sleeping on public transportation.

People sleeping in their own private tents on public land in urban areas is as much of a problem as people sleeping on public transit is. I want protectors of law and order to catch and arrest people sleeping in tents in public parks just as much as I want them to do so for people using public transportation as shelter. If there isn't enough law enforcement resources to do both and it's necessary to prioritize, then I would reluctantly say to prioritize public transit, simply because public transit is more enclosed and so it's harder to quickly get away from people who are a threat on it. But ideally we'd do both.

Where do you want them to sleep and will you pay for it?

people don't want to live in shelters. they don't provide enough safety or privacy. being out on the street feels safer. any housing must at least provide a private room and bathroom. and ideally not have all those people concentrated in one place.

an important factor in improving your life is integration in society. but that only works if you live among people already integrated, not if everyone around you is also not integrated.

the same reason why it's hard for people to escape poverty uf everyone around them is poor too.

Why shouldn't we have exactly the ambitions you're using as an argument against change? I support all of those proposals. The richest nation in history could do all of that easily if there was the will to do so.

If giving away free public services could be grifted to increase the bottom line of the ultra wealthy, we'd have a utopian society.

> to offer free public transport to people, we now have to solve housing at a societal level. To solve housing, we have to fix zoning laws. to fix zoning laws, we have to fix NIMBY-ism which needs partisanship to be solved. To fix partisanship...

Aren't half of these wrong?

NIMBY-ism isn't particularly partisan. Find a suburb and it's probably full of NIMBY zoning rules regardless of which party has the majority there. This is one of the things which isn't red vs. blue, it's "got mine" vs. the people who don't get a vote because they can't afford to live there because they don't get a vote.

You also don't have to "solve housing the societal level" to keep the homeless from using the subway as a bedroom. That's the better way to do that, but you can also do things like build homeless shelters that resemble (and therefore have the density of) college dorms in places where the "neighbors" are auto salvage yards, warehouses, prisons, abandoned buildings or the like and are correspondingly less likely to object to putting them there. And then anyone you catch being disruptive on the subway gets a free one-way ticket to the shelter.

They are wrong but also unrelated to the issue of free public transport and hence include trade offs which don’t directly affect public transport.

Effectively, to offer free public transport, you have to reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money in politics.

To promote solar power, you have reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money.

To promote anti-vaccine ideology, you have to reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money.

To promote a strictly equal society where every person is judged by their abilities and not ethnic history and skin color, you have to reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money.

There are vested interests in every debate and saying we should aim for wholesale societal change for every low hanging result is a recipe for inaction (or at least, very delayed action)

> Effectively, to offer free public transport, you have to reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money in politics.

Do you actually though? Or do you just have to do it in a way that they won't stop you?

There are at least three ways to do that. You can do it in a way that it actually doesn't cause trouble for them, you can do it in a way where they can't stop you (e.g. at a different level of government where they have less influence), or you can do it in a way where they can't see what you're trying to do until after it's already done.

"Reduce the influence of lobbyists and money" doesn't even mean anything. If you want something to happen or not happen, you're lobbying. If you spend time or resources trying to achieve your goals, that's money. What people mean is they want to reduce the influence of people they don't like. It's fully generic, you might as well say that in order to win you have to defeat your opponents.

Homelessness only partially overlaps with what British authorities euphemistically refer to as "street lifestyles". The people you see blacked out in the gutter or ranting wildly on a subway car are disproportionately likely to be homeless, but their behaviour is not the result of homelessness - many of them do in fact have a stable home and most of the rest would continue to behave in an antisocial manner even if they were adequately housed.

The problem of persistent disorderly conduct by a small minority of highly disturbed people is either an unfathomably complex psychiatric issue, or a fairly straightforward carceral issue.

you can't possibly know that, in the world we live in. Not conclusively - the amount of other factors at play and the ubiquity of those factors - crushing social stratification, pay-to-live capitalism, the overwhelming pressure on people to produce or die (meaning that learning to produce is on them to figure out, and quick, or else.) If you had an example of a society where these things were not at issue, you could more easily make a statement like "their conduct is an unfathomably complex psychiatric issue or otherwise they just need to be punished enough".

It's quite possible that these people would have turned out fine if they grew up provided a path to integrating into society that was less burdensome. It's possible you're right, too, but without controlling for confounding factors there's no way to know.

Should it be illegal to pass out in a gutter? If so, why specifically?

I think the argument is that it should be illegal to pass out lying across 4 subway/metro/tube seats.

And that is because it is not polite to take up more than the minimum space needed. (Like using seats for your bag, or putting your feet on the seat across from you.)

Should everything that is impolite be illegal?

You can be impolite at your home as much as you want but in public spaces we need to enforce politeness with harsh punishments.

So if you don't say please to your server, you should be hanged?

Yes, although the punishment shouldn't be the same as for crimes like eg. theft.

As for why, two main categories of reasons. First, for the good of the person themselves. By making it illegal, the state then has the authority to compel some sort of action. For a first 'offence' this could simply be sleeping it off in the 'drunk tank' (or in a hospital bed if necessary). For repeat offences, an escalating scale of compulsory treatment. Basically if a person is regularly passing out in gutters, it's likely only a matter of time before they kill themselves, so being nudged, then coerced, then ultimately compelled into treatment would likely benefit them. Of course, this relies on avenues for treatment rather than simple punishment being available.

The other reason is for the rest of society. People do not want to walk down streets where people are passed out in gutters. They will either feel compelled to try to help - which can be, or at least feel, risky, given that intoxicated and/or mentally ill people can be unpredictable - or they may feel badly for not doing anything. Regardless, if it's a regular thing, it will encourage people to avoid the area where they're likely to encounter such things. That will impact local businesses, residences, etc., leading to an overall decline of environment and services for everyone.

Should everything that isn't good for you be illegal?

Should everything that causes people to feel bad be illegal? Many people are scared by guns.

Isn't open carrying of guns illegal in lots of places already?

> That wouldn't be an issue if we also provided shelter to the most distressed people in our society.

It's not an either-or. We can build more shelter to help homeless people, and at the same time we can dissuade them from using public transportation as de facto shelter.

After all, everybody's perfectly happy to keep homeless people out of their front yard or the local Starbucks. Nobody says "But we need to tolerate bums smoking weed in the middle of our coffee shop, unless we build enough shelter for all of them. ALL OF THEM."

We don't actually have the technology to build housing on the cheap for the most marginalized people in society, who would trash that housing without intensive and expensive and very often coercive support from some kind of social worker. One of the biggest reasons many homeless people avoid the homeless shelters that do exist for the most distressed people in our society, is because the other most distressed people in our society living in the same shelter are prone to stealing from them or physically harming them. And another reason is that they want to irresponsibly use drugs in a way that makes them a potential threat to others and so is banned by the shelter.

>it becomes de facto free shelter

So? Let it.

If people need shelter, it's a shame we are building a ballroom instead of shelter.

It's nice to have an opinion but free public transport causes many issues and isn't great policy, it actually means transport agencies have less money to invest and take out debt on as system use increases which is a very bad position financially. The same issues actually apply to roads as well and are a reason things like congestion taxes are a good idea.

So, explain why it works in 100+ cities all over the world?

Congestion taxes are completely different from ticket fees.

Could you give some example cities? I've never encountered a free metro.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_public_transport

Fares typically make a negligible contribution to the overall costs of operating the system.

Public transport in the state of Queensland, Australia charges a flat fare of 50 cents. They only reason they charge anything at all is because they want the trip data for route planning purposes.

Free public transport solves many issues and is a great policy.

The notion that transit agencies need to be funded via fares is nonsense to begin with, but it looks even wackier when one looks at how roads are funded.

Absolutely not. People don’t appreciate free things psychologically. When they don’t appreciate it they trash it: vandalism, littering will all become bigger problems.

To prevent this effect, you have to have a well educated population first. That’s actually an even more difficult problem to solve.

This isn't a big problem for roads, sidewalks, or the library.

Roads aren’t really free: you need a car or at least a bike.

Sidewalks are free, but they are usually unpleasant or inaccessible. In places where that isn’t true, they absolutely get trashed by litter; some even spit on the sidewalk.

Libraries are seemingly free, but getting a library card often requires you to provide several forms of proof of address, including evidence of paying rent or property taxes. So they aren’t truly free.

spitting on the sidewalk causes literally no damage. Even peeing on it is minimal.

https://www.etipressurewashing.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/0...

That's chewing gum, not saliva

Yes, and common, particularly at chewing gum’s height of popularity.

It looks disgusting so I wish there was a hefty punishment and AI cameras.

Libraries are free. (Well, at least most public libraries. There are private libraries for personal use, institutional libraries for internal use, subscription libraries which require membership fees, and others.)

I've visited libraries in a half dozen countries, where I'm not even a taxpayer. I just walked in.

Some services at the library might not be free, including book checkout or making photocopies.

But if you want to make that distinction, then walking around your neighborhood isn't free because in most place you need to wear clothes, and clothes aren't free.

FWIW, I've walked a lot of forest roads without a car or bike. And the biggest littering problem on our sidewalks, by weight, are the escooter riders who simply leave their machines parked in the middle of the sidewalk.

The problem isn't that the sidewalks are free to use, the problem is one of regulation and enforcement.

That's why libraries are both free and well-loved - they librarians regulate the free space.

In our library, I saw a homeless person pleasuring himself.

Limits. You put limits in place.

Don't give endless free fair, give n free fair per day.

*fares

In the Phoenix Metro area, the fares are capped, so you never pay beyond the cap for daily, weekly, or monthly fares.

If you ride and pay your fare twice, then every ride after that, for the rest of the day, is free. That is very nice. So if you commute and you have a transfer, and you're taking 4 rides per day, then you're saving half of that in fares.

In the old days, you would pay a cash fare and the bus operator could issue a paper transfer ticket. The transfer would be good for a few hours. So your fare was basically per-trip. But the system couldn't track people paying cash fares like that, so there were no free rides without the transfer ticket. If you took two trips a day, like a normal commute, you'd pay at least two fares. Now, with pre-loaded cards or fares on the mobile app, you can track all that stuff, and reload when necessary.

For disabled people or whoever qualifies for "Reduced Fare", your fare costs half ($1.00 instead of $2.00) and so your daily maximum is only $2.00. A really good deal.

technically, possessing two transfer tickets from the same day could be used as proof that you paid enough for the day.

vienna has day tickets that cost as much as two single tickets but you can only buy them on a strip of 8 which you can use one day at a time over an unlimited period

No, they were not proof of anything. They were nearly worthless, and people discarded them all the time. You could collect a fistful of them on and around the bus.

Anyway, that is not how the fare system worked with paper transfers. There were no caps at all. You either paid full fare, or you showed a valid transfer. If you didn't have the transfer, then you paid again and again on any given day. The fare caps only came into use when the system was capable of tracking them, for example a unique preloaded or prepaid card.

Now I have limited experience with American public transit, so perhaps there were some "capped fare" systems in the 1980s or before, but I never saw one that worked that way.

i was talking about how to potentially implement a capped system on paper, not about an actual implementation. if two strips would give you free rides for the rest of the day you probably would not throw them away.

i know the but ticket system from los angeles 25 years ago. you could use each strip only once because you had to hand them in. i think you got a second strip on the next bus so you could potentially make an unlimited chain. if people would throw them away then only because they got one they didn't use. you were also not allowed to use the strip for a return trip on the same route.

>I think public transport should be free.

>Absolutely not.

I think that having it very cheap compared to quality and service delivered is the best of both worlds.

That’s already the case in reality. The NYC Subway’s $3 fare is quite low for example. Just like roads are taxpayer subsidized, public transportation is almost always subsidized. (Some countries like China have heavier subsidies though.)

Very true. This is why they don’t appreciate roads or parking.

It's definitely why roads and parking are congested! People don't value access to roads properly, that's a big part of why driving became the default mode of transit.

The main reason why we should charge money for transit is because it makes it easier to kick off people who ruin it for everyone else. It's not important that transit covers its costs, it's important because requiring payment filters out people who don't value it.

It fucking sucks to be on a train with a homeless guy shouting threats into the air, or with a bunch of teenagers blasting music and intimidating other passengers. Once on the way back from work once, there was a guy watching porn at full volume in a car with children at the other end. Sure, you can say "call the police!" but it's much harder to place cops everywhere (purely expensive) than it is to just send out some ticket inspectors (who generally justify their own salaries).

I was being sarcastic, to be clear. Though it's funny that people clearly cherish parking over most other things in this world, but are willing to pay nothing for it.

You're right about fares being a useful tool to filter for antisocial behaviour. After becoming a parent I became a lot less tolerant of horrible behaviour on trains and buses. Luckily I rarely encounter it here in the Netherlands (Ireland was worse, but still not atrocious, depending on the area)

> it makes no sense to dis-incentivize the use of public transport to begin with

MTA serves NYC. People who can't even afford the subway are definitely not driving over there.

Great let's pay everyone's fare from your income then.

Free public transportation is a huge productivity boost for society.

Then charge them cleanly and don't artificially try to inflate charges. It is the duty of any jury to let someone off when they feel its malicious prosecution.

Police, Prosecutors, and Judges all openly use their discretion. Each of them could have quashed the charge before it got to a jury. The jury is the last line of discretion. Police, prosecutors, and judges love to call it "jury nullification" but its the same power that police, prosecutors, and judges use multiple times a day.

The only crime I see is that police arrested an innocent person on false evidence, prosecutors charged someone based on false evidence, and a judge is actually allowing this case to proceed all based on evidence that everyone knows is false.

> Make them clean the station and pick up trash...

This should just be an established way to pay your fare.

"it's unfair to law-abiding people" is a terrible reason to force more people to abide the law if you think the law is unfair

Paying for public transit is not some fundamental violation of human rights.

If you think free public transit should exist, do the policy and outreach work, and make it happen.

Reserve civil disobedience for injustices that truly cannot be tolerated, even for a second. Or when the democratic process is not available to you.

The real crime is you thinking public transportation should cost the individual money.

Nowhere did I say I'm opposed to free public transit. You shouldn't assume things about people.

Fare jumpers absolutely need jail - the sort of person who jumps the faregate is also much more likely than the average person to be a nuisance or a violent threat to other people on public transit. I think it's more important to jail fare jumpers than a lot of other types of petty criminal, because enclosed public transit is one of the most important areas in a city to control crime; people need to feel safe on public transit in order to want to use it to get around. The sort of person who fare-jumps is extremely often homeless, mentally-ill, or a gang member - not someone who is capable of being compelled to do a minor chore for the station without way more coercive effort than the station employees can be expected to provide. The right response to fare-jumpers is to have police - uniformed specialists in using violence or the threat of violence to enforce public order - physically remove them from the public transit station and keep them in a locked room under guard where they can't harm someone else.

Fined maybe? But jailed is a bit too much. There are poor people who jump the turnstile who are not violent nor a nuisance, why make the assumption that anyone who jumps the turnstile is that bad actor you describe? I jumped the turnstile a few months ago (more like I crawled under in a frenzy like an idiot), I was running late for work, found out my card had to be refilled but there was a line at the machine and the train was approaching the station. Am I a violent criminal? If I got caught it would be fair to fine me but would you jail me?

As far as nuisance and violence on public transportation, that's a different problem that I agree it has to be dealt with. Apparently police don't do anything about it, they instead hunt for fare jumpers...

I pay because fuggit it's cheap but I'm gonna think twice now that I know I can make "those people" think I'm some sort of hardened criminal.

No the punishment should be harsher, not for an hour but 40-60 hours, or fine of $1000-2000. Otherwise they will never learn to respect rules. Especially in the subway where you cannot "accidentally" jump over the turnstile.

I regularly see how people are not paying the bus fare (here in Russia). And the only reason why they do not pay is because the punishment is light (fine of ~25 USD) and chance of being caught and actually prosecuted is close to zero. So paying does not make economical sense.

That’s a great idea, just get people to voluntarily sign up to pay for things like that for the criminals. Like you said, take the $2.50 one way several times a day, every day for one person, times however many people do that out of your income since you want to pay for it.

I am no fan of this rotten and illegitimate government or the fake and imitation justice system, but what do you think happens if every thug can just jump fare and get away with it, because if you had $1000 per month taken out of your paycheck every month, in sure you’d be singing a different tune.

Or we can all just agree that maybe basic transit in a city should be subsidized, maybe say... To the same degree that road construction is?

At which point no one would need to pay a fare, and we'd all still save money trying to prosecute broke teenagers trying to move around a city?

Transit is very heavily subsidized by taxes. In the US, the least money losing system is BART which covers 70%+ of it's operating (but not capital) expenses through fares.

The point is it should be free. Public roads are free.

Sort of? The people using them (driving) pay significant gas taxes, plus parking permits, and other things.

Do you think that engineering, asphalt, machinery, and labor are bankrolled by charitable goodwill? Public roads are absolutely not free; you simply haven't thought hard enough about how the public indirectly pays for it.

Read this thread again and maybe you'll understand.

No one is assuming it's magic free fairy dust.

We're making the argument that perhaps we should subsidize public transport in the same manner we do roads - aka, fucking tax people who have the money to cover the cost.

If we assume that movement is generally positive enough that we don't charge directly for access to roads, why do we assume the alternate for public transit?

Everyone fucking understands how roads get paid for - we spend an inordinate amount of taxpayer dollars on the infrastructure at all levels of government... city/county/state/federal.

And you might then go say something silly like "but muh gas tas!"

And you're right - we do generally tax gas sales to help cover roads, and this is directly a form of consumption tax on roads. Except... we tax gas at $0.33/gallon in my state. A gallon gets you ~20 miles. We charge $2.50 for a metro ticket with an average trip length of 5.7 miles (this includes both rail and bus).

If we taxed the metro trips at the same rate we taxed gas... each rider should be paying ~9 PENNIES. We can round up to a dime. Instead they're paying 25 times that amount.

---

So ultimately - I agree 100 percent. We should think more about how the public should indirectly pay for this. Instead of doing the absolutely batshit insane moral proselytizing that ends up with us ALSO indirectly paying for an entire damn legal process to prosecute broke people for skipping a $2.50 fare on the metro.

But damn if America isn't truly focused on "fuck those poor folks" in a lot of really odd (and usually self-harming) ways.

I don't even know what to say to that. No wonder the western civilization is crumbling and being overrun right before our very eyes.

By Republican logic, public libraries "lose money". So do a lot of public services.

But it's not about some shitty private equitymoney extraction. And it's not lost money.

Public transit is already substandard to driving, and should be free. And it'd be a way to reduce congestion too. But no, it "loses money".

Can you name a country where public transit is free?

I think a better goal would be to not have to travel across the city for basic needs and services. Would reduce congestion even more.

Not a country, but it's free in Belgrade, Serbia for last two years.

Due to weird goverbnment statistics and unaccounted expats officially it's 1.1M to 1.6M of people, but actually there likely well over 2M people living there.

Public transport is pretty good there and it cost their budget $300M-$400M a year.

The buses running along the I-91 corridor in VT/NH USA centered around White River Junction VT and Hanover/Lebanon NH have been free to ride since around Covid. And those are two transit agencies. Broadly: one serves north of Hanover, the other south.

Luxemburg. Was there the other day: public transport was great!

You are falling into a false consensus trap. You are asking a question of someone who has zero comprehension or understanding of the context or foundational knowledge that would enable them to actually answer that question, let alone come to a realization by asking it in a socratic way that you likely subconsciously meant it to be.

You are well beyond the zone of proximal development, the idea that challenging someone somewhat, but within their range of understanding will lead them to come to new understandings and realizations. This person represents a type of people (and not him personally) who lack such fundamental common understanding that you may as well ask that question of a cat.

That's not meant personal, it is a universal challenge and you asking that question is also an example of the very trap you fell into asking it. You lacked the understanding of what you were doing. Many peel fall for this, often even the most "educated" or "intelligent" ... which really should put the definition of "intelligence" itself into question since the "intelligent" keep repeating these types of rather simple mistakes.

Ive dealt with enough "profound academic psychobabble" idiots like you to know what you're going after. And what you're going after is the whole grandstanding "im better than thou" crap. I'll just resort to insults, because you are inherently not worth a discussion.

> that you may as well ask that question of a cat

To be fair, given the previous armchair psychobabblists ive met, my money's on the cat compared to you.

That’s a lot of words to say absolutely nothing.

> Transit is very heavily subsidized by taxes.

So are roads.

Nope. In my state 75-95% (depends on year) of _all_ road-related expenses (including capital projects!) is funded by user fees: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-infrastructur...

In comparison, transit is about 99% subsidized (when capital expenses are included) and about 90% subsidized just for the operational budget.

I am no expert, but those state road funding figures are highly misleading.

It ignores all direct federal subsidies on roads.

It ignores the original moonshot-scale creation of the interstate highway system, which was obviously not based on user fees.

It ignores related health costs caused by dirty air.

It ignores the intangible but very high cost of turning cities into noisy, unpleasant, and dangerous places built for cars instead of humans.

It ignores the less tangible subsidies involving things like military to keep oil flowing.

It ignores current and especially future costs due to a rapidly changing climate.

...and probably many other things.

> It ignores all direct federal subsidies on roads.

It doesn't.

> It ignores the original moonshot-scale creation of the interstate highway system, which was obviously not based on user fees.

That is correct, but the last Interstate freeway was finished 30 years ago.

> It ignores related health costs caused by dirty air.

So does transit.

> It ignores the intangible but very high cost of turning cities into noisy, unpleasant, and dangerous places built for cars instead of humans.

Yeah, and cars ride without any humans inside. Nope. Freeways make cities liveable for humans, not bike bros.

> It ignores the less tangible subsidies involving things like military to keep oil flowing.

So does transit. It's a hidden subsidy for companies that can offload personnel costs onto the public.

Also, we're already in the process of switching to EVs. In a decade gas cars will be a minority of vehicles.

> It ignores current and especially future costs due to a rapidly changing climate.

Just wait until you find out how much transit and dense cities cost.

Public transit is subsidized in a lot of the world. Subsidized is good. Free though.. free is a problem. A good or service that someone doesn't have to pay for becomes valueless to them, despite it still costing someone (sponsor, owner)/something (corp, gov).

Examples:

A free Christmas party, where the cost of the convention center/catered dinner/wine on the table/entertainment was about $110/pp. Those costs were all paid in advance (you might be able to exceed catering, wine is probably fine but at a different rate.. but otherwise you're stuck with the bill/contract), but when tickets were free the no-show rate ("didn't cost me anything") was about 30%. We switched to $20/ticket, and yes there were grumbles about the company being cheap, but the no-shows fell to around 8%.

There's free sections of transit in our city (not the whole system). Most of the disruption and police call-outs happen in this section.. open drug use, screaming at/threatening other passengers or making them feel unsafe, making a home, thefts & pickpockets (does a thief buy a ticket? Perhaps if they spend 6 hours a day "working" and don't need the hassle of being checked for a ticket), even violent crime (stabbings, beatings, one gun situation). An unfortunate side effect of that is we have one of the worst riderships in part because people don't feel safe on transit, and when discussions of subsidies/improvement/expansion come up ridership is basically the only KPI. ("Oh only 12% of the city uses it, let's not further invest").

> Seriously, just take it out of my taxes. I'm happy to work to fund public transportation.

Why don’t you just write a check to your transit authority every year then?

In the off chance this is a genuine question, this thought experiment is always resolved with "reasonable payments are only effective if many people contribute, and that is probably okay".

Consider the extremes: - No one does anything. The cause fails. No one goes broke. Many people are modestly inconvenienced. - One average citizen donates everything to a worthy cause. No one else donates. The cause fails and the donor is broke. Many people are modestly inconvenienced. - Everyone donates a small fee to a worthy cause. The cause achieves its aim. Some people do not benefit, and are modestly inconvenienced.

The choice, when given these two extremes, is clearly to decide by some consensus whether the interests of many (who would otherwise be modestly inconvenienced) outweigh the interests of the few (who would be modestly financially inconvenienced).

But it assumes the cause is truly worthy, the money is handled faithfully, and the survey method is fair and accurate.

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