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Comment by tyrabound | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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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").

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