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Comment by IanCal | Hacker News Reader

As a different data point, in Manchester (UK) there are 3 free bus routes around the city. They are used quite heavily and work extremely well. There seems to be no problem with homeless people using them as shelters. I would love to see them expanded.

One stark contrast between these busses and the ones that charge is the time it takes to get people onto the bus. After getting used to the free version, getting on a paid bus feels glacial when it's busy. Seeing queues of busses feels wrong. I can't help but wonder how much better the transport system would be if you took out the time it takes to take payment and give tickets to people and just let them on.

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You don't really have the speed problem in London where you can pay by contactless oyster or contactless credit/debit card though.

It's still way too slow to tap in as people fumble for cards and the general latency between the tap and acceptance.

Might be that there are a lot less homeless in Manchester, or the UK generally.

I wonder what the numbers are.

Significantly higher if perusing this wikipedia article is anything to go by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness#Statistics_for_de...

UK: about 10K USA: about 650k

USA has about 6 times UK population, so if their populations were equal the UK would have about 60K, or one tenth of the problem.

Note: This is just guesswork just perusing that article and taking guesses at populations(60mil and 330mil). Also, it looks like countries define homelessness slightly differently, but I don't have time to read through that part of it now, so I'm bookmarking it for later.

The next question is, why is it so much higher in America?

Homelessness is a moral as well as practical problem. How can more than half a million people have no home in the richest country on earth?

Wasn't the point of the grand parent's post that, per capita, it isn't higher in the US as compared to the UK?

UK: 10K USA: 650k - US has 6 times the population of the UK so it look like the problems is ~10 times worse in the US.

Because (most of) the people of the richest country on earth believe that any form of tax-financed welfare is "socialism", which is evil, and the only reason they're the richest country on earth is diligent avoidance of "socialism".

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