Without nominal costs, buses turn into mobile benches for unhoused people and druggies. It’s the same story as what happens with libraries.

[delayed]

> That means, 5/6th of the budget is subsidized by the taxpayers of SF. There is no reason why Muni can't be free.

You'd still want to charge for congestion. Ie when a particular bus (or rather bus route) is reliably full at a particular time of the day, gradually raise prices until it's just below capacity.

Basically, you want to transport the maximum number of passengers while making it so that any single person who wants to get on the bus (at prevailing prices) still can.

Instead of a bespoke dynamic system that adjust prices dynamically, you might want to keep it simple and just have a simple peak / off-peak distinction.

I mostly agree.

> You can pick free, or scalable, or financially sustainable (and without sustainability, a political shift will kill it), but you cannot have all three at once.

Real polities are of finite size, so you don't need (infinitely) scalable.

Here in Singapore we could sustainably afford to make public transport free, if we wanted to.

However I agree with you that charging for public transport is the right thing to do. (And to charge users of government provided services in general for everything, and to give poor people money.) If nothing else, you at least want to charge for congestion at peak hours, so that there's always an epsilon of capacity left even at rush hour, so any single person who wants to board the train at prevailing prices can do so.

https://www.icgov.org/government/departments-and-divisions/t...

Most of the routes run Monday thru Saturday. Schedules are something that are easily changed to support demand.

So there is nothing to learn her at all?

Good thing there are plenty of other cities with free bus lines and no one saying “no we have to do everything exactly like Iowa City”!

So many public transit options just absolutely fall about if you have more than the standard 1.5 kids.

It adds up super fast; even “kids ride free with parent” would go a long way.

If you have any transfers as part of that to muni or other services you'll be happy to know that they'll be much cheaper/free starting in December.

https://clipper2.hikingbytransit.com/

When I had a solar-charged EV, taking transit to SF only made sense if I was going by myself and didn't need to do any transfers. Any additional people or modes and it was always better to drive.

We just need to subsidize public transport like we subsidize roads.

I think the cost saving will be realised by not having to expand the road network as quickly if they convince people to use public transport. The cost of land acquisition/resumption along with the improbability of widening some central bottlenecks like Coronation Drive, the SE Arterial and the hell-hole that is Hale Street.

Personally, the $1 commute from the Sunshine Coast has been very good. I occasionally drive in but the Bruce Hwy has been a constant process of widening each section as they barely keep up with the traffic increases.

I think what you will see is a lot more people moving out to residential areas north of Brisbane seeking cheaper housing as they can take advantage of the almost free travel. Especially if they eventually build the Rail/Light Rail through South Caloundra to Maroochydore.

The real benefits come from eliminating fares.

While I have never lived in a place with free transit, I have lived in places where it was possible to board trains without passing through fare gates and certain busses through the rear exit. It is amazing how much faster boarding is. They probably face some lost fares, but the benefit of faster travel times outweigh the cost.

I also think that those criticizing free fares are disingenuous. None of those cities had problems with (insert stereotypical undesirable group) using public transit. If anything, there were fewer issues because everyone was more inclined to behave since there were more eyes on the trains and busses.

EDIT: it's also worth noting that collecting money costs money. That's especially noticeable when upgrading to (or to new) electronic fare systems, but it's also true when using things like tickets and cash. It probably doesn't mean such in the cities I've lived in ($3+ fares), but I'll bet it accounts for a lot more in cities that charge $0.50 or $1 fares.

Iowa City is in Johnson County. A 2024 point-in-time count of the chronic homeless population--the highly visible population noticeably encountered in public spaces--in Johnson and Washington Counties combined is less than 200 people. See https://opportunityiowa.gov/media/5390/download?inline#page=... There are also only 13 bus routes, and it's a college town with a significant percentage of price-sensitive student ridership (i.e. highly elastic demand) that either wouldn't qualify or wouldn't bother applying for fare subsidies or passes (common in major metro regions). The context is incomparable to major coastal cities.

We know free transit works in many cases. There are plenty of examples. But it's rare to compare and contrast the contexts. (But, see, e.g., this 2012 National Academy of Sciences report: https://cvtdbus.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/2012-07-TCRP-...) It's far easier to promote free transit than it is to address underlying issues, like regulatory barriers to housing production and infrastructure projects, that limit organic improvements to social welfare and which are likely to cause free transit to fail long-term in large, diverse metro areas.

I live there in that city. There are hardly any homeless at all here. Not like other cities at least. I could see it being a major problem in other places.

Last time I visited New York I was lucky to have a companion who knew all the ways to get around including the free bus lines. The people using these buses were no different from those using buses and other public transportation that charged fares.

Ipso facto, eliminating fare collection eliminates crime. Fare evasion as a crime amounts to make-work for cops. Not all value, and often least of all value in public goods, is derived from charging at the point of use.

Having a fare wouldn’t affect this much. It’s not too hard to get someone to spot you a couple of bucks at a bus stop.

Honestly it’s not that big a deal if someone sleeps on the bus. Homeless, drunk, tired from work, whatever.

When I was younger and lived near Iowa City homelessness was nearly unseen. Not sure what it's like these days.

Whenever I hear about this criticism of free public transit I always wonder why the question isn't "how do we keep homeless people from living on our busses" and is instead "why don't these homeless people have some place to live that isn't a bus?"

Homeless people aren’t living in the bus. Cool your stigmas. It’s weird your biggest concern is the people who need the most help. Life must be pretty good for you to attack those in need.

I just love cycling in Paris (apart from winter...) the experience is amazing, and the city is beautiful. It's a joy to experience the city this way.

Both bicycles & free transports would be even better !

That's how we lost public transit the first time. Here's hoping local government knows their history.

United States vs National City Lines, Inc. 1947.

Is it cheaper to lobby or to create an incompetent monopoly to ruin things?

This would happen naturally except that most US cities have made it illegal to build anything without gobs of parking attached, so car drivers like myself get a government handout.

In Tokyo, parking is managed by the market, so it’s incredibly expensive. So it’s always cheaper to take public transit without artificially low public transit prices.

From experience, $1 is not enough to keep out the people who spend the whole trip talking about where they want to go to jail for the winter.

And $1 is already expensive enough that if the destination is within 5-10 miles, driving is cheaper if you already have a car and parking, so you are keeping that class of people out.

Though really I find the main reason people don't take the bus is that there aren't enough buses (in time or space) for where/when people really want to go. This is an `m×n` problem.

Or maybe you could take serious steps for the homeless as well.

What would happen if you had to tap a card/phone to get in to the subway system (and this was enforced, no jumping turnstiles), and then have to tap it to get out too.

Then if someone is habitually in the system for a significantly longer time than it reasonably takes to travel from point A to B, deactivate their access.

In Portland they make the busses free in the central area but charge a bit outside that, partly to stop homeless sleeping in the busses.

Why do we want to prevent people from walking?

why not go in the other direction and get them housing and healthcare so they can be treated like people and will also not disrupt your ride

people from outside the US often think it’s a land of fabulously rich ppl and are aghast at how we treat our citizens

Corvallis, Oregon is another college town where buses are free within the city and also to some other cities including Eugene and McMinnville.

I'm conservative. I think buses should be free. Then they'll actually get used and all the secondary benefits they were supposed to bring will be much more easily realized.

You need public transport in major cities. Not everyone can or should drive.

You need private transportation almost everywhere. Not everyone should be forced to ride public transport just because it exists.

As long as people have an actual choice that's not manipulated in some way then I think the system is fine. It has a public function and it provides immediate and secondary benefits.

Iowa City is the bluest of Iowa cities. It's a university town.

That is a particularly fine line to walk for the modern conservative. Government should not be picking winners, except for the very targeted tariffs that just happen to benefit company X or Y.

Please stop watching, andd being a pawn of, paid and party propoganda on tiktok et al.

You can tell who actually lives in cities because they're the ones who see through this and go about their lives unafraid of city violence fanfic.

Oh, they've got drugs there, don't worry about that...

Which ones are those?