This is one of those NYTimes "solutions journalism" pieces meant to celebrate the program rather than truly analyze it.

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. The minute you push on one, second-order effects pop up somewhere else.

It is a classic wicked problem: solving it literally changes the problem.

Big-city transit has an equilibrium point, and it is incredibly stable. Every serious transit city in the world ends up in the same place: charge fares, subsidize low-income riders, and fund the system with taxes.

That equilibrium is stable for a reason. Every major city that tries free transit at scale will eventually snap back to it, because it is the only configuration that does not implode under feedback loops. It keeps demand reasonable, service reliable, and the politics tolerable.

It didn't work out well when the NYC MTA tried fare free rides. https://www.mta.info/document/147096 Dwell time and customer journey time decreased. The bus speeds were lower on the fare free routes.

If public transport provides value to people, they should pay for some of it. 30 day unlimited ride pass in only $132.

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.