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.)

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.

*fares

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).

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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...

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

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.

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

> 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.

> 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.

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.