[wenc]

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 basic 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.

[mmooss]

> 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

You're cherry-picking your own examples. It worked in Iowa City.

Y Combinator and much of SV would be out of business if innovators followed that thinking. One reason is that people do come up with new ideas; that's how the world changes. The other is that the world changes, and what didn't work before now works - costs change and value changes, and now it's worthwhile. For example, with congestion pricing and other rapidly increasong costs of NYC car ownership, there's more value in free transit.

Oddly, it's the thinking advocated by many HN posts, denigrating the innovation under discussion as impossible, useless, etc.

> without sustainability, a political shift will kill it

That can be said of many things. A political shift could kill military funding in the US.

[saithound]

> You're cherry-picking your own examples. It worked in Iowa City.

Indeed, it worked in Brisbane (a metro area comparable to Baltimore in the U.S.) and Lanzhou (comparable to Boston-Cambridge-Newton): congestion was reduced, the environment benefited, and usage increased in many cities that dislodged from that equilibrium and switched to a free-of-charge or symbolic-charge model.

I don't think GP's claim stands, for transit cities big or small.

[littlestymaar]

> Oddly, it's the thinking advocated by many HN posts, denigrating the innovation under discussion as impossible, useless, etc.

A significant fraction of HN has been raised with the idea that “natural” innovation can only arise from the private sector competing on a market, and every attempt at public-funded out-of-market innovation is seen as “unnatural” and doomed to fail.

And like all religion, it's pretty hopeless to refute it with rational arguments.

[bko]

I don't get your comparison to VC model. Sure it's temping to sell $10 for $5 and many VCs fund this business for a while. But the difference is there isn't an infinite backstop. It's not really new or innovative to give things away from "free" and fund it through some other means. But that's the problem. There's a disconnect with the service and what it costs.

You should charge roughly what it costs to operate because that's information. People should ask why it costs so much. People should consider alternatives. Trying to remove prices is like fighting climate change by removing thermometers.

[littlecosmic]

Maybe the military should pillage all the places it goes to self-fund?

[chii]

> A political shift could kill military funding in the US.

and lose the very thing that keeps the US top dog. You're implying that political shifts could happen to shift _anything_.

That's not true for things of fundamental importance. So is transit of fundamental importance?

[saghm]

For what it's worth, the New York Times has spent most of this year actively trying to dissuade people from voting for the mayoral candidate in New York that had free buses as one of the more widely known parts of his platform. I'm not saying there's not an agenda in them publishing this article, but I suspect it has a lot less to do with a predilection for "solutions journalism" as much as trying to backtrack their pretty noticeable opposition to the incoming mayor that ostensibly came from them not being as far leftward as he is.

[JumpCrisscross]

> the New York Times has spent most of this year actively trying to dissuade people from voting for the mayoral candidate in New York that had free buses as one of the more widely known parts of his platform

The Times editorial board repeatedly wrote anti-Mamdani opinion pieces. But speaking as a non-NYC New York Times reader I never saw it unless it was sent to me by a New Yorker--it simply wasn't commentary that was highlighted unless you were specifically trying to follow the NYC election. (And to the extent they criticised his candidacy, it wasn't in rejecting free busses.)

[Gud]

You are making a lot of assertions. Meanwhile, I travel globally for work and my preferred mode of transportation is walking and public transport(ideally tram).

There are BIG DIFFERENCES between how well different cities handle this. There is no "equilibrium", only wise(or unwise) governance.

How do you explain Luxembourg? They've had free public transport for 5 years now.

[xdkyx]

Luxembourg is an outlier and more of an edge case, then something that can be dissected and applied to other countries/cities.

[throwaway0352]

> charge fares, subsidize low-income riders, and fund the basic system with taxes.

Car traffic is also expensive. Highways, parking, and maintenance are massively subsidized through taxes, and they consume far more space per traveler making cities more congested and polluted.

Cities with good public transport also tend to be more walkable, which has health benefits and could provide significant impact to healthcare costs.

According to this article, every $1 invested in public transit generates about $5 in economic returns:

https://govfacts.org/housing-infrastructure/transportation/p...

[eru]

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.

[littlecosmic]

In Singapore there is no MRT congestion prices only for private cars, right? Trains get crowded but still workable. It’s not clear if people would start working 6am to 3pm or something if you did. Overall I think charging money made more sense when there were more private, profit seeking companies involved as it’s the name of the game… buts it’s cheap enough that it’s hard for someone with an ok job the get bothered about it

[blks]

Charging more for publicity transit during peak hours won’t make people use it less, there’s a reason why so many people commute during peak hours

[lazylizard]

on the other hand. gdp is ~200 days of work. 1 day is 0.5% gdp. 1 hour (assuming 8hr day) is 0.06% gdp. gdp/capita is nearly us$90k. 1hr of work is >us$5k!

it might be more cost effective to expand public transport to transport every singaporean to where he/she needs to be on time, than to make them wait..

[fragmede]

> charging for public transport is the right thing to do

It's a simple matter of supply and demand so even if the transit system operates on tokens but those tokens are given away for free, my weird brain would still want to the system to exist to track how the system is being used.

[AlotOfReading]

Consider the case of roads as a system of transit. Fuel taxes and licensing costs don't remotely cover the infrastructure costs, and roads predated them by decades. They're obviously scalable. They're not remotely sustainable financially (and effectively free to access) yet they remain stubbornly resilient even in the face of massive political shifts.

Why is that equilibrium impossible for other transportation infrastructure?

[iso1631]

> Fuel taxes and licensing costs don't remotely cover the infrastructure costs

In which country? Because they certainly do in the UK - about £10b a year on maintenance vs £33b a year from road taxes. Half that maintenance comes from local property taxation and half from the central exchequer

If you include the societal costs from road accidents it's nearer, with estimates putting all costs from accidents including lost productivity at £35b a year. Throw in global warming and you find drivers only cover about half the costs.

But then people who argue societal costs need to be included never seem to acknowledge the societal benefits of a road network.

[soerxpso]

Roads are cheaper than busses.

[mapt]

The thing about public bus systems is that none of them are financially sustainable. If they were, you wouldn't need a government to run them.

My local system collects about 1/3rd of the annual operational costs and none of the (sizable) capital & infrastructural costs in fares.

The choice to collect insufficient fares versus collecting no fares at all, has secondary effects - fewer people choose to ride, spending any money is a psychological nudge against taking the trip, especially if you're not sure how much money you're going to have to spend. The car historically appears to be ~free, while the bus demands exact change in an impatient voice. You can solve the change issue with cards, but you could also just not charge fares.

Let's say you double ridership by taking away fares. This doubling adds approximately nothing to your considerable costs, but you get twice as much direct social benefit, and the price you pay for it is having to cover ~100% of the program cost using taxes instead of ~90%. On top of this you get secondary social benefit - buses move people so much more efficiently than cars that traffic speeds up dramatically, and you don't need to perform continuous expansion of the road network to accommodate ever-growing traffic problems. The labor value of those hours stuck in traffic alone covers the whole program, even if that value isn't something you can practically "capture" for some kind of profit.

[port11]

IIRC the Flemish bus system is profitable. So is the public train company, even if marginally so.

What I dislike about GP's comment is that it obfuscates that mostly it's the lower classes that ride the bus, and paying it with fares takes away from the potential to redistribute tax money that harmonises the way we all live together.

Like you've said: buses move people more efficiently, and once they're on the road they're better off being closer to full since that won't dramatically change the fuel they're burning. Plus less cars, etc.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Big-city transit has an equilibrium

Iowa City isn’t a big city. Most American cities aren’t.

I lived in New York. We had paid subways and busses and that didn’t stop them from being abused like park benches—enforcement did. (And to be clear, the minority creating a mess for others were all over the place. Homeless. Hooligans. Mentally ill who got lost.)

I now live in a small Wyoming town. We have free downtown rideshare. (It’s just slower than Uber.)

[gabinator]

I visited NYC and San Francisco. It's appalling and unacceptable in this day and age.

My small northern Minnesota town is far from perfect, but we don't let our neighbors and kids become fent zombies on the main drag. That's not a lifestyle that we want to enable or perpetuate. I do not understand the mental hurdles that Berkley-educated 'scholars' jump through to rationalize letting people suffer the most potent and deadly forms of addiction. The penal system is the last net to catch these people before they die from OD or blood-borne pathogenc or the consequences of criminal activity. And the "empathetic" west coast intellectuals say "legalize the drugs". Absolute lunacy

[freen]

Exact same argument was made against the interstate highway system.

Now it is lauded as one of the highest ROI investments the US govt ever made.

If you really want to do the math: if we value all urban land equivalently, what is the subsidy provided by free parking? In NYC, it’s astronomical.

Free transit is trivial to fund if you actually care about humans being productive.

Not everyone does: harder to capture rents that way.

[krageon]

You are objectively wrong. Public transit scales the same way free and paid (i.e. based on demand). The cost for free countrywide public transport in a country with very high quality public transportation (so not the US) is about 8k per person, per year. This isn't some insurmountable amount of money - it's not even particularly costly when you compare it to what the infrastructure costs are for cars (mostly related to accident mitigation. Especially bad in the US).

[gnarlouse]

As somebody who grew up in the area, Iowa City has a near-nil homelessness problem.

[echelon]

It's 23 deg F in Iowa City in a few days. It's not even winter yet. I think this has everything to do with it.

Meanwhile it's 70 deg F here in Atlanta. California and Florida have even warmer temps.

[bluGill]

I live just down the road in des moines and there is a homeless problem. It is mostly out of sight but it is there.

[mmooss]

What is your point? The assumed demonization of people because they lack homes is a false assumption. I've spent plenty of time around people who apparently lack housing (I don't ask), including on public transit. I don't find they behave better or worse than others, on average.

[fragmede]

> Every serious transit city in the world ends up in the same place

If we look to Asia, we see that's not the only way things can work. Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, Tokyo, Osaka, are serious transit cities in my book, and their way is to have property development, diversified business models, or operating in extremely dense corridors where demand is high enough to cover costs through fares alone.

But you're right that "just run trains and collect fares" doesn't work and has to be subsidized everywhere else. The question is, how do you account for the subsidies that cars get. The cost to invade Iraq isn't usually accounted for when screaming about how much it costs to fund public transportation out of tax money.

[JeremyNT]

> 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.

What is your basis for this assertion? One could simply increase the tax rate on high income earners and large property holders and readily fund fare free transportation in a financially sustainable and scalable way.

I believe the unstated mechanism of failure here is "it will piss off the wealthy and they will kill it" - which, at some point, needs to stop being true about literally everything in our society, or some extremely unpleasant consequences will manifest.

[inglor_cz]

Here in Czechia, I lived in two cities with a great public transport system. Prague and Ostrava. Ostrava, despite being much poorer, is actually often voted to have the best system in CZ, because the management is really creative and diligent here and they often pull off miracles with a relatively small purse.

That said, yes, it is a major burden on municipal finances. The taxpayer here is mostly OK with it, but compromises have to be done, such as fixing sidewalks when they really fall apart and not a day sooner. Maths cannot really be wished away.

Important factors that plague the entire system:

* fluctuations in cost of energy. The Russo-Ukrainian war, European Green Deal etc. Getting a multi-year contract for electricity that can be used as a basis for budgeting has become impossible,

* driver wages. Drivers can move around the EU and they indeed often do, being a wandering folk almost by definition. Thus every city in the EU competes with Stockholm, Amsterdam or Milan on wages, while having half or less the economic power of those metropolises. So you have to find a precarious balance between "paying your drivers so little that they leave for greener pastures" and "paying your drivers so much that the budget cannot tolerate it".

Full self-driving could alleviate the second problem. Robots don't eat and don't pay any rent.

[jayd16]

Paved roads fails your test but we have those in abundance. I'm not sure this is a useful way to dismiss things.

[eternauta3k]

The answer is transactions costs, many countries charge for roads where it's practical (not in the city).

[rightbyte]

> 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.

You can't name three things, rule out any combination that includes more than two things, and call it a day.

The gas saved is less resources wasted, savings which to a large part are taxable. Etc.

[kamaal]

Bangalore(+State of Karnataka) is currently having free transit, but only for women.

Which seems to have drawn anger from Meninist circles.

People who support this say, it gives more mobility to women from poor and lower middle class households, and hence better employment opportunities, increased family incomes and by the effect taxes as well.

People who criticise this say, the expenses for free rides are offloaded to already burdened tax payers, who quite honestly in the Indian system get nothing in return. These forever increasing free perks for sets of people who won't contribute anything back, at the expense of ever increasing burden on people who are expected to pay without expecting anything in return, won't end well.

[watwut]

Why are women considered to be people who "wont contribute anything back"?

But also, why are women specifically traveling for free? What was the original argument?

[matwood]

> financially sustainable (and without sustainability, a political shift will kill it)

Fiscally sustainable is a BS excuse often put forward by conservatives to not fund the things they don't want funded. Most things the government runs are not fiscally sustainable on their own, but they provide some sort of societal value. See things like the military, police, fire departments, etc...

A political shift could certain still kill it, but let's not pretend it has anything to do with fiscal policy.

[belter]

> 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.

Less Jevons Paradox and more Theory of Constraints...

Five million people are not going to descend on Iowa City because buses are free. Luxembourg has full free public transport from buses to trains, with no feedback loops. Same in Tallinn, Estonia capital where is free for residents.

[anubistheta]

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.

[trial3]

why highlight bus speeds being 2.2% slower but not that ridership went up 30%? which, to me, feels like an obvious correlation to dwell time.

[mmooss]

> only $132

If you don't know that's a lot for some people ...

> they should pay for some of it

They do. It must be paid for, and all government money comes from the citizens.

[Broken_Hippo]

"Only $132"

That is 16 hours of work if you make $8 an hour. You obviously make more than that if you can say "only $132"

[guptadagger]

I dont' know how you reached the "didn't work out well" conclusion, both metrics you mentioned were commensurate with systemwide metrics, meaning fare-free didn't have much of an impact on these routes. Ultimately, ridership increased

[wat10000]

We rarely apply this principle to roads, and I never see anyone clamoring to change that.

[jeromegv]

If roads provide value to people, they should pay for some of it. Right?

[rsynnott]

So, in Ireland, which has a historically pretty terrible public transport system, the government has been fairly aggressively cutting fares. A journey which cost me about 6 euro literally 20 years ago (about 9 euro in today's money) now costs 2 euro, transport is free for kids under 8 and extremely cheap for people under 25, and so on. And it has _worked_; public transport utilisation is dramatically up.

Now, maybe there's a point where it stops working as you reduce fares. But it's not particularly _clear_ that that is the case.

[Braxton1980]

>That equilibrium is stable for a reason. Every major city that tries free transit at scale will eventually snap back to it

What about US school bus programs. They have existed in many areas for decades.

[rkagerer]

Civilization figured out how to make water relatively cheap and widespread (at least in developed countries). We can do the same for transportation.

[taurath]

Do you have examples of cities that have tried and snapped back along with reasons it can’t work, since you speak with such certainty?

[m463]

I think if you treat the bus including "externalities", the bus problem might be very smart.

What if you include road construction and widening, road repair costs, impact of traffic on commerce and taxes, and more nebulous stuff like pollution, quality of life, noise, etc.?

[estimator7292]

Just say that you think poor people are gross and that public transit as a concept is beneath your contempt

[lanthissa]

sounds smart, but this a false premise because its not zero sum and theres this magical thing called taxes that allow you to reap the benefits of a more productive system.

If you have free public transit and that enables more economic activity or more disposable income to be funneled into services that boost the tax rake of the city the gains can offset the cost. This is an equation none of us have the info to do as randos online and its pointless to claim otherwise.

and even if your point was true free buses are a partial subsidy to low income people like you suggest in nyc its busses are a predominantly taken by low income individuals (source https://blog.tstc.org/2014/04/11/nyc-bus-riders-tend-to-be-o... subway nearly everyone, and ride share has their own tax as well.

[xnx]

A transit ride in the US might be $12 of subsidies and a $2 fare. Making the ride $14 of subsidies isn't a big difference. There are even situations where eliminating fares saves money because of the overhead.

That said we'd probably be better off if we eliminated subsidies and introduced competition.

[iso1631]

Waiting for Tallinn to collapse. It's been 12 years now.

[casey2]

>politically unpopular

You mean capitalists will stir up a shitfit if they aren't allowed to profit from someones misfortune. The proper amount of traffic on roads should be close to 0. All LA would have to do is offer more and free bus rides and charge for driving in the city and everyone would save hours of their life for no cost.

[ggherbobooh]

Milwaukee hop