[saithound]

> Brisbane's free buses are only the "city loop". The rest of the transit system is fare based

With all due respect, I expect more effort than Googling "are buses really free in Brisbane", then copy-pastig the AI summary. Symbolic charges were mentioned for a reason, both cities have a fixed "fare" of about 30 US cents on their networks.

If you think there are examples of GP's claim that "every major city that tries free transit at scale will eventually snap back to it", feel free to substantiate it by naming major cities which tried the Brisbane-Lanzhou model and snapped back.

[AnthonyMouse]

> both cities have a fixed "fare" of about 30 US cents on their networks.

What form of corruption-induced lobbying is this now? A sizable advantage of making it actually free is to remove the huge cost of the fare collections infrastructure.

[saithound]

If you remove the fare collection infrastructure, you remove beneficial usage tracking infrastructure too.

There might also be other "social engineering" benefits to having a fixed symbolic charge, as some people argued in this thread. I don't know about that, but I don't think it's _just_ lobbying.

[aldonius]

In Brisbane I think our ticketing system cost overhead is maybe 10%?

The cost of the programme rolling out new ticketing infra (the first major ticketing system upgrade in ~15 years since we first got integrated ticketing, going from a stored-value smart card to also being able to tap your credit card) is roughly the same amount of money as the annual revenue from fares.