[manarth]

    > "Prices are information"
    > "Is a particular route lightly used? Is it overcrowded?"

There are plenty of ways to evaluate that without charging a fee. You can track utilisation without needing to charge for it.

There's also a qualitative vs quantitive element to it. Only one person uses the bus each day? Eliminate the bus route. Oh, that person is a student who uses the bus to travel to college, and without the bus they would have to drop out of schooling.

The equation isn't necessarily "Is the bus worth a $1.50 bus fare for one person", but rather, is the bus generating a much greater future value by ensuring a student can get to college?

[DemocracyFTW2]

There's also the adjacent phenomenon that when you have a bus that operates, say, every twenty minutes per day which is already inconvenient not least because of inevitable delays and the occasional early bus (meaning your average passenger will wait at least 15min just to make sure they don't miss the ride), and you then start to streamline efficiency by cancelling the worst-performing trips, now you have a schedule people can't easily memorize which is another hassle. As an effect, because transporting passengers is not exactly like herding cattle, people will try to find other means to do the commute, so thinning out your service will likely reduce ridership on all the other tours, too.

[bko]

> There are plenty of ways to evaluate that without charging a fee. You can track utilisation without needing to charge for it.

The point is that utilization is dramatically different when something is "free". Many times the marginal user values it just above 0, and having that person on reduces the value for everyone else. Charging something, anything, weeds out the very marginal people you don't want using the service. Same concept with emails. If we had a marginal fee to send emails (fraction of a cent) it would love spam pretty much overnight. Things shouldn't be "free".

That student in your example would gladly pay as he has no other options.

[manarth]

    > "people you don't want using the service"

That's a subjective evaluation, which doesn't have a clear criteria.

[DemocracyFTW2]

> Things shouldn't be "free"

More good reasons to hate this government.