Against Free Buses
Much of the public discussion over A Better Billion, our proposal to increase New York’s subway construction spending by $1 billion a year in lieu of Zohran Mamdani’s free bus plan, has taken it for granted that free buses are good, and it’s just a matter of arguing over spending priorities. Charlie Komanoff, who I deeply respect, proposes to combine subway construction with making the buses free. And yet, free buses remain a bad idea, regardless of funding, because of the effects of breaking fare integration between buses and the subway. If there is money for making the buses free, and it must go to fare reductions rather than to better service, then it should go to a broad reduction in fares, especially if it can also reduce the monthly rate in order to align with best practices.
Planning with fare integration
The current situation in New York is that buses and the subway have nearly perfect fare integration: the fares are the same, the fare-capped passes apply to both modes equally, and one free transfer (bus-bus or bus-subway) is allowed before the passenger hits the cap. Regular riders who would be taking multi-transfer trips are likely to be hitting the cap anyway so that restriction, while annoying, doesn’t change how passengers travel.
Under this regime of fare integration, buses and the subway are planned together. The bus network is not planned to connect every pair of points in the city, because the subway does that at 2.5 times the average speed. Instead, it’s designed to connect subway deserts to the subway, offer crosstown service where the subway only points radially toward the Manhattan core, and run service on streets with such high demand that buses get high ridership even with a nearby subway. The same kinds of riders use both modes.
The bus network has accumulated a lot of cruft in it over the generations and the redesigns are half-measures, but there’s very little duplication of service, if we define duplication as a bus that is adjacent to the subway and has middling or weak ridership. For example, the B25 runs on Fulton on top of the A/C, and the B37 and B63 run respectively on Third and Fifth Avenues a block away from the R, and all have middling traffic. In contrast, the Bx1/2 runs on Grand Concourse on top of the B/D but is one of the highest-ridership buses in the system. B25-type situations are rare, and most of the bus service that needs to be cut as part of system modernization is of a different form, for example routes in Williamsburg that function as circulators with maybe half the borough’s average ridership per service hour.
In this schema, the replacement of a bus with a train is an unalloyed good. The train is faster, more reliable, more comfortable. Owing to those factors, the train can also support higher ridership and thus frequency. If the train stops every 800 meters and averages 30 km/h and the bus stops every 400 and averages 15 (the current New York average is much lower; 15 is what is possible with stop consolidation from 200 to 400 meter interstations and other treatments), then it takes a 2.5 km trip for the replacement to be worth it on trip time even for a passenger living right on top of the deleted bus stop, and a 5 km one if we take into account the walk penalty – and that’s before we include all the bonuses for rail travel over bus travel, which fall under the rubric of rail bias.
The consequences of differentiated fares
All of the above planning goes out the window if there are large enough differences in fares that passengers of different classes or travel patterns take different modes. Commuter rail, not part of this system of fare integration in New York or anywhere else in the United States, is not planned in coordination with the subway or the buses, and fundamentally can’t be until the fares are fixed. Indeed, busy buses run in parallel to faster but more expensive and less frequent commuter lines in New York and other American cities, and when the buses happen to feed the stations, as at Jamaica Station on the LIRR or some Metro-North stations or at some Fairmount Line stations in Boston, interchange volumes are limited.
Commuter rail has many problems in addition to fares. But when the subway charges noticeably higher fares than the bus to the point that passengers sort by class, the same planning problems emerge. In Washington, the cheap, flat-fare bus and more expensive, distance-based fare on Metro led to two classes of users on two distinct classes of transit. When Metro finally extended to Anacostia with the opening of the Green Line in 1991, an attempt to redesign the buses to feed the station rather than competing with Metro by going all the way into Downtown Washington led to civil rights protests and lawsuits alleging that it was racist to force low-income black riders onto the more expensive product.
Whenever fares are heavily differentiated, any shift toward the higher-fare service involves such a fight. One of the factors behind the reluctance of the New York public transit advocacy sphere to come out in favor of commuter rail improvements is that those are white middle class-coded because that’s the profile of the LIRR and Metro-North ridership, caused by a combination of high fares and poor urban service. Fare integration is a fight as well, but it’s one fight per city region rather than one fight per rail project.
And more to the point, New York doesn’t even need to have that one fight at least as far as subway-bus integration is concerned, because the subways and buses are already fare integrated. What’s more, free bus supporters like Mamdani and Komanoff aren’t proposing this out of belief that fares should be disintegrated, but out of belief that it’s a stalking horse for free transit, a policy that Komanoff has backed for decades (he proposed to pair it with congestion pricing in the Bloomberg era) and that the Democratic Socialists of America have been in favor of. The latter is loosely inspired by 1960s movements and by reading many tourist-level descriptions in the American press of European cities with too weak a transit system for revenue to matter very much. Free buses in this schema are on the road to fully free transit, but then the argument for them involves the very small share of transit revenue contributed by buses rather than the subway. In effect, an attempt to make the system free led to a proposal that could only ever result in disintegrated fares, even though that is not the intent.
But good intent does not make for a good program. That free buses are not proposed with the intent of breaking fare integration is irrelevant; if the program is implemented, it will break fare integration, and turn every bus redesign into a new political fight and even create demand for buses that have no reason to exist except to parallel subway lines. The program should be rejected, not just because it costs money that can be better spent on other things, but because it is in itself bad.
Pedestrian Observations 
Bravo !
One of the arguments for free transit is that there will be no cost of fare collection and no fare evasion. Both are terrible arguments.
We have a terrible, broad social problem with not only poor people (for whom I have some sympathy) avoiding fare-payments, but also presumably better-off commuter rail passengers not validating their tickets until they see a conductor.
Approximately 25% of the MTA’s operating income is from fares. Over the past 50 years, the subway and bus fare has increased at a lower rate than inflation, and–as Alon points out–the fare value has increased because of free transfers.
And when the pendulum swings the other political direction, the next generation of political leaders will not dare reimpose fares, but instead will decrease service.
If the politicians want to fund transit for poor people or students, they should pay the MTA for the lost fares.
Fare gates solve that.
There are pros and cons of fare gates.
A system so that people trying to validate their tickets only when they see a conductor are caught and fined for that action would also solve the problem – the real question is the local legal environment supportive of that, if you can’t fine people who are cheating the system enough to make it a net negative to cheat fare gates are the best answer.
Fare gates are often badly implemented. If you have them they need to be fast to let people with the correct fare through – there must never be a line at the gate. If someone is “running late” and sees their train at the platform when they enter, the fare gets should not be why they can’t sprint to get on their train in time. (assume someone in good physical shape and the sprint is safe at the moment)
Trams here have a Razzia button, which enables the inspectors to lock the validators on the tram as soon as they get on, to defend against this problem.
Or in Sydney there are no validators on the trams. You have to swipe before you get on. OTOH there will be a certain level of “fare evasion” because, unlike the trains, there are no gates. Everyone, including me, has done it when a tram is about to depart but there is a gaggle of tourists occupying the validators.
What is terrible about the following argument?
Adopting current best practice (PoP monthlies) has benefits over the current system, and its end result is that ~100% of the urban population buys a monthly, for the same price of whatever a monthly costs, independent of how much money they have. Which is to say, the transit agency collects a head tax, and has to set up a largely duplicate tax collection organization for it. We already know that both of these are bad on their own (a head tax is regressive), so on general principles we should look for a revenue-neutral replacement of this head tax with a flat-or-progressive municipal tax collected by the already-extant tax collection service, i.e. a very slight hike to the existing tax.
Separately, an agency with 25% farebox ratio is already 75% funded from some more usual tax (be that the general budget or a separate earmarked source). The political support for this component of the agency’s funding depends on the service being useful, roughly mirroring ridership and farebox income. (Yes, there are differences: the high support for airport links relative to their ridership shows that when people vote tax funding, they ignore how often they expect to use the service.)
One obvious counterargument I see is that far less than 100% of the population would actually have a monthly (because a lot of people apparently live in the municipal boundary but either don’t use the production amenity provided by the existence of the city, or drive a car everywhere), and their tax-support for transit shouldn’t be increased above the current level. Basically “car drivers shouldn’t pay for transit”. Unsurprisingly, I don’t see it as convincing.
This is because per head of population the usage of airport links is pretty high compared to other public transport. Parking at the airport is expensive and slow.
A lot of this is maths, in a hypothetical circular city of radius 20km and even density, then half the population is within 14km of the centre and half is in the outside 6km, with over 1/4 of the whole population in the final 3km of the city.
Now yes real cities have higher density in the middle, but also more commercial usage in the middle so the population density is closer to the theory.
Good argument.
A good argument against PoP monthlies being best practice
Also in e.g London the radial connections are pretty close to the middle. The circle line is 1-5km from the centre (Piccadilly Circus) and the Mildmay/Windrush line circles are maybe 7km from the centre – whereas the edge of the city is 20km from the centre.
Beyond that you have the bus-only Superloop.
Even ignoring drivers altogether, in a nice urban environment, people who work in their neighborhood including from home, and people who don’t work like stay at home spouses and retired, have no need to leave walking/biking distance of home. That’s like the entire “15 minute city” concept.
Of course some of those people will still leave walking/biking distance of home often enough to make monthly passes worth it, but most probably won’t.
This is also asserted against real world evidence. The lowest car use metro areas in the world use distance based fares, paid through transit cards at fare gates and validators, with relatively limited monthly passes.
People who support it present a chain of reasoning about why it would be better even if the vast majority of transit ridership globally is on a different model.
Your argument is a proof by contradiction chain of reasoning against PoP monthlies being best practice, though as mentioned, I think 100% usage of monthly passes is a bad assumption.
In many cities (or for that matter countries, even on intercity services) retirees ride for free. What, if any, side this is an argument for is unclear.
Now, a marginal trip worth caring about will definitionally have much more value than a few single fares, so this isn’t a strong argument, but just imagine a politician saying: “It is our considered policy that e.g. a housewife with “too few” necessary trips should have to pay actual money for the fare when she wants to visit a museum/stadium (inherently too big for 15min), or an urbanist meetup (niche interest), or a friend across town, whereas her husband shouldn’t have to pay for trips like this because he already has a monthly (or has hit the fare cap).”
My problem with distance-based fares is that you need gates (or equivalent), which is not a problem exactly as long as the overwhelming majority of your ridership is on heavy rail. If that’s the case, because you’re a megacity and the heavy rail network is so dense that it provides coverage and leaves little ecological niche for ~buses (because terrain constrained suburban growth into a <<2-dimensional shape and good density), I have no opposition. However, if you are a smaller city (say, 1-5M), even with a good heavy rail backbone (e.g. one S-Bahn tunnel and a triangle of metros) the majority of your ridership will be on systems ranging from “bus” to “subway-surface”, which (on the surface parts of the route) tend to have (and benefit from) open platforms, or indeed cannot reasonably gate off their “platforms”. Thus you would need to compel passengers to tap on the vehicle, which isn’t a problem if every tram has a dedicated ticket inspector in addition to the motorman, as used to be done everywhere in the world until wage growth made this untenable. (Correspondingly, buses and trams often had a fare system based on the approximate number of stops traveled, or fixed “segments”.) But in the 21st century, bus/tram-heavy systems need to forget about tapping, hence monthlies (or moving from already-more-than-half-tax-funded to fully-tax-funded operations).
You can tap on and off with validators on vehicles or platforms. I agree that PoP with most people using monthly passes is very appealing for tram/bus dominated systems.
That said, your argument in favor of free fares is one of the better arguments against PoP monthlies being best practice. If almost all transit users use wide area monthly tickets, you lose a lot of the benefits of fares.
It is good business practice to reward you loyal customers. It encourages their loyalty to continue. They are also your lease expensive customers to keep – they know the system and so are less likely to need staff – and even when they do the cost to answer it is amortized over all the future trip the same answer applies to.
Kids should ride transit free for similar reasons – it is a long term investment in getting them in the habit of using transit (when they don’t have other options or money) so when they grow up and can afford cars that isn’t the first thing they dream of.
You shouldn’t charge so much that the “housewife” finds it is never worth taking transit. However they are your most expensive trips to serve.
I’m generally against reduced rates for retired people. Those with money should pay. You need a program for the poor and some retired people are poor enough to fall into this program, but those who can afford to pay should.
Note that “housewives” and retired people are more likely to use your system off-peak when there is excess capacity and thus they are cheaper to serve. I have not looked at the economics in depth, but it seems reasonable to sell off-peak fares at a discount which encourages people who are not regular riders to use the system when it isn’t as busy. Those on a monthly pass are likely to use the system at peak times, and it is hard to know what you will do in a month so I don’t think a off-peak monthly pass makes sense. This entire paragraph is a place where I’m not 100% sure, but it seems like there is something here that might be worth it.
“The lowest car use metro areas in the world use distance based fares, paid through transit cards at fare gates and validators, with relatively limited monthly passes.”
Paris would be a major exception to this, right?
And it is relatively recent. But then there is NYC, except for its regional rail which reverts to distance-based fares? ie. what is equivalent to Paris RER?
Anyway I think Paris may be leading the way here. If we want to get those exurbanites out of their cars it is not so smart to penalise them for using public transit. In these mega-cities fares from the outer to anywhere can be very punishing. With GPX arriving in the next few years, it is part of the push to get suburbanites out of their cars more often.
[Is Moscow flat fare or distance-based? I can’t remember. It being a poorer city (cf western cities) it too wants/needs to mobilise all of its giant city more on public transit than its ridiculously congested roads. ]
The unlimited monthly in Paris is not that recent – it goes back to 2012.
New York has stingy discounts for season passes – even before it just abolished the monthly, the monthly cost 46 times as much as a single trip, compared with 36 in Ile-de-France (which is at Europe’s high end – the range here is usually 15-30). It also has nothing like the RER.
I should probably write more about Paris and the push to get people out of cars, but, in brief, this push is disjoint from any Métro and RER construction, and focuses on street redesign intra muros. Same thing in Germany – the people who are most concerned about modal shift away from cars usually oppose U- and S-Bahn construction and think faster transport than trams and bikes is immoral, while the politicians who build more U- and S-Bahn lines, like the ones who sign off on major expansion in Ile-de-France, usually also support more urban highways.
You don’t view GPX, the RER E extension, the extension of the legacy metro, and the growth of the tram as being at least partially motivated by a desire to reduce car usage? These expansions are often accompanied by urban infill in the Petite couronne near the new stations. This all makes living in the petite couronne car-free much more viable. The decline in the % of households owning cars between 2011 and 2022 was in part driven quite heavily by the Petite couronne:
https://imgur.com/a/nVoMUAF
For that matter, street redesigns that reduce the amount of space for cars have been spreading into the Petite Couronne.
Quite (and extension of M14 & M11 deep into the suburbs). Another of Alon’s few blindspots. But his HDS (Hidalgo Derangement Syndrome) is about to come to an end with the upcoming mayoral election and H not standing again. Unless of course her Mr Green wins and it continues!
[I should add, before someone else does, that Hidalgo doesn’t have much influence on those decisions of RATP by StIF etc.]
The Velib bike share scheme quickly spread to the suburbs too.
*their
It has express subway lines. They could redesignate everything and call the A train to Far Rockaway the RER B1 and the A train to Rockaway Park the B2 and the B3 is the train that goes to Lefferts Blvd. When it heads north it could be the B4. The C train could be the Metro 1. The D train could be the B5 when it’s headed south to Coney Island and the B6 when it’s going to the Bronx. Yokels from the hinterlands would still complain that it’s not a Red train and a Blue train. Then there are clueless transit fans who want to extend the subway to places that already have rail service. https://transitcosts.com/a-better-billion.html
But it is low compared to large European cities I.e. London, Paris and Istanbul.
But those are much slower.
I can’t take the Paris RER from Yankee Stadium to Rockefeller Center. The speed of the RER or the slowness of the Metro is irrelevant. Using the express subway train is faster than taking the local subway train. And unlike the long walks between RER and Metro stations the local is across the platform from the express and vice versa.
Except in especially colorful crayonista frenzy, that there are local subway trains and express subway trains – that connect with the local suburban trains and the express suburban trains – is as good as it is going to get.
Those people who wouldn’t have a monthly pass are what matters. Even the most transit cities the transit mode share is around 1/3 – 2/3rd of the population is doing something else (drive, walk, bike…). This makes the “I’ll reduce your taxes by taking funding from that bloated transit system that you don’t even use” a powerful message – it won’t win every election, but it can turn a few. This sets up a death-spiral from funding cuts.
Fares force the transit agency to notice what routes generate a large part of their revenue and give at least those good service to keep the riders they have. In many cities (at least in the US) the executives in charge of transit never ride their own system and so they will direct money to what they feel like (which might or might not be useful transit) if there are not good signals that they need to keep some good service.
A city needs a program for the poor – but the majority of the population isn’t poor. The non-poor people generally would pay more money for better service.
This is bizarre. Do people really believe this? Currency is the only way to measure everything?
Measuring cost-effectiveness of services and aligning networks to maximize cost-effectiveness (solely, or, realistically, in combination with other politically-determined goals) is utterly unrelated to whether there is a cost-per-ride barrier to the rider.
One can equally “force” a transit agency to notice ridership by doing manual statistical couting surveys, or also “force” a transit agency to notice ridership by installing people counters on vehicles, or by deriving estimates of passenger load from other vehicle data.
Currency is a force in that you will be hurt if it falls. You can force someone to count and report all kinds of numbers, but the executives can ignore those numbers if they want to. (and indeed the Coverage vs Ridership argument gives them cover to ignore them) Money however is something they cannot ignore, if it goes down there is less funds for their pet project.
Henry: Jarrett Walker’s version — I assume it can be treated as the point of origin? — quite clearly says that “think like a business” is the Ridership end, so Coverage is explicitly not that, thus execs have permission to ignore money. And when money runs out, what they do is go with hat in hand to the municipal government. If pity doesn’t work, they quietly remind the council that they hold half the population and half the economy hostage.
Whether transit agency leadership is forced to care about cost effectiveness is related to whether they get paid purely on political will or on actually providing a service people want to use
Basil Marte: Jarrett Walker is talking only about the coverage vs ridership question. That is a valid question, but either answer is at least somewhat useful for someone. However transit agencies can spend their money on lots of other things.
They can build an expensive big beautiful bus depot (not maintenance shed) in the middle of nowhere – it will look great, but transit becomes worse for everyone because the buses are going to a place where nobody wants to be in a direction they don’t want to go.
they can start a tourist bus system that isn’t transit, but takes transit money for tourism. (this might be a good thing for the city, but tourism money hiding in a transit budget is still fraud)
“Fares force the transit agency to notice what routes generate a large part of their revenue and give at least those good service to keep the riders they have”
The JFK and Newark airtrains are, per mile, one of the higher cost transit systems on the planet.
They also offer some of the worst possible transit experiences.
10 million riders is also quite bad when Heathrow central station alone has 8 million, and that doesn’t include the tube or terminal 4 or terminal 5.
If Heathrow is too big compared to JFK Gatwick has 20 million and Stansted has 10 million.
The amusement park ride at Newark is… an amusement park ride. Quite entertaining. When it was actually operating. They are replacing it. At the kind of prices New York City pays for subway. With cable cars.
The 1.7 million passengers a year using the Newark one is even worse, Manchester airport station has 5.5 million passengers a year.
It has to be operating for people to use it.
It seems, Wikipedia isn’t definite about it, everybody else who was stupid enough to also install the monorail-o-the-future!!! amusement park ride at Newark airport have …retired… them. It breaks down. Alot. “everybody” knows that. And avoids it.
The Port Authority, being the Port Authority, is going to replace it. Decades past the service life of the amusement park ride. At the same kind of prices as Manhattan subway tunnels. Above ground. On land they already own. Where there are no neighbors to be NIMBY.
Under the heading of “moving a bus trip to the subway is an unalloyed good,” I would also add that subway service is less expensive than bus service, in terms of both cost-per-passenger-mile-traveled and cost-per-unlinked-passenger-trip. The numbers are skewed by the fact that coverage buses are included in the pot with highly-used ones, but the difference is, I think, large enough to offset this effect.
https://www.transit.dot.gov/ntd/transit-agency-profiles/mta-new-york-city-transit
If anything, buses should generally be more expensive than the subway and without a free transfer to nudge people into helping the system as a whole be more efficient by accurately conveying information through prices.
This works particularly well when bikes are a viable (or best) option for most trips that might otherwise be on a bus, e.g., in Japan and The Netherlands. Bike infrastructure is dirt cheap compared to buses widespread bike usage is great for public health.
People’s attention is not a free resource. Letting them drop the entire dimension of fares from their thoughts is good. The benefit of fare integration (treat it as the advertising budget) is higher than its value as a price signal. “Use the system purely based on usefulness/convenience, don’t worry about fares” should be considered as a type of advertisement. Businesses know that minimizing the friction people face on their way to giving the business money is very important. Lubricating away these frictions — including the need to fish in your pocket/wallet for the thing to tap, rather than just walking onto the bus or into the station — is a small step in the right direction. (Tap-and-cap is actually a not so small annoyance to bulldoze. Making people do unreasonable things, e.g. insisting that they tap to “pay” $0, is an excellent way to tick them off.)
Price signals are necessary when in their absence, people would overuse something. Ever since they told William Horace Coltharp that he couldn’t bring 37 tons of bricks on the bus as hand luggage, the ~only problem use case is the “mobile homeless shelter”, and fare policy is not the correct tool to address it. Other than that, people aren’t going to overuse the bus, or transit in general, thus the price signal can be abolished without ill effect. (Taking something like the area median income, the value of the time passengers spend just inside the moving vehicle exceeds typical urban fares. No need for further signals.)
With bikes, I understand that (again) the time benefits mean the bus would have to be cheaper than free to compete. The average linear speed of improved urban buses is 15 km/h. Mass cycling is slightly slower. But bikes have zero headway, and unlimited (door to door) access. It is superfluous to go out of your way to kick the bus.
Is it better than lower prices on what is cheaper to provide? Or an alternative look, more money from people who are getting a ton of value out of the system? The most successful transit systems in the world use distance based fares and and monthly passes of limited usefulness.
People also aren’t constantly paying attention to fares, just like they aren’t constantly paying attention to exactly how much gas, maintenance, and depreciation they are eating every time they use their car. However, accurate pricing can still positively influence long term habits.
It’s true that I typically would almost never take the bus, even if it was free, there are cases where the bus might be more appealing if it wasn’t kinda pricey for my non-disabled non-elderly ass. For example, if it is raining.
And those cases where the bus might be more appealing if it was free, including free if I was going to transfer to the train anyways, are the cases where the demand management aspect of pricing is most important (e.g., so people annoyed by a light rain don’t degrade service for the disabled/elderly who really need it).
This is fundamentally incorrect categorization.
Transit belongs in the category of services whose presence is vital for and benefits a community even when not being actively consumed: it is like healthcare, public education or the sewer system and not at all like electricity or gas.
If you never step foot on a bus in your life you still benefit from the access to and availability of the bus network. You still benefit from the knock-on effects of everyone on the bus who chose to ride the bus. If you yourself get on the bus, your decision was guaranteed to be strongly influenced by the schedule/frequency and overall network/coverage, which means you’re also benefiting from every other vehicle in the network that you are not riding instead of the one that you are.
And, yes, your property values are also influenced by the quality of transit as a “neighborhood amenity,” just the same as a nearby hospital you hope to never use. Or a “good school.”
Also, while the cost of each vehicle and the people driving and maintaining them is readily quantifiable, the actual cost of adding or removing individual riders is effectively zero. Empty buses cost about the same as full ones.
So, if it’s too cheap to meter and its primary value drivers all still apply to non-users anyway, then funding it via user fees is at best inefficient and more likely just the thing that is done because that’s how it’s always been and anyone saying “hold on, isn’t charging a user fee actually just wrong on the level of basic economics” gets screeched at and lectured about how much money in absolute terms can be found in the farebox and how asking for things to be funded equivalent to their real costs is the same as demanding profitability (it isn’t) and anyway if it’s a societal good who cares what it costs…
London is reporting they’ve managed to – mostly – get their user fees lined up to the operating costs. I will admit they are currently the leading counterexample. I will guarantee that doesn’t stay true if they aren’t constantly raising their fares to keep the funding level against inflation.
That’s one city. Everyone else is either reporting massive unsustainable losses (all USA cities), benefiting from being allowed to capture development value and count that as operating revenue (the famously “profitable” examples from Asia), or through a powerful accounting tool known as “just blatantly lying about it” reporting positive farebox recovery by simply removing enough of the actual costs of operation to somewhere they don’t show up against the farebox (any of the “restructured” organizations and come to think of it I wonder if a deeper dive into what’s actually going on in London doesn’t give me a reason to put them in this category too… whatever, I don’t have the time.)
So this is where I’ve always been. The benefits are shared by all, the costs should also be paid by all. I do not care that even in high-transit-adoption areas the majority are not riding. In fact, just like raising everyone’s taxes has been my goal all along, extracting payment for the value gained from existing near the subway from those who drive everywhere anyway has also been my goal all along.
The above was meant to be attached as a reply following the other end of this comment thread (https://pedestrianobservations.com/2026/02/19/against-free-buses/#comment-166769).
Oops.
@Transithawk. Both the train and property divisions of JR East for example make a profit.
The collection of JR companies whose entire existence is due originally to a privatization scheme intended to excise most of JNR’s deficits and who in present day are primarily the world’s most famous (and YouTube’s most beloved) HSR operator with the unique benefit of access to the Shinkansen money printing machine, were not really who I had in mind when I wrote out the category of transit companies who are profitable through utilizing the accounting technique of “lying,” but if you consider them part of this conversation then they very much do belong to that category.
I eagerly await the coming debate over whether or not intercity HSR counts as transit just because it happens to utilize railways and whether or not my failure to explicitly exclude it instead of implicitly excluding it from the conversation (are airlines transit? I don’t believe so. Would anyone other than someone trying to make an annoying gotcha post in response claim that they are?) means I’m shifting the goalposts here.
The majority of households in New York City are car free. They aren’t all walking. Or biking or taking an Uber.
@Transithawk Both the low speed and high speed parts of JR East’s transit business make a profit. And the private railways with no HSR whatsoever, also generally make a profit. For that matter, even a lot of PPP lines whose construction wasn’t motivated by making a profit, often still do.
Also, airlines and high speed rail are obviously public transit. It’s shared transport for use by the general public.
Transit is vital when not actively consumed in the same way electricity, gas, and sewer are vital. And fees are generally charged per use for the latter three.
If that was true, you could run a network of minivans instead of full sized buses and achieve the exact same social benefit at a much lower cost, or much higher social benefit for the same cost.
Just like a neighborhood with electricity and sewer lines.
@Sassy a minivan would costs about the same as a full sized bus. The bus costs 10x more than a minivan (there is a range of costs/options in both do this could be as low as 5x for a cheap bus vs luxury van, or 20x for a cheap van vs expensive bus), but either way you amortize the cost over 12 years and the cost of buying is a rounding error in your total costs per hour. Your largest costs are the driver and office staff/management, both of which you need (though often office staff/management is bloated, you still need it even if you can make cuts). You don’t save enough from having a smaller bus in less busy times to be worth the bother.
The other problem with a mini-van is they have a limit of 5 adult passengers (smaller kids can be packed in more, but adults won’t accept those conditions) which makes it highly likely you will have a surge in the less busy times that fill your minivan.
Between these two running a mini-van will never make sense for public transit. However on less busy routes there is potential a full size van (15 passengers) would make sense if we have self driving – run the van every 5 minutes and you get more capacity than a bus for a similar cost and the service will attract riders. Right now self driving technology isn’t quite there, but it is showing good promise and is an area to watch – this also means I’m speculating: there may be some detail about running such service nobody has even though of yet that matters.
I wish I had edit… When I said a 15 passenger van has more capacity than a bus I mean a 50 passenger bus is running every half an hour or less. If you run with the same frequency the bus obviously as more. (and a 100 passenger bus has more, but if you have those run a smaller bus more often once/if self driving works)
Self driving has been showing promise since General Motors commissioned the 1960s version of Futurama. Why would I take a self driving bus when I could summon a self driving taxi to my door?
@henrymiller74
Great arguments! I’m not the one arguing that transit is a public good though. I’m well aware that transit is rivalrous, and the consequences of that for designing a transit system.
@adirondacker12800 In the 1960s self driving was a dream that only worked in the movies. In 2026 there are a lot of self driving cars on real roads. They still have significant limitations which might or might not be solved, but they are no longer fiction.
a bus that is used by just a few people is cheaper than a taxi when you consider all costs (not just the fare, but also the other subsidies as if you paid for your portion of them in the fare). Self driving doesn’t change any of that (in both cases the cost of the driver is close enough to the same)
The question then becomes is the bus good enough to be worth the savings?
A bus every 5 minutes is better than a taxi that will come – who knows when. Sure you can watch it on the app, but only after you have requested it. The bus is always on the way and so you don’t have to think at all you can just go. (a bus every 30 minutes you check to see where it is before leaving, every 5 you just go to your bus stop and wait knowing it won’t be long).
The next question is speed. The bus is likely slower than the taxi, but if the routes and transfers are good (including express buses to more distance locations) this can be a different that doesn’t matter.
Although not everyone cares, the bus has better emissions than several taxis.
In short, self driving buses look like a useful step to making bus service enough better than the alternatives that people will use them when they won’t use transit today. Of course it remains to be seen if they every happen – but there is real progress today.
If the bus is coming every half hour it’s for the few people who don’t drive because they are too poor or too disabled. Or are masochistic puritans. There are funner ways to get your masochism. Five self driving cars are cheaper than a bus and people who aren’t starry eyed fabulists will replace the bus with five cars. Ten cars are cheaper than a bus and if there are ten of them one can head to your request, immediately, when it comes in. And you, being a fully cognizant adult will figure out that it takes a few minutes for it to arrive and will summon it at an appropriate time. Ten may be overly optimistic for what replaces a bus that comes every half hour.
It won’t have any emissions. Because electric cars are cheaper than internal combustion cars.
Seriously it isn’t. One has to pass thru e-gates anyway (in most systems) and the only irritation is that too many people faff around searching for their card or don’t swipe it properly. I can walk thru these gates, while swiping, without changing my pace. It is trivial, and more, I’m thinking nice thoughts if I have already achieved the daily cap. (Sometimes you lose track and so it is nice to see the display come up with $0.)
“One has to pass thru e-gates anyway” — those gates only exist because you have a tapping-based fare system. If you moved to either POP monthlies as the default (or to free transit), those gates could be demolished. For that matter, it would become cheaper to do accessibility retrofits and to improve passenger circulation, because you only need to dig/erect a staircase/elevator/escalator/Schrägaufzug between the platform(s) and street level in whatever way it is most convenient, without having to design around the landside/airside distinction and building/excavating additional volume for their border.
Likewise, on a bus or tram the alternative is that you can board at all doors (or at multiple doors, depending on the local directed-flow schema). This, combined with, oh, “many people faff around searching for their card or don’t swipe it properly“, are the reasons fare reform can speed up service.
Moreover, I’m sorry to say, I think you failed to get the point of the quote. The justification for tapping is that this is how you pay your fare (analogously with validating paper tickets). Fare… erm, fair enough. But this implies that if “you already paid”, that if the system itself tells you that — because you reached the fare cap — you don’t need to pay, then you shouldn’t need to tap!
(This is a stretch, but — transit is a public service, right? It shouldn’t treat passengers as presumed-guilty-of-farejumping-unless-proven-innocent. Relatedly, faregates and suchlike, especially “unhoppable” types, serve as indicators of this adversarial relationship. Very clearly, the transit agency and the government it is an arm of do not trust you, as a representative member of the population, to cooperate with society’s systems, or even to have a sense of shame not to conspicuously circumvent a legitimate scheme (e.g. hop a gate) in full view of your fellow citizens; instead it feels the need to compel you to do the right thing. By contrast, POP defaults to trusting passengers, with only random roving “tickets please”; and making transit free does away with even that.)
“Sometimes you lose track and so it is nice…” — How much nicer it would be to not even have to think about that in the first place. Even as a transit nerd debating fare policy online, I have far more worthy things in my life to hold in my head than my fare balance. Again, a public service (or a customer-oriented business) exists to help people get on with their lives (or business processes). It wants to maximize customer surplus (possibly with an eye to capturing some of it). Part of that is to, if possible, minimize the shadow work done by the customer. With the examples given in the article, these steps are worth it because the alternative would show up in the price tag, as hired labor doing substantially the same task (and for furniture, also shipping a larger volume). But in transit, this is not the case — POP ungated stations can simply eliminate without replacement 90-99% of the shadow work, while making the service cheaper to operate (faster bus trip = fewer buses for the same headway) and better for the customer.
@Basil, even ultra low crime Asia has fare gates.
@Matthew, the merely very-low-crime continental European countries don’t have faregates. (For that matter, the less spectacularly functional Asian countries have even worse ideas.) Anyway, I think that even the good examples (Japan, Korea, Taiwan) might be even better off ditching the faregates (but they are doing well enough that they aren’t under pressure to do that, whereas e.g. American transit is clearly not doing well).
To be fair it basically makes them unique in that regard.
The top 35 metros by ridership all look to have ticket barriers, now some are pretty flimsy, but all look to have them.
And of the top 50 maybe 5 don’t?
At the cost of overcharging occasional users
People walk through faregates faster than past validators. A lot of rural stations in Japan have only validators since they don’t need the same throughput as urban and suburban stations.
An actual honor policy is trusting passengers. POP is roving cops who treat passengers as guilty until proven innocent.
Effectively all behavior except jumping fare gates or large conspiracies with a paper trail, is treated as an innocent mistake in Japan. If you get caught with an invalid fare trying to exit a station, they will take your word for it and charge you the correct fare, no penalties, no taking your ID to track repeat offenses. What trusting passengers actually looks like.
You just don’t get it. You “validate” (ie purchase a ticket, or activate a pre-purchased ticket) once.
After that, for 3 hours, or 24 hours, or 3 days, or 7 days, or 30 days, or 365 days or whatever, you don’t interact with nor are delayed by “validators” or fare gates at all.
Ideally “validators” are placed to the side of heavy pedestrian flows so that the minority of people needing to purchase a ticket do not get in the way of the free passage of riders who just want to get to or from the platform or in or out of the bus or tram. The point is to remove impediments to travel, not impose barriers.
It’s a different model. I don’t claim it’s the model for Tokyo or other mega-cities with huge existing investments in walled-off staions. I do think it’s the superior model for nearly all of Europe and nearly all the Anglosphere (I have no experience nor knowledge or what is right for the majority of the world outside my experience.)
I simply fail to understand the “Stockholm syndrome” of British and Australian commenters who are so unable to imagine doing things any other way that they actively defend their oppressor (who is nearly always Cubic Systems, Inc.) We’re so habituated to abuse that we insist others must also be punished! People are bad! People are cheats! Only the machines can discipline them!
In the USA perhaps. Elsewhere they’re customer service agents who keep the system working efficiently through occasional interactions. I’d rather pull out my ticket once every 10th or 20th ride to show a human than be corralled and diverted through fare gates or forced to queue endlessly to board only one door on a bus showing my ticket every time.
That’s largely incompatible with distance based fares, which are best practice for a transit network covering a large area seamlessly, and are competing for marginal trips against cars in at least some regions, and are trying to offer a fair deal to people who mostly walk or bike.
And that describes what most transit networks should aspire to, unless they are geographically isolated.
The lack of quality of Deutsche Bahn was a bigger impediment to travel than tapping Suica/Pasmo ever could be. And the extortionate pricing of single trip tickets imposes a bigger barrier for occasional/potential riders.
Who give you a ridiculous fine, take your ID, and might send you to court (and from there maybe prison)
Not so. They trade the very few seams between fare zones — which many (perhaps most; and with free transit, all) passengers wouldn’t encounter, because they live and work within one zone (because often the whole city of up to a few million is covered by a single zone) — for a seam between the city and the transit system, which all passengers encounter, on every single trip.
Yes, some cities do achieve damn impressive results with distance-based fares. Still, gateless (monthly-based) systems are a superior solution to distance-based systems, exactly because the latter needs gates. Monthly-based gateless systems are currently the state of the art, the best practice in widespread use (and it seems theoretically plausible to further improve on them with free transit). For that matter, the US is the richest (non-tiny) country despite being carbrained and NIMBY, not because of them, and could be even richer if it corrected these mistakes.
Perhaps it would help to emphasize that transit in many ways behaves as a public good, so the concept of “occasional user” doesn’t make sense. For example, I’ve never had my house catch fire, but I have no problem with paying the increment of tax that becomes the fire department’s funding. Likewise, whether I personally ride transit every day or seldom, I enjoy the benefits of the city existing and being dense and not being overfilled with noisy and smelly and dangerous and generally unpleasant car traffic.
Which is bad, because you can’t adjust fares charged by the value delivered to the passenger. People who get relatively little benefit from the system pay too much, and tons of potential funding is lost from people who get relatively much benefit.
It’s not really a seam, or at least a significant one. Almost all rapid transit ridership happens on systems with distance based fares and fair single ticket pricing, as it is by far the most effective way to collect fares for such systems.
The idea that gates are a significant barrier to transit use, or at least a more significant barrier than the downsides of gateless systems with punitive single ticket pricing, is completely detached from reality.
Gateless systems with punitive single ticket pricing are uncommon, and account for a much smaller fraction of overall transit ridership and especially of rapid transit ridership. Flat fares and excessive prioritization of monthly passes are workarounds for the inability to efficiently collect accurately priced fares for individual trips. They are simply not necessary with the current state of the art, tap-in-tap-out. The only potential improvement from faregates (or tap-in-tap-out validators on less busy systems) would be gateless systems that work on wireless beacons to collect distance based fares.
Transit absolutely does not behave as a public good, except for the very worst transit systems. That’s also why getting rid of fares makes the most sense for bad transit systems with no plan to improve.
The “free public toilets are a public good” argument is already a bit stretched, but extending it that far is on a whole nother level.
First, why would you even try to do that? You’re not a monopolist company trying to capture the customer surplus, you’re a public agency. Neither are you a conquering government trying to squeeze net revenue from a subjugated province, trying to capture the benefit of providing public goods. (“If we build sewers, the slaves will not get cholera and typhoid all the time, we will be able to work them harder, and make more money.”)
Second, if you tried to do that, you would apply market segmentation on urban transit. Each bus would be divided into a first- and second-class part, just like trains and planes. (No, no, you don’t dedicate whole vehicles to one travel class or the other! That breaks frequency or even route structure.)
Third, let’s look at the value proposition my local transit agency delivers me. Relative to the alternative of living in Sprawlburb, my local transit agency enables me to not own a car, to do my grocery shopping on foot or by bike (because density), and also to commute across town to work. You may notice that the first two don’t involve me interacting with the transit system or its fares (but me enjoying the benefits-to-me of other people around me riding transit rather than driving cars). You may also notice that quality-of-life improvements, expressed via the question “how much would the person be willing to pay for it”, tend to track with household income per capita (subject to temporal consumption smoothing and suchlike). So what things do a better job of estimating the above benefits provided by the transit agency? Broad-based taxes, such as payroll or property or land-value. Good thing the systems using monthlies are already mostly funded from taxes like these, with their fare system mostly being a distraction.
It’s an effective way to raise funds for transit.
From a moral standpoint, people able to pay for what they consume generally should. There are cases where this breaks down, such as for healthcare or for toilets, but in general, user fees based on consumption is a good thing. Transit isn’t any different from food, electricity, gas, clothing, etc..
Transit isn’t a public good, being both rivalrous and excludable.
That’s at odds with how it works in reality. City buses divided by class are basically non-existent, even in regions with multiple classes even on rapid transit trains.
Why? Some people on longer trips might pay more for an intercity style bus with more comfortable seats that makes fewer stops and potentially uses the highway, vs a city bus that doesn’t, even on intra-regional trips.
I’m well aware of the “free public toilets are a public good” argument.
The primary beneficiary of transit consumption is still by far the person riding it.
There are other alternatives, such as an entire region built around people walking everywhere, or walking/biking everywhere, or walking/biking for all local trips but still needing a car for longer trips. Your benefiting from land use and street design, not the transit agency. Your primary benefit from the transit agency is the third point, being able to take it for trips outside of walking/biking distance.
Unless you live in Hong Kong or a lesser extent Tokyo and Osaka and maybe some Chinese megacities, your transit agency’s influence on the built environment of your neighborhood is very limited and indirect.
Rivalrous? Ha! Please, wave your magic wand and make more people ride the bus route I do. Then the agency will schedule the bus to come more frequently, and my commute will be shorter. If the extra riders come from people who have previously driven cars, then doubly the better, because with less car congestion, the buses will run faster, making my commute even shorter (and making the extra frequency perhaps not even cost a penny to the agency). Heck, given the increased ridership, they might deem it worth putting in a bus lane. So go on, tell me how at the level of typical buses, transit is rivalrous. It is antirivalrous. (Once you get sooo many passengers in a pile that you have very frequent heavy rail — oh, look at those poor souls, reduced by their vast numbers to having to put up with merely [checks notes] the fastest and most reliable form of urban transportation — maybe the antirivalrousness does peter out, and you only get longer trains? Or maybe you get more heavy rail lines, which is to say, better coverage and better network connectivity.)
Excludable, technically yes (at which point, we are either at “club good”, or an unnamed option, since club- and public goods are merely non-rivalrous). But given the above antirivalrousness, this is a very low bar, and one which is already specified in all transit operators’ conditions of travel (“it is forbidden to smoke” &c). Gate-free systems reflect this “you could, but why would you” state of excludableness.
(History note: didn’t racially segregated buses work on a “first class” front, “second class” rear layout?)
You are welcome to have local+express buses, or local+express rail (e.g. metro+RER), or buses-feeding-rail, as long as they are all integrated under one fare system. But — read the article — breaking fare integration causes “this mode for rich people, that mode for poor people”, you split the ridership and thus by the antirivalrousness of transit, both classes of people get worse service.
I live in an urban region of ~3M. Walking is simply not fast enough, it would produce untenable density. Bikes could just about work, theoretically, but not really (far too many people would get cars and bully cyclists off the road into getting cars of their own). Cars, “just for the longer trips”… haha, what do you think the people creating Sprawlburb thought? Yes, cities can stay dense without transit if almost everyone is too poor to buy more than a moped. But if a large fraction of society can afford cars, and have a reason to buy them (because transit isn’t there to cover the longer trips), is exactly how sprawl comes to be. In other words, I’m benefiting from land use and street design that would be impossible without the transit agency. Indirect yes, limited not in the slightest. Therefore, the majority of the benefit I get from the agency doesn’t directly depend on my riding it. QED
@Basil. I assume @Sassy means that the rich travel more?
Travel is much, much less flat with income than domestic energy use for example.
i.e., the public transit is rivalrous. You can’t create bus passenger service hours like you can copies of software, and a single bus revenue service hour can’t be enjoyed by effectively unlimited people like broadcast radio.
Does anyone do that nowadays?
Therefore, the only fare system that really makes sense, given the vastly different cost of providing someone a 2km long ride vs a 200km long ride vs a 2000km long ride, is distance based fares.
The argument relies on the faster mode not being appreciably more expensive to provision than the slower mode. Breaking fare integration in the direction of the more expensive to provision service being more expensive often makes sense. For example, it wouldn’t make sense to charge the same for a taxi ride as a bus ride.
Basically every step in your argument to get there is broken. It should be pretty obvious, but if you can’t think of it, maybe see how your argument could be turned into “ebikes are a public good” or “cars are a public good”
Unless you live in Hong Kong or a lesser extent Tokyo and Osaka and maybe some Chinese megacities, your transit agency’s influence on the built environment of your neighborhood is very limited and indirect. Which is why you had so many questionable leaps of logic.
…except it is enjoyed by effectively unlimited people due to the existence of that revenue service hour and every other revenue service hour occurring in parallel increasing the network value of the service as a whole. Everyone in the service area benefits, not a maximum of ~80 people or whatever number can be defined to reasonably be 100% bus occupancy. Induced demand is both real and in this case something we actually want to happen, but the demand is induced by the fact that the bus shows up faster and not by the fact that there’s increased capacity.
This is why I’ve been implicitly excluding HSR operators from my constant harping on how achieving revenue neutral status at the farebox is impossible in part because over sufficiently long distances with sufficiently efficient technology the economics shift and it actually does become possible to meter individual use and even price for profitability, but again, the argument here is about free buses primarily and to a lesser extent free local transit where the difference between occupied or empty seats traveling 2km or 20km is a rounding error against the cost of the vehicle revenue service hour those trips did or did not happen in. (And because, again, I think it’s pretty obvious that very long distance intercity rail travel is not “transit” much in the same way that the virtruvian man is not “obscene.” It’s actually pretty annoying to have to explicitly define this! I’d rather just be accused of moving goalposts, to be honest.)
Claiming that your local transit is profitable because you report its financials as inextricably linked to (buried within, really) your hugely profitable world-beating high-speed train between the first and second largest cities in your highly mechanized and technologically advanced country is disingenuous at best and so is using the economics of running that service as an argument for any decisions made about how a subway between any random two quarters in any given city should be designed, built, operated, or funded.
And this counterargument relies entirely on operating costs being not worth caring about which is the other disingenuous part of many common arguments here and everywhere else. It’s indeed appreciable orders of magnitude more expensive to provision a train instead of a bus but it’s appreciable orders of magnitude less expensive to keep the train running once you have it. Therefore, fares should either coincidentally end up about the same (assuming you are amortizing capital and operating costs together) or be very clearly biased by a preference towards fares as revenue for capital expenditure (something also clearly expressed in the “but what if we just bought more stuff instead” argument against free buses) that shows up as a premium on rail fares. It’s not a “premium fare for a premium product” meant to signal the desired rider base and it’s nothing to do with any other justice or equity arguments except for indirectly as a byproduct of the actual justice/equity arguments around which people and which parts of society get invested in and which do not.
Turns out being poor is pretty expensive, actually!
Okay, I have no notes. You’re absolutely correct.
But I’d posit to you that the problem then is that transit agencies only have influence over the built environment in those few exceptions and that instead the real answer is that transit agencies everywhere as subsidiaries of the government should enjoy the full force and backing of their operating regions’ governments’ abilities to influence the built environment.
If that is the case, then any transit network using full sized buses instead of minivans or even sedans is idiotically lighting money on fire.
It’s pretty obvious that long distance transit is still transit. You can ride local trains across the country just the same way as you can ride long distance ones.
And regardless of whether you think long distance trains count as “real transit” or not, you have to account for their existence when setting fares, at least if local transit regions are not effectively isolated, and capacity is an issue at all. If slower trains are too cheap relative to faster trains, then local trains in rural areas may get overloaded by budget conscious long distance travelers. If faster trains too cheap relative to slower trains, then intercity trains in urban areas will get their seats filled by people on cross-city trips displacing people on cross-country ones.
And the natural way to have reasonable fares for trips from 2 to 2000 kilometers, is distance based fares.
None of my local transit agencies benefit from the revenue from running high speed trains between the first and second largest cities in my country at all. That would be Nagoya, I live in Tokyo. And even in Nagoya, it’s not like Meitetsu has access to the Tokaido Shinkansen money printer.
Even after taking into account capital costs, rail is typically a lot cheaper than bus. That’s certainly true here in Tokyo, where transit agencies all do normal people bookkeeping with interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization included as operating costs.
The US does have unusually high passenger rail everything costs, and the Feds require transit agencies to do fantasy bookkeeping with separate “operating” and capital budgets. However, NY MTA quietly also does normal people bookkeeping, and even there, iirc, rail is cheaper than bus.
@Sassy, I do think the flaw in the Japanese system is that the very long trip fares are too high compared to flying.
They probably are. The fare schedule is relatively inflexible and optimized for trips like Tokyo-Osaka or Tokyo-Sendai but is applied nationwide.
It’s certainly still much better than making all transit fares a flat 450 JPY no matter whether your trip is from Tokyo Station to Takanawa Gateway, Takasaki, or Takarazuka though.
If Buses are free, why not make the subway free and LIRR and Metro North free too? Then you’ve got the best fare integration across all modes and also skip the expensive costs of adding new fare gates when you can just remove them all! You even remove the need of conductors on commuter trains too! 😛
Then you get homeless people in Great Neck. Shock horror.
The bus that goes through Great Neck goes all the way to Roslyn. The buses – on other routes – go all the way out to East Hampton.
Because NYCT and MTA Bus revenue in 2019 was, in 2025 prices, $6.1 billion/year, not just $1 billion. Big urban systems rely on revenue for a significant part of their funding.
If people are saving $6b a year on not paying fares, then they would also have the capacity to pay $6b a year more in taxes. The mean user/taxpayer would break even, while the wealthy/infrequent transit users pay more, and the poor/frequent riders end up with a bit more change in their pocket. That seems like a worthy trade-off. You also save on revenue protection measures.
Still, I think the same social goals could be achieved with steeply discounted monthly passes valid for all modes region-wide (say, $1-2 a day) and more widespread concession policies for students, the unemployed, low-income people, etc.
One problem with free transit is where does it end: if you do buses, then why not subway, if subway why not commuter rail, and you end up with New Haven-Trenton trips having to be free (and then why not New London, etc.).
In theory, yes, lower fares mean people have more capacity to pay taxes. In practice, we’re not seeing this in Germany – the VVs are hammered by the loss of revenue, there’s no real appetite for raising taxes to replace it, and the Greens and Die Linke in Berlin still think the best way to save money is not to expand the U-Bahn.
Sure, but that’s a political issue rather than a technical or fiscal one.
Let’s say you have a set budget for public transport, e.g. $10b, because that represents the total capacity of the residents of the city in question to pay for this transport. Should that money come from fare revenue or taxes (or a mix)? The more it comes from taxes, the more equitable it is (the rich pay more), and the more it encourages people to ride public transport (since they’re already paying for it through taxes). Which are two benefits.
It’s hard to think of a counter-argument except for:
But both those arguments are basically right-wing scare tactics.
df1982: All options mentioned here include an effect to “encourage people to ride transit because they already paid”. The only question is whether, to put it in an odd way, City Hall should buy everyone a monthly pass (and then get rid of the organization that handles passes).
Also the more it is paid for by non users, rich or poor, and they won’t be happy about that.
How much do car-free households contribute to the roads. How much do they contribute to the free parking littering every curbside everywhere?
@adirondacker12800, public transport subsidies are quite high in general so I am not sure car free households are paying more than their fair share?
Automobile subsides are quite high too. If you want to fret about how people rich enough to own automobiles and who suck up lots and lots of automobile subsidies might whine about transit, people in car free household want to have a detailed discussion about who is getting subsidized.
@adirondacker12800, that certainly isn’t true in Britain – we spend more on the trains than the more heavily used roads, and it’s highly doubtful it’s true anywhere else in Europe given the fuel taxes.
The subject is New York City buses. I hope this isn’t a revelation. When people buy fuel in the U.S. they don’t pay European fuel taxes. Road costs are sprawled across umpteen different budgets which makes it very very difficult to come up with a cost. While people who are afraid that there might be a brown person on the bus – and drive – make sure transit every dime is allocated to the bus.
@adirondacker12800, in New York motorists pay the bridge tolls that cover most MTA costs.
It costs a lot of money to maintain bridges or tunnels. They don’t cover most of the MTA’s costs which is why they have instituted a congestion charge in Manhattan. .. You want to live in a fairy tale world where automobiles pay for themselves go right ahead.
The transit geek … media persons… love to document how to get from Boston to Washington D.C. without using Amtrak or Greyhound/Greyhound competitors. New York to Philadelphia is possible to do all rail, without SEPTA.
“The same kinds of riders use both modes.”
This is not true at all, and points up something you keep missing. Busses are the accessible (ADA) network. Subway simply cannot be a replacement in its current form.
I struggle to follow this.
How are buses with wheelchair lifts better for wheelchair users than a subway train with three doors per car boarding from a level platform? Wheelchair lifts increase dwell time at stops and therefore trip time significantly. Subway trains can accommodate more wheelchair users because the vehicles are bigger and have larger aisles.
Moreover, with respect to “in its current form”: the ADA consent decree referenced in the Better Billion report binds the MTA to make the subways 95% ADA compliant by 2055. The report also proposes to spend a portion of the $1B per year on compliance. Given the shorter trip times and higher throughput of the subway and the distribution of residences, workplaces and non-work destinations in the city, trains are the ideal core transit solution for all residents, not just those who are mobility impaired, with buses acting as feeder or crosstown services—not substitution. There are also paratransit options.
Anecdotally: I have taken the BxM1 where a wheelchair user was aboard. Dwell to unload was at least 4-5 minutes. Even if the wheelchair user is adept at maneuvering, the driver is still required to secure the chair to the platform, exit the bus, operate the lift, unlock the chair, ensure the safe debarkation of the passenger, retract the lift, close the door, and resume the trip. (Fascinating and interesting process, by the way. We’ve come a long way.)
This is not conducive to short trip times or high throughput. Now, this was an express motor coach-type high-floor bus, and regular low-floor buses don’t take as much time to load and unload, but they do have increased dwell nevertheless. It is far preferable to have accessible stations and board from a platform. Indeed, the disabled already get discounted fares, and disabled advocates have focused their efforts on class action litigation to compel the city into compliance and political advocacy to expand and make more reliable paratransit options.
The assumption of good faith in a criticism follows if the critic read the report in its entirety. Ignoring the statement about the consent decree and taking into account what that means, combined with your ignorant statements in the previous thread about divisive and negative framing or whatever (especially hypocritical since you followed up by comparing a detailed subway expansion proposal created by academics to vaporware and flim-flammery from a ketamine-laced madman) and inability to recall that one of the expansion proposals is for a subway line to replace a heavily patronized Bronx crosstown bus service indicates that you didn’t read it all the way through. Perhaps you should re-read in detail with an open mind rather than skim the scholarship to confirm your priors before choosing to question and opine.
The ADA became law in 1990 – most places in the US already were putting in effort to be compliant (at least with the spirit of the law if not the letter) before then. That 2055 is only 95%. Until the subway is 100% compliant buses are the only option for some disabled users. Because a bus only last 12-15 years, NYC buses should all be complaint as of 20 years ago. Maybe in the long run the subway will be better, but for now buses are the safe option for the disabled.
NYC should be spending that extra billion they are getting for bus fares on either improving ADA access for the entire subway, or expanding service. Free fares is only helpful for a small minority.
Once again, that’s exactly what the proposal recommends (emphasis mine in bold).
And of all the criticisms of this report, the “where is the money coming from” nonsense is the most frustrating, including Mr. Komanoff’s statement that
Once again, quoting:
Not much of a black hole. Did no one read this thing before running their mouths?
I really tried to say out of it this time since my main goal in picking fights in the comment thread on the last article was to hopefully cause a follow-up article to be written actually opposing free buses instead of patronizingly equating them to “free lunch” as a single throwaway section in the middle of a report that for some reason is otherwise penned as though it is a completely different proposal despite a headline and followup media campaign that very explicitly casts “A Better Billion” as directly in opposition to free buses.
I don’t think I’m ever going to convince Alon Levy or any of their associates of the merits of my position because we have a fundamental disagreement about which political fights are worth picking, and I figured some kind of passive aggressive parting shot asking why this article wasn’t in “A Better Billion” to begin with would be an undeserved level of animosity and hostility. So, I saw the article, read it, figured I’d read the comments and then go on to enjoy my nice weekend.
But, like,
This is disingenuous and you know it. A federal match of money at any percentage rate requires some amount of non-federal money first. This quote explains where roughly 30% of the money came from. Would you care to now quote post the part of the report that explains where the other $34 billion is coming from? Because from where I’m sitting 70% of a black hole is still a pretty massive black hole, actually.
You were intentionally dense about this last time, admitted you didn’t read past the preamble, and tried to mix it up with all-source funding or whatever so pay attention this time around, since you have deigned to grace us with your presence once again.
In appropriations terms, the proposal is for $1B in additional spend over the current policy baseline. The question is whether it goes to bus operating subsidy or subway expansion. All other items are held at current baseline for the purposes of this exercise, and are not germane to this conversation.
$850M/yr x 40 years = $34B
Enjoy your nice weekend.
Ah, I see.
So it is indeed exactly as I and everyone else have been asserting all along: the plan is indeed a funding black hole that assumes that operational spending is the exact same thing as capital spending, that money can just be moved arbitrarily around on spreadsheets, and that your competing plan doesn’t need to do anything to figure out where the money is coming from because it’s just assumed that every single person who campaigned for and voted for and worked for a specific thing is simply confused and ignorant and if only they would read the report, they would understand the depths of their folly and change course without complaint.
Glad we’ve established that for the record.
I respect Alon Levy, who has done a lot of great work for a lot of noble causes. The world is a better place for the work they do, even if I don’t agree with all of it, and the world is also a better place for the fact that they’re willing to run and maintain this website and let any such person as myself come in from wherever and start replying. I also respect you as a human being, J.G., which is why I’m replying for a second time tonight.
I don’t respect “A Better Billion.” It is not a respectable plan and it’s not worth engaging with on its own terms when its attitude towards the people it most needs to convince of its merits is, on its face, summarized as “you stupid children, don’t you know there’s no such thing as a free lunch? Now go sit down and be quiet while the adults in the room figure out how best to spend your money.”
And I think, behind your outrage that I won’t meet some arbitrary minimum level of decorum you feel is necessary, nor will I deign to engage with any of the arguments the report did make because all of its arguments are frankly in as bad faith as you want to ascribe to me, you realize that too.
I hope you also have a great and enjoyable weekend.
Before asking where the money is coming from it’s a better question to ask why anyone wants to spend money on the cockamamie plans.
I still want to know why the western end of InterBoro eXpress terminates at a sewage treatment plant. Or why the freight trains are problem on the bridge but they aren’t a problem on the ground. Why does it send BMT trains through an IND tunnel when BMT trains have been going to Queens in a BMT tunnel for over a century. So, so many questions.
There are lots of places the money could come from. Expecting the money to come from the same place decades from now is …optimistic.
Really odd to act like the mayor’s free bus plan is anywhere near reality when he appears to be begging the governor to give him an income tax increase just keep the current policy baseline in city services intact. Seems unlikely we’ll see any ability to even consider 1 billion in extra transit spending by the city during this Mamdani term, might as well let people try to convince him the first billion he can rustle up should go to the subway instead.
It’s really not that odd. Really! Those two things go hand in hand.
We have to raise more taxes, by a lot, to plug the leaks in the city finances. One place with a particularly big leak is the breathtakingly inefficient MTA, which yes, nevertheless needs massive additional investment on top of sweeping organizational reform and many, many, many people to be fired.
But the MTA’s ever expanding deficit is more than just waste and incompetence. It is the product of structural underinvestment and of disenfranchisement and this is where the difference between the real world and the universe of crayons on maps comes in.
If you have an annual surplus of $1 billion, sure, we can have a lively debate over which hypothetical capital projects we can direct it towards. However, we don’t have an annual surplus of $1 billion. What we actually have is a large and growing annual deficit that we need to fill. Part of that deficit is because the MTA’s buses, like everyone else’s buses, report massive operating losses due to the inherent inefficiency of the bus, so one thing we can do to help address our actual deficit is to simply cover the full cost of bus network operation by subsidizing it directly, an idea that we can then package for public buy-in by presenting it as “fast and free buses.”
The thing that is bizarre to me is how adamantly people refuse to acknowledge that finding money to cover an already incurred debt is not the same thing as finding money to buy something else. The amount of farebox revenue that would be forfeited by a move to fare free bus operation is not currently accumulating in some bank account. You cannot simply choose to “invest it in the subway instead,” both because the farebox cash itself is being burned six times faster than it comes in and also because if you take $1 billion found to cover a deficit and then choose to buy something else with it instead, you have failed to solve the original problem and you also now have an additional negative $1 billion. If you want to make the argument that it doesn’t matter how big that negative number gets, be my guest, but if you do then you’re the one arguing on behalf of unlimited money and I’m going to demand you be upfront and honest about that, the same way I’ve been upfront and honest as to my real motivations and where I’m coming from this entire time.
That is why I don’t care what “A Better Billion” promises can be purchased ‘instead’ and why it infuriates me every time the tired old meme of “why don’t you just take the money and spend it on more transit instead” gets trotted out. Sure, we could do both, it’s quite possible to tackle two mostly unrelated challenges (we don’t build enough and we also don’t adequately utilize/operate/fund what we already have) at the same time, but since everyone else insists on either/or: the answer to why is because I’d like to actually pay off the credit card and it just so happens that while it’s impossible to get people to agree to take responsibility in the present for the mistakes of the past, it’s a whole lot easier to get buy in from the public when you link the massive tax hike to a benefit that gets delivered immediately.
Or, you know, we can ‘instead’ spend the next 40 years going through the same exhausting “the MTA needs more money again” routine year after year as we construct an average of 1 mile of subway track in each of those 40 years. I suppose that is also a choice we could make.
@Transit Hawk, some of our buses were run for-profit without subsidy, maybe not anymore now fares are capped, but before.
But even in London where they are subsidised to a decent level they have £1.5bn of fares and £2.5bn of costs as per https://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-annual-report-and-statement-of-accounts-2024-25.pdf (page 70 and 72)
I will note that page 70 on this report is indeed gross service income by type, where TfL reports it did in fact collect £1.549bn of fares. However, page 72 is not expenditures by category – that’s page 74 – and the £2.75bn figure is a redistribution of the income values from page 70 to instead show income by operating division. (Ergo, the difference in these two numbers is actually the portion of money collected through ULEZ/tolls/ads/etc which is earmarked to “buses, streets, and other operations” – as you would expect and hope for, virtually all of the road charges are going to fund the road’s buses with just £46m (million with an m) of the miscellaneous revenues being added to the subway column when compared against its fares.)
Page 74 has gross expenditures by operating division. For TfL “buses, streets, and other operations,” this is £3.825bn against the £2.75bn revenue – a £1.075bn shortfall, or, an operating ratio of roughly 72%. I’ll use these two numbers because TfL has not disclosed in an immediately apparent way what portion of “buses, streets, and other operations” is the bus network itself and so it is unfair accounting to weigh bus revenue against all of the non-bus expenses that got shifted into that pot.
Either way, it looks like London, too, needs to find another billion somewhere. But I’ll give you that 72% is a much better number than the MTA’s 15%. And I’ll say this, if London does find that billion and is separately willing to embark on a scheme where fares are indexed to inflation and go up annually, they uniquely probably can continue to operate a transit system that is somehow paying for itself. Maybe that billion can be in the form of consulting fees as we get a bunch of those guys over here to show us how they managed it.
Otherwise, we’re back to the original problem and my original complaint. We can and should take a hatchet to the MTA’s payroll, but that’s not going to bridge the gap. If we’re going to keep charging fares, then they have to go up at pace with inflation, which is a real conversation we could have and that I could be persuaded to accept if you can show me a path to making that actually happen. And no matter what we do, we still have to figure out how to actually fund the system, of which a key component has to be giving the public something to make the increased taxing viable.
I’ve got my preferred alternatives, but I’m certainly open to an honest debate along these lines. The only thing I’m really not open to is simply continuing to ignore the problem and in many ways actively seeking to make it worse by ‘instead’ taking any operational funding streams and rerouting them to random capital projects instead.
Why does it have to make a profit?
How many sewer systems make a profit? Why is the road budget on my property tax bill and not in fuel taxes? When was the last time a school system broke even on the tuition they charge?
@adirondacker12800 the books need to balance somehow. Transit doesn’t need to make a profit, but the books need to balance.
Every city where I’ve lived that has water and sewer service you pay for the water you use, and that goes to both the drinking water and sewer system – many cities will let you attach a meter to your sprinklers so you don’t pay sewer charges for water that goes to the lawn. I have never looked at the sewer budget but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the funds come from taxes despite the above.
You can run a debt for a short time, and if that is used to build/buy something that will last can be a good thing. However the books will balance long term – if not according to the bottom line then you are just hiding things (often inflation).
A transit system doesn’t need to pay for itself in fares only, and this is rare. However the money needs to come somewhere.
Some places don’t have water meters. Notably, New York City, for small residential, until recently. The school system is a yawning gaping hole that sucks money. So is the road system. Luxembourg has decided to make all transit free. The only reason you think the books need to balance is that you think they do. They don’t.
This is absolutely correct and largely my point, with the only additional note that any funding structure which includes fares as a component at any percentage must either continually adjust fares to ensure that percentage stays close to stable or else inflationary and other pressures will cause that percentage to inevitably trend down, which leads directly to the next budget crisis.
And, like, if someone comes up with a novel fare structure that can actually keep that percentage stable, I’m fine with that compromise even if I personally disagree with it. But given how politically contentious all fare hikes ever are, I remain extremely skeptical that such a structure can be found or accepted by the general voting public. Such a thing would have to in some way have routine and predictable fare hikes built in, and even if you got everyone to agree to that today, it just becomes the exact same kind of red meat for future politicians to attack as a wasteful cash grab that gets cited as an argument against fare elimination, just with the added disadvantage that unlike arcane but routine changes to income or property taxes, seeing the number on the fare vending machine going up every month or even every year is much more obvious to the random member of the voting public as something to get mad about and vote to stop. (Or we can just choose to accept the perennial budget crisis fight instead, but, like, doesn’t that just suck? Isn’t that basically giving up on the idea that anything better is possible? If we’re doomed to constant political funding battles anyway, why not at least get something for the trouble? I’d rather spend the rest of my life defending free transit then spend it defending necessary cost-of-business annual fare hikes.)
So I 1) still disagree with fare collection on general economic principles for all of the reasons I’ve outlined in all my other comments and 2) consider it politically unviable because of the above.
But I don’t think we’re actually all that far away from each other ideologically, my own generally hostile posting nature aside.
Wheelchairs may be the most visible form of disability, but they absolutely arent the majority.
Ride any bus in Manhattan, and youll note the average age is probably around 75. I would guess 90% of the riders cannot go up or down a flight of stairs. But none of them are in a wheelchair. And if the bus can stop at the curb, dwell time is barely affected.
Of course it’s also possible to speed up wheelchair loading considerably, if the agency cared about that.
Being old is not a disability.
My intent in focusing on wheelchair users/mobility impaired individuals is that other aspects of ADA compliance are, presumably, a rounding error in station or vehicle retrofit costs, and don’t increase bus dwell time significantly.
As far as age by travel mode, I’m sure you understand that your numbers are not credible if not supported by rider survey data.
This is what I was able to dig up on short notice. See pdf-p. 146, table 4-31. This is the most recent survey I can find at NYMTC. This is for the entire planning region.
https://www.nymtc.org/portals/0/pdf/RHTS/RHTS_FinalReport%2010.6.2014.pdf
6.3% of subway riders are 65 or older, and 14.7% of bus riders are.
You may find rider surveys specific to the city or Manhattan, or more recent on your own time.
I’d like to hear what you think can be done to speed up wheelchair loading. It seems like the lift systems currently used prioritize rider safety.
UK standard low floor buses that we’ve had for 25 years or more don’t take 5 minutes to load a wheelchair.
I’ve never timed it, but it does happen from time to time and doesn’t take that long.
“Being old is not a disability.
This is what I wrote:
“90% of the riders cannot go up or down a flight of stairs.”
Which is, as you said, “mobility impaired individuals”.
They cannot ride the subway in its current state. Subway expansion does not help them.
—
“This is the most recent survey I can find at NYMTC. This is for the entire planning region.”
Again, please read what I wrote.
“Ride any bus in Manhattan”
Manhattan, in particular, has extremely busy bus lines that run directly above subways. Because it is the accessible options. Again, my point is that Alon is wrong when they say that the same people ride subway and bus. This is not true!
—
“I’d like to hear what you think can be done to speed up wheelchair loading. It seems like the lift systems currently used prioritize rider safety.”
Building slightly higher bus stops (14 inches) vs standard curb height and introducing vehicles that deploy the ramp every time the bus stops, versus the NYC design which requires the operator lower the bus suspension, stand up, flip a ramp up and around, exit the bus, watch the rider enter, and then do it in reverse. Depending on the model, many US buses also require the driver to ask passengers to move so seats can be lifted and locked in place.
Note the photo of this bus that does not require a ramp because the floor is even with the platform:
https://wheelchairtravel.org/richmond-public-transportation/
And this is what the interior could be:
https://www.alamy.com/madrid-spain-december-5-2021-interior-view-of-a-modern-bus-empty-bus-interior-public-transport-in-the-city-accesibility-for-passenger-transpor-image454149749.html
You wrote that the “average age is probably 75”
That’s not a disability, and you made up the number
You also invented the 90% number
I even volunteered a source for you, and invited you to find your own. You didn’t. We’re very done.
Once again, simply engage with what I wrote:
“Ride any bus in Manhattan, and youll note the average age is probably around 75″
At no point did you volunteer a useful source. And thats ok, because no agency collects age demographics for a subsection of their network. Which again is why I wrote what I wrote, and not something else.
I actually think the Chamonix approach sort of followed in other places where public transport is free when you pay the tourist tax is a good idea that should be rolled out wider.
The bus fare question obscures what should be the concern about the MTA’s bus operation – service efficiency. According to the NTD, NYC bus operations are an outlier in many categories. Among them are: service delivered; use; crowding; speed and unfortunately operating cost per vehicle-revenue-hours ($/VRH). In many respects NYC bus operations represent “mass production” compared to every other bus operation. Each excess operating cost gets multiplied by the sheer volume of service delivered.
According to the NTD’s latest annual data (2024), the per VRH operating cost for the MTA’s bus operations (MTA NYCT + MTA Bus) came to $300.56. The comparable figure for other bus operations within a UZA with population exceeding 1 million came to $199.55. Multiplying this difference over the MTA’s 16+ million VRH’s means: MTA’s bus operations cost $1.64 billion more than would have been expected from other bus operators. This isn’t a recent phenomena. The MTA’s excess operating costs have exceeded $1 billion goes back to at least 2015.
What about giving free fares to everyone who qualifies for one of a long list of pre-existing welfare programs– food stamps, free school lunch, subsidized public housing, etc. Right now they have a reduced fare program, but I would imagine that for the poor any cost, no matter how small, discourages use.
That’s one possibility usually proposed as an alternative. I can see it, but for what it’s worth, the practices I’m seeing in social democracies are to instead give such users deep discounts (75% off in Paris), not free fares. Pensioners get free fares often, partly because they tend to ride off-peak anyway, partly because they’re politically powerful and seize state resources that could instead go to working-age people and children.
Let the kindergarteners go out and get jobs to pay their tuition! The people too disabled to work could beg at the subway stations. Tin cups are difficult to find these days. A plastic mug from the dollar store would have to do. Workhouse! bring back workhouses, they don’t need to travel to work that way. And keeps the beggars away from the subway stations.
… the senior citizens raised the kindergareners’ parents and along the way paid taxes to fund the schools they went to instead of funding their retirement accounts. I suppose the kindergardener could sleep on the couch so grandma could move into their room. And the parents take time off work to take her places.
There is the option of forcing the senior citizens to drive until they run over a kindergartener. There is the option of raising taxes so the kindergarteners don’t have to find jobs, disabled people can go to their doctor appointments instead of begging and senior citizens can take the bus to the supermarket instead of having the kindergarener’s parent take them.
That isn’t as masochistic. Or puritanical.
>I suppose the kindergardener could sleep on the couch so grandma could move into their room.
This is indeed how early 21st century housing policy works in many first-world countries. And it was a deliberate choice, taken by multiple democracies with different electoral systems, left-right orientations etc. I don’t know if you were joking or not, but the issue is serious.
>There is the option of raising taxes so … list of nice things
The reason why we can’t have these nice things is that the costs of providing goodies for a growing elderly population increase faster than we can raise taxes. There aren’t many countries where public spending is growing slower than GDP – population aging means that public services are getting worse despite spending growing at least as fast as our ability to pay for it.
The reason we can’t have nice things is that, for decades, people have been voting for Laffer Curve mirages. The main one being that cutting taxes on rich people will make us all rich. And even though it’s not riches trickling down, vote for the mirages again and again.
The evening news recently showed the crush of train passengers in China travelling for the Lunar New Year. The focus was on how the high-speed lines were not full, but the lower-cost low speed lines were completely jammed. There were interviews with passengers who talked about saving 100 yuan on their train ticket by being willing to spend an extra two hours on train travel.
Plenty of crowding on high speed lines during the New Year celebration in China
China Railways High Speed has at least 2 billion trips a year – as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Railway_High-speed
Its actually more trips per capita than the TGV has in France I think?
Actually looking further down the article and it looks like its 3bn a year now, yes much higher than the TGV per capita.
I’m reminded of Susan Fainstein’s book “The Just City” where she says commuter rail isn’t just because rich people ride it while buses are “Just”.
Its like affordable housing versus housing, better crap but moral, than aesthetically impure efficiency.
I’ve not heard of this book. I don’t want to pass judgment without reading it, but the statement that commuter rail isn’t just because rich people ride it, in isolation, is rather objectionable. Just because they’re “rich” (and we can quibble over what that means) they don’t deserve to be furnished with public transportation? What about other goals besides justice, like reduction of carbon emissions? What is the alternative proposed for the “rich” commuter rail destinations?
JFC!
Oh so I moved to a sprawlburb on former forest/agricultural greenfield land absolutely nowhere hear my site of employment because, you know, cheap! Cheap, somewhow. Who knows how? Doesn’t matter how, cheap to me! It’s all a miraculous mystery. Also, purely by coincidence, there no ethnics being scary ethinics here! Cheap, but not so cheap that the ethnics might, you know, be ethinic? Just following purely economic market signals here.
Anyway, now it is now somebody else’s problem that I am generating all the greenhouses. I had no choice! It was either the greenhouses or the ethnics, and I for sure didn’t want the ethnics.
So, how about those greenhouses?
So can somebody else please ameliorate those greenhouse thingies? Somebody else, please! It’s a moral obligation!
They’re not cheaper than the city. Alon wrote here: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2025/09/15/transit-oriented-development-and-rail-capacity/
I was surprised by this. I thought people moved out mainly because it was too expensive. And yes, I acknowledge that suburban ethnic makeup (the result of a long and sordid history of white flight, preferential government policy, etc.) is probably a consideration, unfortunately, for some city emigrants, either overtly or dog-whistled under concerns like schools and “the character of the neighborhood.”
But I concluded from this very interesting post that specifically for New York, if LIRR, MNRR, and NJT didn’t exist, these suburban dwellers would likely drive to work, either in the city or elsewhere, before moving to the city.
I think commuter rail has its place in a public transit system, alongside rapid transit, buses and other modes. I don’t think we should be making squishy value judgments on how just it is based on who rides it. I don’t think classifying a transport mode as unjust incentivizes anyone to change their behavior, whether it’s what kind of a job they have or where they live. Rather, I think for most people, behavior changes based on incentives.
These could include:
I understand the frustration, and my apologies for not articulating these points more fully.
They can’t. The gridlock outside of Manhattan would discourage it. The few who make it into Manhattan wouldn’t have anyplace to park.
“I’ve not heard of this book. I don’t want to pass judgment without reading it, but the statement that commuter rail isn’t just because rich people ride it, in isolation, is rather objectionable. Just because they’re “rich” (and we can quibble over what that means) they don’t deserve to be furnished with public transportation? What about other goals besides justice, like reduction of carbon emissions? What is the alternative proposed for the “rich” commuter rail destinations?”
It comes from one of the sins of Urban discourses in academic circles which refuse to see urban problems as logistical infrastructure ones. “inequality” is a cosmic issue, that you defeat with superior morality rather than solving actual problems. I.e. a very convenient answer for an aging boomer leftist academic who owns property in NY and has tenure. And Feinstein had to deal with shedloads of criticism for being too moderate/practical from the rest of the Boomer NIMBY Leftist context she was in (e.g. David Harvey being arrogant sexist dick).
And commuter rail even in the US isn’t even a 1% form of transport but upper 20%. And in the UK, Europe or East Asia, equivalents to LIRR or Metro North are used by all classes.
There is also a bullshit leftist-environmentalist belief that faster transport is immoral even when physics says “electric railways are more efficient than buses at almost any velocity”.
Please tell me this isn’t real. Who says this and do they actually influence policy anywhere?
There are noise issues with high speed trains that the Japanese solved in the early 1990s but which we haven’t solved yet in Europe.
To be fair there’s evidence that HS2 has at least tried to learn from Europe but not Asia!
Oh yes, they do. Some quotes via humantransit.org articles (pointing out the folly of this view):
humantransit.org/2009/04/the-disneyland-theory-of-transit.html
This series: humantransit.org/2010/06/is-speed-obsolete-the-wrapup.html
humantransit.org/2013/02/quote-of-the-week-the-portlandia-streetcar.html
web.archive.org/web/20140731004511/bettercities.net/news-opinion/blogs/robert-steuteville/21226/place-mobility-sometimes-good-transportation-slow
Furthermore, refer to the misunderstanding of the 15 minute city idea which also posits that jobs should be within that range, too.
Now, you will note that none of these actually call fast, mass transit “immoral”, or even any of the other expected name-calling (“faceless”, etc.), at most they remark on it being expensive, and just completely miss the point. (OK, the last one calls the supporters of transit being useful “speed freaks”, which falls into the interesting bin where it doesn’t technically say anything objectionable, but at the same time conveys clearly the message that their argument isn’t worth engaging with but should be dismissed out of hand.)
The right wing is fairly lousy with people screeching about the moral failings of everybody except old rich straight, preferably Protestant, white guys. The rich straight white guys can get away with almost anything. One of them had an insurrection but got re-elected anyway.
Maybe Trump should have been arrested more quickly like Peter Mandleson was.
Maybe Trump should have been arrested more quickly like Peter Mandleson was.
Please point to where Susan Fainstein makes this claim. The only mention of commuter rail vs. buses in The Just City are these two quotes:
I dont think making buses is a good idea. I agree with you on that better billion and we can hand out monthly free passes to the ones in need. Or discounted routes can be created like in IETT, charging either a symbolic fare or being completely free of cost bus service. These would be short services that connects poor neighborhoods to a nearby subway or place of interest (like an important plaza) in an semi-express manner. This way the purported benefits of free buses can be reaped without the entire system having to go free. Another method of payment for such a service I think could be that, if it goes to important plazas along the route, how would it be if those that board the bus have to show proof that they work at one of those plazas? Like an ID? If such a thing is done then maybe the plazas could be rewarded for reducing the car traffic.
200,000 households in NYC make under $10,000 a year. Free transportation would be a boon for them since every penny counts for them.