@acdha @rsynnott @crashglasshouses @liferstate @mekkaokereke @bluejekyll And really, public transit should be free! Car drivers don’t pay the city every time they drive on city roads.
So why isn’t it free? Because then we couldn’t ticket poor people for not paying! And our systems are designed to keep most Black and brown folks poor, so… oops, there’s that racism again!
Car drivers incur costs, yes, but the marginal costs that accrue to them with each km driven, are significantly smaller than the costs imposed on society - society significantly subsidizes driving.
The total cost of a transit trip (rider paid + taxpayer subsidized parts) is much smaller than just the tax subsidized part of the cost of driving.
... to such an extent that if free transit doubled transit ridership, but only a smallish percentage of those added transit rides would have been drives (e.g. 1/2 of those transit rides would have been walks or bike rides, 1/4 would have been staying at home, and only 1/4 would have been drives) - that still would save taxpayer funds overall, because just the taxpayer subsidy to those relatively few foregone drives would cover all the extra transit rides.
Laura Langdon
Theneilcave
dragonfrog