Mastodawn

Cait the Proud Trans Woman

A thought about public transit.

Why do we have to pay for it?

We built it. It was our tax money and our labour and our commonly-held land. The buses and trains we bought, we paid for. The people who drive them? We pay that.

So why do we charge people to use it?

We don't charge road users to use the roads. "We pay for them," the drivers say. "So do we pay for them," say I. "We have to have insurance!" "So do transit vehicles."

"We have to pay for our go-juice of choice!" "Us too."

"We have to pay to maintain our own vehicles." "Yep, that's a pain for us too."

So why, exactly, do we provide use of the roads free to people who have the money to have their own vehicle, but NOT to the people who *don't* have that money, or choose not to spend it on a car for all kinds of society-benefiting reasons?

It's ridiculous. In order to facilitate the fare collection, we have to have MORE POLICE in our lives, people going up and down the LRT trains, bothering people trying to journey, and writing expensive tickets if they find someone forgot to tap their card on the out-of-the-way pedestals for such. How many hundreds of thousands are we paying in the salary for that couple of dozen people? Do we come even CLOSE to recovering that money by catching so-called "fare cheats"? No. Nothing like it.

It's a big ripoff, in favour of individual car use, and allows them to underfund our public transit so that it can take me an hour and a quarter to get to an appointment a private vehicle could reach in fifteen minutes, because it's about five km from my apartment. But in our rattletrap system, that's 3 buses.

This kind of thinking is burning our planet and our people alive. And still we hem and haw about whether it's worth the expenditure, and make it easy for people to live 100+km from their place of work - and yet still attend every day.

Madness!

@oldladyplays The best part is when the administrative overhead of fare collection far outstrips the revenue of the fares it collects.

@raeve I haven't seen the cost of collecting fares exceed fare revenue yet, but I've only looked at a few examples. Those costs do take up MOST of fare revenue, though. Meaning, if you eliminate fares, and by that also eliminate the cost of collecting them, then you come out fairly close to even.

No evidence I've seen suggests to me that fares serve any practical purpose, or ever could.

A Flock of Beagles Jul 24

in OC Transpo's case, it becomes ever-more "unmanageably" expensive as politicians have made choice after choice that would inevitably raise costs and increase fares while delivering worse service. because MetroLinx owns everything these days, they keep asking for a bigger cut of profits. the routes which were once familiar or made any sense get changed almost completely every couple of years or so by people who don't and won't use public transit.

i think the fundamental reason is because people who use public transit are not projecting the image of "rugged individualism", atomisation, and private property ownership that capitalists want to see in the world.

Aurani of Perpetual Pyrolatry Jul 24

@oldladyplays if it's trying to turn a profit, its not a public service.

Just a private service, run by the government.

Dark Phoenix 🇺🇦🇨🇦🇬🇱🇵🇦🇵🇸🏳️‍🌈Jul 25

@Aurani @oldladyplays I am so happy that I actually found a non-profit Medicare Advantage plan.

Glen, waiting for the pre-poll Jul 25

@Aurani @oldladyplays Although they are not suitable for public transit, government owned for-profit entities are not inherently bad and are often good social policy.

They can offer an alternative to exploitative practices which can be difficult to legislate against effectively. Governments have run banks, bakeries, supermarkets. It is important that these make a profit, so there is room for commercial competition. But the the commercial competition then needs to set the qualities of service to compete with the government competition (good quality bread, non extortionate conditions on loans, foods which are healthy).

AndThisIsMrsPeacock 🏳‍🌈Jul 24

@oldladyplays Transit should be free. Our system "temporarily" stopped collecting fares during lockdown and it proved to be such a massively popular move that we're never going back.

They keep "temporarily" extending it longer but they already ripped all the fareboxes out of the buses and scrapped the farecard machines so we all know it's permanent 😆

Szescstopni Jul 24

@andthisismrspeacock @oldladyplays And when you're accused of socialism/communism – people in the Eastern Block had to pay their fares too (I did live in the Eastern Bloc under"socialism", which was just a despotic oligarchy ). Free transit is not "socialism". Economically, it's the best solution.

Cait the Proud Trans Woman Jul 24

@Szescstopni @andthisismrspeacock

Thanks for that perspective. I'm old enough to have been in the military facing off against your "allies" in the other "socialist" countries, when I was posted to West Germany in 1985. I stood 100km from the border, and thought about how quickly tanks could cover that distance.

It was an awful, and scary time. I'm so fucking glad it ended. And now we have to worry about an evil git like Putin who wants to re-establish it.

I like the world a lot better without whole blocs of countries being declared off-limits to whole other blocs of countries' peoples. I can only imagine what it was like to be on the restricted side. :/

Szescstopni Jul 24

@oldladyplays @andthisismrspeacock It was hard, compared to the West, but there were some perks. I was taught how to make explosives in school, for instance. Not that I remember much now :)

Cait the Proud Trans Woman Jul 24

@Szescstopni @andthisismrspeacock

Hehehe...be very good, and someday I'll tell the story on here of how I Hindenburged a group of bullies when I was 13.

I will also explain how one performs a Hindenburging, and how it became a verb.

AndThisIsMrsPeacock 🏳‍🌈Jul 25

@Szescstopni @oldladyplays It's Massachusetts, so they already call us socialist. We generally take it as a compliment.

Szescstopni Jul 25

@andthisismrspeacock @oldladyplays Massachusetts is definitely un-American :)

Salty ⊙▃⊙ 🏳️‍🌈 🇺🇦 ✡️Jul 25

@andthisismrspeacock @Szescstopni @oldladyplays I had to laugh at the cons who when our jobs relocated from the Boston area to Atlanta, were rejoicing in the notion of leaving “Taxachusetts" only to find out that Georgia income and property and sales taxes were the same if not higher. Womp womp…

Atlanta's creaky transit has been paid for ten times over but there's been no talk of eliminating fares and plenty about spending a billion more on expanding the main north/south highway from the city to the wealthy white 'burbs. So glad I don’t live there anymore.

Jo with elbows up & chin up Jul 24

@oldladyplays
Excellent points!!!!

dragonfrog Jul 24

@oldladyplays
"So why, exactly, do we provide use of the roads free to people who have the money to have their own vehicle, but NOT to the people who *don't* have that money"

That's why. That's exactly why.

We're deathly afraid of poor people. We charge money and put up fare gates and hire police to check fare payment, even when it costs much more than any fare they recover - because we're afraid if we don't, poor and homeless people will ride around on transit.

dragonfrog Jul 24

@oldladyplays In my city, you're supposed to pay a fare to ride the trains, but there are no gates - you can just get on the train and hope you don't get caught.

When proposals for fare gates come up, it's always in the context of safety and perceptions of danger on transit, never in a financial context. Everyone knows and acknowledges the gates would cost more to install and run than they'd ever recover.

It's not to collect fares, it's to keep out people who can't afford fares.

@dragonfrog And it's not necessary. People in charge of transit can already bar or eject anyone they want for any valid reason.

Also, many people who can't afford fares get free passage anyway, so this seems to target only a pretty narrow income range -- poor, but not TOO poor. It's never really made sense to me, frankly.

John E. Bartley, III (D) K7AAY Jul 25

@dragonfrog @oldladyplays Not poor people, _disorderly_ people. People who offend the senses.

bewilderbeast23 6d ago

@503bartley @dragonfrog @oldladyplays and invariably by that they mean poor people.

Fat_Farang Jul 25

@oldladyplays You will kneel before The Car. The Car is to be worshipped above all others. Policy is created to help move The Car, not people. The Car will be the driver of the world economy. Prostrate yourself before The Car.

Brad Rosenheim Jul 25

@oldladyplays Because the capitalists don't want US to have anything for free.

RustyRing Jul 25

The busses in my town are free.

Lucia of the Burning Halo Jul 25

@oldladyplays My city got rid of fares when covid began and has no plans to reinstitute them: it's just good for everyone.

@oldladyplays I don’t know where you live.

I pay to use the roads. Even when I lived in Michigan (a state with no toll roads) I paid to use the roads.

I pay tax on gasoline. I pay to register my vehicle. Even folks that have EVs now pay a minimum tax to use the roads.

@Blueteamsherpa We all pay in various ways, and there's some disparity in all cases, mostly due to how these excises (and I include fares in that) are structured. Realistically, it should all just come out of the general fund, because otherwise you're playing favourites, and decades of experience have shown us that there's no entirely fair way to do that.

[witchzard]Jul 25

@Blueteamsherpa @oldladyplays None of those taxes comes even close to covering the actual cost of your car - the cost to society, which is subsidized by taxes. Thanks for nothing.

@ics Funny thing is, I pay to use the roads as well. Driving a forty year old box of bolts down a privately-maintained dirt road that looks like it's been used for artillery training, the cost of that road comes directly out of my spine.

And incidentally, that mail in my truck, the bills and legal documents and other necessary grease for the wheels of society buried under all the capitalist ejaculate that is bulk-mailed advertisement? That is not subsidized by those taxes; the result of self-funding something that should be a public service is you getting a shit ton of junk mail so that you can also get free-to-you delivery.
@Blueteamsherpa @oldladyplays

@oldladyplays My own research finds no meaningful benefit from transit fares. The vast bulk of fare revenue goes to the costs of collecting fares in the first place. If fares are eliminated, then a smallish amount of extra subsidy is needed, but the COST of collecting fares is also eliminated, and it's not small.

As best I can tell, fares serve a social or political purpose, but not a practical or financial one.

Jennifer Kayla | Theogrin 🦊Jul 25

@wesdym @oldladyplays

100%. Additionally, the benefit of having people able to get around the city without having to crawl into a comparatively massive (per-capita) automobile, solely -- solely -- from a financial level, is immense. People so provided for are able to frequent business centers, to get out there and do things they would otherwise be locked away from doing, even (gasp!) find jobs they would otherwise be barred from working, and that means $profit.$

(I don't like capitalism. But some people, only stirred by the thought of profit, can only be reached in such a way.)

The only logically valid use for a bus fare system is to disincentivize the people who can't afford it from existing in spaces both public and private.

@theogrin My own suspicion is that fares serve mostly to assure people who don't ride that people who do don't get to ride for 'free'. LOTS of people who can't afford it ride anyway, due to other govt measures. So it's not keeping poor people off. I have to assume it has another purpose. I'm just sure that purpose isn't to pay for anything other than the cost of making people pay.

@oldladyplays I can only speak for my experience as a poor person who relies on public transport, but free public transport is the bane of public transport.

Here in Melbourne we have a "free tram zone". It sounds great: within the grid, trams are free.

The problem with this is that it incentivises laziness. People getting on for one or two stops, while people who need to get home are left on the platform. It's especially bad on the east-west routes, as tourists get off the Skybus and lumber on to trams.

It means that I have to ask for a seat, which is quite uncomfortable when you have non-visible mobility disabilities. Eye roll, after eye roll, kind of wears me down.

This isn't once off, or one time of the day, it's all day, every day. Once outside the free tram zone I can get a seat, and while full, trams aren't packed

@sortius @oldladyplays sounds like a capacity & implementation problem to me. Overcrowding always is.

It's entirely possible to run a dual free/paid transit system. The nearest big city to me does it. Instead of everything in a zone being free, specific busses that serve only that zone are free.

They are large, frequent, and divert one-stop-hoppers off the longer (paid-for) routes. All the busses are well used, but not overcrowded.

I empathise with the invisible disability & seat access issue. There are never enough priority seats and policing them is impossible. The best thing I did for my personal situation was get a stick. Now that my disability is visible, people are much more accommodating. I really wish it wasn't necessary.

She Was Speaking Jul 25

@oldladyplays Here in Hawai'i, our buses are completely free.

Granted, the buses are also absolute dogshit.

More police, more bureaucrats to make the money disappear, more expensive monitoring equipment, more expensive thief-proof fare machines, more expensive closed circuit network lines along the train tracks, and all for a measely $1 million in the entire Portland metro area. That's 50 cents per person, per year.

But hey without fares, we might have to give homeless bums a ride!

@cy @oldladyplays this is the deal, it's gatekeeping / an excuse to exclude some people while delusionally referring to riders as "customers". There are also more remnants of for-profit transit companies in some of the establishment thinking / state law and policy frameworks, but the actual function of transit fares is to limit ridership. If Portland achieved its climate action plan's transit mode-share goals, the bus would be late for needing to collect/check fare from every person boarding.

Oh they've reduced the amount that the bus is late by making you submit all your movement patterns to a central government database, so they can verify you aren't poor merely by tapping the $100,000 sensor podium! As a bonus, if you're elderly or disabled it's permanently tied to your legal identity, and you can be tracked for your entire life! Hope you aren't taking the bus to any protests or activist meetings!

CC: @oldladyplays@wargamers.social

@cy @oldladyplays personally I never use transit because an e-bike will take 30min less per ten miles, for almost every trip in the Portland metro area, and I'm often carrying a kid over 500ft of hill to a thing that starts 15min before the bus would get there (teenager is 130lb now, so carrying some of her own weight on a tandem.) I think trimet bus still takes cash but it's been at least five years since I've been on one. Even so, I rarely drive, despite hills, cargo, rain, stroads, excuses.

Violet Madder 6d ago

@cy @enobacon @oldladyplays

THIS IS THE OTHER PIECE: legibility.

Almost everyone can see how fare systems are used to control the poor.

But too many people fail to see how controlling the poor is, most importantly, a tool that is used as a lever to control EVERYONE ELSE, TOO.

If we let everyone use transit freely without charge, it would suddenly seem weirdly onerous and invasive to make everyone tag on and off the buses and trains purely for the sake of tracking everyone's movements, now wouldn't it?

But for the sake of money-- not even actual profit, which as we've established isn't particularly feasible anyway-- suddenly we accept it as fine, reasonable, normal, and not at all fucking creepy or dystopian.

Everyone's location and status has to stay LEGIBLE to the system, for us to be effectively oppressed.

Yeah, pretending the busses would break down and the drivers wouldn't be able to eat is a great way to make people smile at the thought of being recorded in preparation for being sent to the death camps. It's only fair!

And for every poor shmuck who can't afford to take the bus, there are a dozen wage earners on that bus who receive a chill and think twice about quitting their awful job, instead resolving to continue to burn the planet for their dark masters.

CC: @enobacon@urbanists.social @oldladyplays@wargamers.social

Karen Keiller Jul 25

@oldladyplays When I was in Canberra last October the transit was free because they were switching payment systems. For a stranger to the city it was so stress free. I notice they have Free Fridays, which is a start. https://www.transport.act.gov.au/news/news-and-events-items/december-2024/fare-free-fridays

Travel for free on Fare free Fridays - Transport Canberra

Travel for free on our buses and light rail every Friday.

@oldladyplays

RE: https://irlqt.me/notes/a97b1npw14c703ij

@oldladyplays why do people get $7,500 or whatever off their EV but I get nothing for not buying or using a car at all

or we buy six people e-bikes instead of an ev car rebate

car lobby has had it too good in the sun for too long

Princess Serena Star ✨Jul 25

@oldladyplays I think the thing about transit fares is to help subsidize the development and upkeep.
Cars do have fees. License renewals, vehicle taxes, tolls, traffic tickets.
I definitely agree with the substance of "fund public transit, disincentivize car usage", but the system isn't quite as broken as you make it to be.
Just a respectful disagreement... But I really wish transit were more viable, I still don't drive but I'll need a way to reliable get to a job when I graduate.

Genna || HaruEb 春 Jul 25

@Starcross @oldladyplays I mean, if you look at figures, raw income from fares is like, a teeny tiny drop in the bucket of the overall cost of the system, almost negligible. But those fees are significant to many of the users of public transport, for whom the elimination of a couple hundred dollars a month would make a real difference. Why are we asking those people to subsidize anything?

It turns out that when you eliminate fares (or reduce them massively, all fares no matter the distance are 50 cents in my city) people start using public transport more, meaning less wear and tear on car based infrastructure, and more people going out and shopping or dining or entertainment, and that increased economic activity is good for everyone, and taxes levied on that revenue more than make up for the shortfall left behind by eliminating or reducing fares.

Eliminating or reducing public transport fares is an overall win for everyone involved, riders pay less, the government orgs who administrate don't have to pay people to check riders have paid, fewer cars on the road is obviously good for everyone, the environment in many ways, less maintenance, less traffic, and the enhanced economic activity really puts the nail in the coffin for the idea of charging fares.

Public transport is super viable everywhere with frankly very modest investment for the return, the reason it's not present or works badly in many places is not really anything inherent to transport systems, it's a political decision, specifically a decision by the wealthy class to de-prioritize things that are good for the working class...

> We don't charge road users to use the roads.

Gas taxes do exactly that. And there are sometimes extra registration fees for electric vehicles since they don't pay gas taxes.

Cait the Proud Trans Woman Jul 25

Gas taxes do not *begin* to cover the cost to society of using gas. Pull the other one, it's got bells on. When you consider that your vehicle is largely used for single-passenger transit, the gas tax doesn't cover YOUR CAR's effect on the environment. You cost us far more than you contribute.

Look up the numbers sometime. Also, leaving that aside, gas prices are kept artificially low for US drivers, despite that US drivers demand more gas than any other nation in the world. So super high demand, limited supply, but the gas prices stay low compared to everywhere else. And the federal government gives HUGE cash subsidies to fossil fuel companies to support car drivers' access to cheap fuel.

If you're gonna bring a whoopee cushion to a logic argument, try it with someone else.

[witchzard]Jul 25

@oldladyplays @atzanteol Back in the 1980ies, a group of environmentalists did an anaylsis here in Ger,any. The result was that gas would've needed to cost over 5 DM (2.5 Euros) then to cover the environmental cost.

Nowadays, this is somewhere around 5-7 Euros (6-8.5 USD per LITER) - and no, we aren't even talking about cost to build and maintain roads.

How much does gas cost nowadays? Well, less than 2 Euros in Germany and the US? A quick search on the Internet resulted in 2.5 USD ... per fucking gallon (NYC)!!!

UkeleleEric Jul 25

@oldladyplays though the problem of living that far from work is a problem of the system and mindset of our society - no-one should have to live that far from work, or have to attend physically a place that far away.

@oldladyplays In Luxembourg, where I live, all public transit is free apart from the TGV. At some point, the government realised that the money collected from fares was irrelevant, there were loads of jobs they were paying for that brought little to no money, and the benefits in terms of public health would be huge, so they just dropped the whole charade.

And this didn’t mean they stopped investing in the network, on the contrary. Bus and train lines have been expanded, and the tram in the capital has grown non-stop; I can now get to the airport from my place faster (or at least as fast) with the tram than I would have with a taxi. And the money lost, budget-wise, is peanuts and will be a net positive when you consider the long-term health benefits (and thus the savings it will provide in the healthcare system) due to having less traffic.

Violet Madder Jul 25

@portugeek @oldladyplays

I mean, do people want society to actually FUNCTION, or not???

Irenes (many)6d ago

@violetmadder @portugeek @oldladyplays that seems to be the fundamental disagreement the US is having

Wilfried Klaebe 5d ago

The US has had public transport, trams, light rail in quite some cities - until fuel companies actively destroyed that to make people need their own cars and buy fuel from them.

@ireneista @violetmadder @portugeek @oldladyplays

Violet Madder 5d ago

@wonka @ireneista @portugeek @oldladyplays

I work in mental health care.

I know a woman who is stuck in a wheelchair most of the time since a bad car accident wrecked her hip. She can barely walk, can't work, is overwhelmed by depression, and they won't give her hip surgery until she loses weight-- but losing weight is damned difficult when it's hard to even walk, plus the depression.

I want to invite her out to some of the activities and events I've been lucky enough to participate in lately. She's on disability and her state health insurance does allow her to order transportation-- but ONLY transportation to medical appointments. Not mere casual social fun events. Those aren't deemed necessary enough.

If she doesn't happen to have friends on hand who have a big enough vehicle to accommodate a wheelchair, she doesn't get to go out to enjoy herself.

Fascist logic says, anyone who doesn't have help must not have enough friends-- and that must be because there's something WRONG with them, and so they should just be allowed to languish in isolation and neglect so natural selection can take its eugenic course.

My friend used to work in a mental hospital. The things she's been through, serving others-- years, decades of selflessly helping people through some of the worst possible shit, and now that she can barely fucking walk she's programmed by this culture to feel despairingly WORTHLESS as if she doesn't deserve any goddamned help now that she's the one who needs it.

How much easier would it be, to put a life back together, if a person who's down on their luck could EASILY get to a transit stop that can accommodate their needs and just GET to where they need to GO? How much easier to make the connections needed to find employment, and hope, and activity, and life??

But some people would rather hamstring civilization's overall efficiency and function, just for the sake of making people MORE miserable when they're already down.

The social darwinism of fascists is a sadistic, self-destructive, depraved level of brutality that takes my damned breath away.

All for a fossil fuel profit buck so somebody can goof off on a bigger boat while the whole planet burns.

Irenes (many)5d ago

@violetmadder @wonka @portugeek @oldladyplays well said :(

Nina Cried Power Jul 25

@portugeek @oldladyplays

Also, the money that people would have spent on fares they are now spending elsewhere in the economy.

@Nina_cried @oldladyplays Indeed. Although in Luxembourg the fares were pretty low to begin with: 25€/month for the city, 50€/month for the whole country. But still, money that people can spend on other things for themselves.

FeralFood Jul 25

@portugeek @oldladyplays yeah, Brisbane randomly introduced 50c fares (vs ~$5). Its pretty nice, actually does make the bus more tempting. And when I do an occasional long train commute, its $1 not like $18.

Thou, the airport is specifically excluded. So an taxi/didi is still cheaper and quicker from my place...

@FeralFood @oldladyplays When it’s free or priced super cheaply, it highlights to people how much of a hassle it is to use the car instead. I never ever take my car to the city centre anymore; why would I bother pay for parking (and have to look for a spot in the first place…), get stuck in traffic, risk a crash, etc etc, when the convenient, and conveniently free, tram is right there?

In fact, now that I think of it, I only ever use the car for groceries or in the weeks I have my kids with me…