Cait the Proud Trans WomanJul 24

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!

Show threadmiaJul 25

@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.

Show threadViolet Madder

@portugeek @oldladyplays

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

Jul 25 at 6:25amWeb
Show threadIrenes (many)Jul 27
@violetmadder @portugeek @oldladyplays that seems to be the fundamental disagreement the US is having
Show threadWilfried Klaebe6d 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

Show threadViolet Madder6d 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.

Show threadIrenes (many)6d ago
@violetmadder @wonka @portugeek @oldladyplays well said :(