The Case for Free Transit
A reader asks what I think about Irwin Kellner’s argument that mass transit ought to be free. Broadly speaking, I agree.
To understand how to think about this, it’s easier to start by thinking about roads. Say there’s no road between Washington, DC and Frederick, Maryland. You can go from the one place to the other, but it involves going way out of your way even though it could be a pretty quick trip on a direct road. What you need to ask yourself about building such a road is what would it cost and would it be worth it? You don’t build the road expecting to turn a profit. And you shouldn’t really build it expecting tolls to finance it. You should build it because you want to encourage people to drive from DC to Frederick. But if you build the road and it comes to pass that it’s choked with traffic during certain periods of time you don’t respond by making the road wider. Just like with building the road in the first place, you make it wider if you want to increase the number of people driving. If you want to eliminate the congestion problem, then you charge people to drive on the road during the peak times. The transit situation is similar. If you don’t want people to take the Metro from Bethesda to Gallery Place, then you shouldn’t build the Metro. But if you do want people to take the Metro from Betheday to Gallery Place then you shouldn’t charge them to ride. But if it turns out that your route is too popular at certain times of day, then you want to charge them in order to prevent overcrowding.
That’s how things should be in principle. In practice, politics is much messier than that, and budget politics is especially messy. There are all kinds of dedicated revenue stream issues and various other factors that mean that reliance on fares is typically a second-best option in a world where the realistic alternative isn’t free transit, it’s no transit. In theory, however, transit and roads should both be free most of the time but perhaps quite expensive at particular times when otherwise there’d be dramatic crowding.
87 Responses to “The Case for Free Transit”
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February 11th, 2009 at 11:11 am
That’s exactly right. Public policy should never be set to meet the existing demands of the populace but should be based on what our rulers think would be best for us.
February 11th, 2009 at 11:12 am
Yes, but the critical question is how do you keep hobos and teenagers from using the bus as an all-day hangout? The main reason people don’t take the bus in America cities is because it’s always full of worthless, worthless assholes. You need to decrease the level of assholes, not increase it.
February 11th, 2009 at 11:20 am
What JH said. This is why cracking down on farebeaters can make a big difference, it excludes undesirables.
February 11th, 2009 at 11:23 am
I’d like Matt to compare his approval of free transit to his disapproval of free parking. I think the case can be made, but it’s one of those things that seem absurd on the face of it.
February 11th, 2009 at 11:26 am
Don’t forget the prostitutes JH.
February 11th, 2009 at 11:30 am
No, mass transit shouldn’t be free. Quality would decline and it would open the argument that transit is just a redistribution to the poor, which of course it isn’t. Plus, trains and buses would be full of sleeping homeless 24/7.
February 11th, 2009 at 11:30 am
For the record, I don’t think any forms of transportation provided by government should be free. All expressways should be toll roads, there should be no free interstates. Those who use something more should bear more of the cost.
February 11th, 2009 at 11:35 am
matt, i’d like to slightly modify one of your statements, as follows:
But if you do want people to take the Metro from Betheday to Gallery Place then you should fix the Red Line so it’s not constantly delayed and single-tracked due to various malfunctions and breakdowns
February 11th, 2009 at 11:44 am
re :What you need to ask yourself about building such a road is what would it cost and would it be worth it? You don’t build the road expecting to turn a profit. And you shouldn’t really build it expecting tolls to finance it.
Those who use the road contribute to funding it through gasoline taxes that go to the Highway Trust Fund (which supports a Highway Fund (the largest share), a mass transit fund and the LUST fund — Leaking Underground Storage Tanks). How these funds are allocated across states, projects and modes is, of course, a complicated and murky process.
I’m not quite sure what all this is about, but dedicated funding mechanisms exist.
February 11th, 2009 at 11:47 am
What?
February 11th, 2009 at 11:50 am
Geez, that’s easy. You want fewer people to use their cars, so you charge them to park. You want more people to take mass transit, so you don’t charge them.
Advance Transit is the second most popular mass transit system in NH– just below the UNH system– and it’s completely free. They feel the boost in ridership is well worth it, especially as any fee-taking system has administrative costs of their own. Their buses are clean and decent and I’ve never noticed any ne’er do wells hanging out there. However, the buses don’t run after 7 pm, which probably helps.
February 11th, 2009 at 11:55 am
If you don’t want people to take the Metro from Bethesda to Gallery Place, then you shouldn’t build the Metro. But if you do want people to take the Metro from Betheday to Gallery Place then you shouldn’t charge them to ride.
What if the govt is agnostic on whether people should take the Metro from Bethesda to Gallery Place, but wants to give them the option in case that’s what they want to do? Then you charge people the full price of the trip.
February 11th, 2009 at 11:55 am
It’s not like homeless people on trains are especially a problem relative to homeless people on the streets or homeless people in the parks, they’re just a problem for different people.
February 11th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
You should built it because you want to encourage people to drive from DC to Frederick.
You see, your entire premise is all wrong… if planning had been done with the mindset that the last think we want is a convenient connection between DC and Frederick, we’d all be better off.
Jokes aside, I really couldn’t care less about the cost of public transit. It’s broadly used as a token fee, and I suppose it serves a purpose of getting people on the metro who need to use it rather than getting on for lack of anything better to do. I never thought about being concerned about that in the first place, though.
In any case, I don’t know why people want to travel between any two points on the metro system, nor do I care: the point is to build out the infrastructure, just as one would do with highways, and then give people the chance to exploit the opportunities that the convenient and rapid transit creates.
February 11th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
To fill out some of what Tyro is pointing at, does anyone know what proportion of (for the DC example) Metro riders (and total trips) involve a weekly or monthly pass, and what proportion involve O-D based fares?
February 11th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
The fees for public transit are token fees? Somehow in NYC, if you can get two other people to join you in a “gypsy” cab it costs the same as taking a bus (provided you aren’t going TOO far or to an airport or someplace) in which there is standing room only.
Except when gas was at its most expensive, since my family already has a car (so any mileage independent costs of car ownership would exist whether I commuted or not), it is the same price or cheaper for me to drive to work rather than take the bus (of course I get free parking at work). And commuting by car takes less time.
To go to the city on a Sunday (when parking is free) from Queens — also cheaper than taking mass transit (and less time is involved as you don’t have to wait for a bus/subway train) … although sometimes the stress of driving in NYC makes taking public transport a reasonable alternative.
I don’t see why mass transport should be made free. But it should receive the same level of subsidies (the budget for rails, e.g., should not be part of the budget for MTAs and similar agencies, but rather should be subsidized as roads are) as individual transit effectively does. At the very least, there is no reason why (if only due to economies of scale) mass transit should cost as much or more than individual transit. And yet it does. Even in mass-transit famous NYC. Even before the planned rate hikes!
Nu? What’s going on here?
February 11th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
But they might get off the trains where very different people live. Then the police in the very different people’s neighborhood would have to put them back on the trains to get them back to where the homeless people “belong”.
February 11th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
Off peak costs!!!!
The cost of operating a subway is virtually ZERO off peak.
There is a minor amount of wear and tear on the cars and the stations from extra foot traffic.
The cost of labor is not significant because you can’t hire the people to only work during peak times. So you have more people than you need during off peak times. Yes, there is a cost but it isn’t very great.
You could make subways virtually free off peak and a small fare would cover costs more than during rush hour.
OK, the subway system needs the extra money to afford to stay open. Well, then they should raise fares during rush hour when the costs are higher. Of course, they probably should get more money from the driving public because if the people weren’t on the subways then the traffic would be just plain disgusting during rush hour. But this is a red herring.
Off peak fares should be far lower than peak fares. Unfortunately, few systems give any discount at all and none give a sufficient discount.
February 11th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
“Free” transit doesn’t make sense in theory and is completely unrealistic in practise. It’s wrong in theory because it would massively distort supply and demand, just like removing pricing from any other commodity.
February 11th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
fpr3, there is an argument to be made that you want people to use public transport when they might not otherwise do so because of the fare. “Distort[ing] supply and demand” might be a good thing, if it distorts the market for car transportation downwards. I’m not saying this would work, only that there’s an argument to be made in favor of it.
February 11th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
So … off peak is pretty much free for subways. And, I don’t know about DC, but in NYC, during peak hours, the subways are packed like sardine cans. Even if everyone is riding using an unlimited fair metro card (IIRC the MTA estimates that such people pay about $1 a ride on average), that is still quite a bit of money.
So how come the NY MTA has such a budget gap? How come they need to increase fares and decrease service even more? When the subways are already running such that each car is being as fully utilized as it can be during those more expensive peak hours?
February 11th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
NoVA has free buses on red alert days in the summer.
It is a disaster. Buses are filled to capacity with smelly Mexican workers. I’ve learned to check before and drive in those days to avoid taking the bus. You can’t get a seat, it is hot, and it is unpleasant.
And homeless people are far more offensive on a bus than on a sidewalk. Again, sit on a bus in the summer with a really smelly homelesss guy two seats over. They use up a lot of space and scare away everyone else.
February 11th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
to use public transport when they might not otherwise do so because of the fare. – Tyro
But the fare is just the kicker (e.g. that the MTA needs to fill a Q23 bus to run it without loosing money yet somehow for the same nominal fare, a gypsy cab operator can feed his family … and gypsy cabs come around with thrice the frequency of buses). The real dissuasion from public transport for many of us is not just that we don’t save money taking it but that it takes up to twice as long as just hopping in a car!
February 11th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
The desire to charge fares on transit reminds me of a bill just introduced in the Washington state legislature, to charge an 18% tax on sex toys. The author of the bill says the revenue would go for good things, and also says that if the tax caused all the sex toy businesses to leave the state (thus ending the revenue, of course), that wouldn’t bother him.
And that’s pretty much the state of transit in the US- the fare revenue goes for good things, but if it means that transit fails, well, there’s a lot of people not particularly bothered by that. After all, driving gets cheaper every year, let the market decide, and blah blah blah- right?
People of the future will look back and wonder how, with the clear example of the elevator before us, we charged fares for horizontal transport but not for vertical. Picking apart the reasons for this dichotomy will resemble a gruesome dissection of a cadaver with widely metastasized cancer, neural tracts tangled in crazy knots, and misplaced extra fingers and clumps of hair resulting from prenatal exposure to some tetragenic substance, most probably automobile advertising.
The broad outline, though, can be easily seen. Freeways are free because if they weren’t, most of them would never have been built. They were built so land developers with friends in the statehouse could make a killing with suburban development. Imposing tolls would have subjected the freeways to all the inconvenience, extra cost, and public scrutiny imposed by fare collection on transit agencies.
The owners of skyscrapers assume tenants will pay higher rents to avoid paying elevator fares, and they also think tenants would simply move to a building that didn’t charge elevator fares if they were to impose one. The American city doesn’t have the self-confidence to make the first assumption, or the competition to make the second.
It’s a lucky thing that driving just keeps getting cheaper, right?
February 11th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
fpr3, there is an argument to be made that you want people to use public transport when they might not otherwise do so because of the fare.
Then make that argument. You can “make an argument” for free anything, but that doesn’t mean the argument makes any sense.
February 11th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
The real dissuasion from public transport for many of us is not just that we don’t save money taking it but that it takes up to twice as long as just hopping in a car!
And that’s the real transit killer. That, plus the convenience factor. With a car, I can go where I want to go, when I want to go. With transit, I can only go where the bus/train route goes, and I have to fit my schedule to the transit schedule.
I think even your “up to twice as long” is optimistic. It would take me three times as long to get to work by transit as by car. And I think that’s probably the typical situation.
February 11th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
fear is the mind killer.
car is the train killer.
February 11th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
some people face commutes such that using public transit can be roughly comparable in total time to driving
Not many compared to the number of people for whom commuting by car is much faster.
February 11th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Transactions costs should be considered in theory as well as in practice. As a practical matter, what holds in theory depends on the assumptions, and for any outcome there’s a list of assumptions that will get you there. One might say that assembling such lists and waving them about is the practice of theoretical economics.
February 11th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
If I can afford a car and have travel needs for which mass transit isn’t a realistic alternative I’m probably going to buy a car. But a huge chunk of the costs of a car are fixed – loan repayments, insurance, registration taxes. The marginal cost of using the car for any particular trip is usually low. That means if I have a car at all I’m probably going to use it for most of my trips. Even for trips where mass transit is a realistic alternative. This means that in order to get most people to forgo cars and use transit instead the transit system has to be comprehensive enough to meet virtually all travel needs. It needs to go all over the city. It needs to run every day from early morning to late at night. It needs to run frequently. And it needs to be relatively fast. Outside a small number of cities, this just isn’t realistic.
February 11th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
That depends on where you are looking.
I’m looking everywhere.
And, of course, there are lots of people facing congestion delays on their commutes for whom public transit could be comparable in convenience, except for the fact the necessary transit service doesn’t exist.
If “lots” means “a tiny share of the total,” correct. I suppose 1,000 people could be called “lots,” but in a nation of 300,000,000 it’s a drop in the bucket.
February 11th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Why do people insist on talking as if the choice was between car and no-car? My wife and I have one car. She drives it to work (in the same suburb where we live, and we both drive it on errands on weekends. I take the bus to my work in the city (round trip cost $2.70; 20 minutes each way). If I wanted to drive to work for some unimaginable reason, we would have to buy a second car, and pay at least $10 a day for parking on top of the fixed costs, gas, and maintenance expenses. Talk about a no-brainer . . .
February 11th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Carsharing is only practical in dense central city areas where car ownership is low and transit use is high. To the extent that it is a more appealing alternative to transit, it will tend to reduce transit usage and increase travel by car. It’s like taxis in New York.
February 11th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
OK. Now try being more granular.
Er, why? “Everywhere” is simply the sum of all the granules.
Many, many millions of commuters are adversely affected by congestion to a significant degree.
Yes, but your claim wasn’t about commuters who are merely “adversely affected by congestion to a significant degree,” but about commuters “for whom public transit could be comparable in convenience, except for the fact the necessary transit service doesn’t exist,” which is a much, much smaller group. There is significant congestion in every major city, but the average commute by car is still much faster than the average commute by transit.
February 11th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Carsharing has the potential to decimate transit in cities that are dense enough to support it. Once it becomes popular enough, you could have cars stationed every block or two throughout the city. Any time you needed to get anywhere you could simply make an instant reservation from your iPod, walk a block or two to your reserved car, and drive to your destination.
February 11th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
Why do people insist on talking as if the choice was between car and no-car?
Well, lots of people don’t have wives to share their car ownership with. But it’s a fair point where it’s applicable.
KJ writes like he/she has never not had a car – people who don’t have a car still have legs, and can still call cabs. If the transit system and walking combined cover 99% of your transportation needs, an occasional hired cab is much cheaper than car ownership, even with the massive road and parking lot subsidies that car owners and non-owners both pay.
Of course for walking to meet a good fraction of your transportation needs you have to live in a dense neighborhood with businesses within walking distance, not a sprawling collection of acres of lawns that go unused because everyone is too busy commuting past each others’ lawns to have time to use their own. (Parks, people! They’re like timeshared lawns, with better facilities. And your lawn is idle most of the time, so timesharing it is a no-brainer, really.)
February 11th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
No. We do not need joyriders. But fares should be affordable.
and there should be reduced fares for school-age children, retired, and handicapped people. Bogota has also had some success with free minivans that go to major transit stops.
February 11th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Obvious, but perhaps worth pointing out that… people already pay for a good ortion of their road use by paying for their car. And for their gas. So the automatically bear at least some of the cost of driving their car from DC to Frederick. People ho drive a lot pay more in vehicle costs and fuel.
People do not pay for the Metro train. Nor its fuel.
February 11th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Sam, a portion of gasoline taxes goes to a mass transit fund, which is part of the Highway Trust Fund.
February 11th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
DTM,
But your original point was that in cases where an individual needs to own a car anyway, it can be difficult for transit to penetrate for only limited purposes like serving commuters. So, you are just supporting my point here: carsharing in turn limits the implications of your fixed cost problem, potentially allowing transit to penetrate wherever it makes sense.
Carsharing exploits new technology to allow cars to be used more cost-efficiently. It is likely to redistribute some travel demand between transit and driving, but it will also reduce total transit use and increase total driving, because in the aggregate it reduces the cost of driving relative to the cost of using transit. Whatever increase in transit use carsharing would induce via reduced rates of car ownership would be exceeded by the decrease in transit use carsharing would induce through increased driving by non-owners. The more efficient carsharing gets, the more it shifts the incentives towards driving and away from using transit. The ultimate form of carsharing would be a municipal autonomous taxi system, which would probably put conventional transit out of business altogether.
February 11th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Because there is a large amount of variation from place to place.
So what? That’s irrelevant to the fact that the subset of commuters you described is just a tiny share of the total.
It is a smaller group. How much smaller is not easy to determine.
It’s much, much smaller. Transit can provide commutes “comparable in convenience” to commuting by car only in a few areas, most or all of which already have extensive transit services. For the overwhelming majority of commutes by car where transit “doesn’t exist,” the only feasible transit alternative would be buses, and buses aren’t remotely competitive with driving on speed or schedule.
You need to compare the possible commutes of the same set of individuals, versus the actual commutes of two different sets of individuals.
No I don’t. You can’t compare “possible commutes.” You can only compare actual commutes. And actual commutes by car are much faster than actual commutes by transit.
February 11th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
lots of people don’t have wives to share their car ownership with
Well, no. But if I were without a spousal unit, I would still own a car, and I still wouldn’t drive it to work.
February 11th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
But what do you do when everyone wants a car at the same time, such as for commuting?
You satisfy as much of the demand as you can, subject to road capacity and/or your supply of cars.
February 11th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
KJ writes like he/she has never not had a car – people who don’t have a car still have legs, and can still call cabs. If the transit system and walking combined cover 99% of your transportation needs, an occasional hired cab is much cheaper than car ownership, even with the massive road and parking lot subsidies that car owners and non-owners both pay.
Now imagine those cabs drive themselves (no labor costs for drivers) and can use road space much more efficiently than today’s cars (because they’re driven by computers). And that they’re much more fuel-efficient than today’s taxis.
The cost of getting around by taxi would plummet. It would be the death of buses and trains. That’s the future of urban transportation.
February 11th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Of course for walking to meet a good fraction of your transportation needs you have to live in a dense neighborhood with businesses within walking distance,
Even a dense neighborhood would have only a limited number of businesses within walking distance. The stores would likely be small, with consequently high prices and limited selection. Your purchases would be limited to what you could carry. You probably wouldn’t want to walk if the weather was bad (winter in the northeast – shudder!). And your housing would most likely be smaller and/or of lower quality than what you could get for the same price in a less dense area.
not a sprawling collection of acres of lawns that go unused because everyone is too busy commuting past each others’ lawns to have time to use their own.
Considering that travel times tend to decrease with density, because lower density is more conducive to car travel and cars are fast, those suburbanites will probably be enjoying their lawns while the cityslickers are stuck waiting for a bus or train.
February 11th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
It’s not like homeless people on trains are especially a problem relative to homeless people on the streets or homeless people in the parks, they’re just a problem for different people.
??? There’s a big difference between a homeless guy sitting on a sidewalk or a park bench and a homeless guy on a bus or train stinking up half of a car.
February 11th, 2009 at 11:47 pm
You already gave a good argument about why this is not the case,
Well, don’t keep us in suspense, DTM. What is this good argument I have supposedly given that carsharing would not produce a net reduction in transit use? Do you subscribe to some bizarre economic theory under which reducing the cost of driving relative to using transit induces less driving relative to using transit rather than more?
That doesn’t address congestion and other relative inefficiencies of using cars for certain transportation needs.
It wasn’t intended to. What ABOUT “congestion and other relative inefficiencies of using cars for certain transportation needs?” Do you have a point?
February 12th, 2009 at 12:03 am
it is true that looking at transportation more granularly is irrelevant if you insist on only looking at transportation less granularly.
It is also true that “looking at transportation more granularly” is irrelevant when the point in question is about transportation in general, not “granules.”
The bolded part of your assertion is unfounded.
Seems obvious to me. If you disagree, please list these areas where you think transit can provide commutes “comparable in convenience” to commuting by car but that do not already have extensive transit services.
Buses on non-congested dedicated rights of way can be competitive with driving on congested mixed-use rights of way.
Perhaps, but that doesn’t support your claim. Where are all these areas that don’t already have extensive transit services but that have enough demand, and the right type of demand, to support this dedicated right-of-way bus transit that is “comparable in convenience” to commuting by car? List them.
If it is impossible to compare possible commutes then not just my statements, but also yours, would be unfounded.
No, just yours.
February 12th, 2009 at 12:19 am
Right, but that means either you severely undermine the economics of car-sharing by having too many cars per customer, or you leave many of these transportation needs unmet.
No, it doesn’t mean that. You have whatever number of cars you need to most profitably satisfy demand. The amount of unmet demand, if any, would depend on the total size of demand and its geographical and temporal distribution. You obviously wouldn’t have to be able satisfy all demand at all times of the day in order to decimate transit by taking most of its business away.
February 12th, 2009 at 1:42 am
“Can be” is the key term here. Maybe there are some downtown city centers with highly contested streets where creating dedicated rights of way for buses would allow buses to be competitive with driving in terms of speed. But I live in a crowded downtown city center with dedicated rights of way, and driving is still faster, because a bus has to be stopping constantly to let people on and off. In addition to the time spent stopped, this produces lower average speeds at the time when the bus is moving.
Also, the times when the non-dedicated lanes are most congested are also the times when more people taking the bus. Consequently, the bus can’t skip as many stops as it can at less congested times, and each stop is longer because more people are getting on and off. These factors erode the advantage the bus gets from the dedicated right-of-way.
I live in crowded downtown urban area and do not own a car. I have never encountered a situation where taking transit would have been faster than taking a taxi.
February 12th, 2009 at 1:57 am
DTM,
KJ is correct. The aggregate effect of carsharing is to lower the cost of driving in comparison to the cost of riding transit. Therefore, the effect on aggregate demand will be to increase the demand for driving and reduce the demand for transit. Transit will lose market share to driving. It doesn’t matter that carsharing will also reduce demand for driving and increase demand for transit among some individuals. The effect on aggregate demand is determined by the effect on aggregate costs, not the effect on costs for certain individuals.
February 12th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
Maybe there are some downtown city centers with highly contested streets where creating dedicated rights of way for buses would allow buses to be competitive with driving in terms of speed.
In Los Angeles, we have the Metro Orange Line, a bus that runs on its own dedicated busway, roughly parallel to Victory Boulevard across the San Fernando Valley. During rush hours, the bus is much faster than the surrounding surface streets, and it’s also comparable with and sometimes faster than the very congested US-101 Ventura Freeway paralleling it a couple of miles to the south.
February 12th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
DTM,
You are just totally confused. Carsharing reduces the cost of driving for people who don’t own cars. It doesn’t increase the cost of driving for people who don’t own cars. And it doesn’t reduce the cost of using transit for anyone. Therefore, in the aggregate the effect of carsharing is to reduce the cost of driving compared to the cost of using transit. It is this aggregate effect of carsharing on costs that governs its aggregate effect on demand for driving vs. transit, regardless of its effects on demand by particular individuals.
February 12th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
DTM,
Again, what you would do is shift around transit.
No, you would reduce transit. Even if you only had enough cars to meet, say, 30% of rush-hour demand, that’s still 30% you’re taking away from transit. And outside rush-hour you could meet a much higher share of demand, because demand oustide rush hour is lower.
February 12th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
DTM,
Automation of cars does not avoid all the inefficiencies of using cars for certain applications relative to transit
Automation of cars doesn’t have to do that to destroy transit. It only has to reduce the demand for transit below the minimum level needed for transit to remain viable. Maybe a few transit-freaks would still prefer to endure slow, incovenient, uncomfortable, inflexible travel by bus or train even after they are given the option of fast, comfortable, convenient, cheap, clean travel by automated taxi, but the overwhelming majority of people would choose the latter.
February 13th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
I’m not sure if making the buses free is what needs to happen. I think that ideally we’d want MORE people on the bus, and what makes people choose not to take the bus is NOT the price. It’s the inconvenience. I like the plan from Thinking Big about buses: We propose the establishment of a national $1.5 billion Get on the Bus program through the Department of Transportation’s Congestion- Reduction Program. This program would fund trials in ten cities to (1) create bus-only lanes and priority at traffic signals; (2) invest in buses with larger, more comfortable seats; (3) provide free wireless
Internet for riders; and (4) fund broad advertising programs promoting fresh positive visions of bus systems. Cities around the world have already been successful in similar efforts: London has increased bus ridership by 40 percent through a bus-priority program, and Chicago is in the first stages of instituting a similar system.
March 9th, 2009 at 9:56 pm
There is another thing you can do when the trains are crowded. Add more cars to the trains.
Service? Make it free. You will see service improve.
In America oil-war veterans sleep under the viaduct and SUVs sleep in warm garages.
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