Maybe we need to stop thinking about public transport as a revenue generating/ self funding organization and just think about it as a critical piece of making a city work.
Nobody worries about whether the fire department is “breaking even”, you just pay for it through taxes because it’s essential
Even Sweden and Denmark have bus fare. If half the people are evading bus fare, then that’s a problem that needs to be fixed regardless of anything else you might do. It’s not likely that the people jumping the turnstiles are orderly and polite riders who help keep the system clean. You’ll just end up taxing everyone to create a system that’s unpleasant for normal people to use, which will destroy public support for those taxes.
Toxic empathy, ironically, is antithetical to building functioning transit systems. To get buy-in from the public to direct tax dollars to transit, you need to have pleasant, orderly, clean systems that people who can afford to drive want to use instead of driving. You can’t get that if half your riders are law breakers.
Sweden and Denmark have low economic inequality and high income transfers.
On the other hand nearby Estonia has less income transfers & higher inequality but free bus fares.
The difference is nobody sees firefighters saving a homeless man and thinks "Eww gross I'd rather not have them saving lives next to me."
When public transportation gets the reputation of being the place of juvenile delinquents and petty criminals, people start to ask why their tax money is spent on it, and it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.
I may sound like a cold bastard but I'd rather have public transportation system frequented by middle class families and commuters, because that's how you get these people to demand more public transportation.
The fare has to be low enough that poor people can afford it because they have to be able to use mass transit to get to work. Even the homeless need to be able to use it so they can e.g. get to a job interview. And a fare is not going to be a deterrent to juvenile delinquents because they're the ones jumping the turnstiles.
But if you're not actually excluding the deplorables then the fare is just a regressive tax and a deterrent to mass transit use for everyone.
The real problem is that you have unsheltered people without taking effective action against it and then the subway is a form of shelter. If you want to help them then you fix the zoning so more housing can be built, provide shelters, etc. If you want to be a cold bastard then you give them a one way ticket to a lower density city. Charging 10% of the cost of the transit system as a fare, which costs about as much to collect as it generates if not more, is neither of those things and counterproductive.
This would be fine if government projects like this had any sort of accountability. As is, these systems can become infinitely inefficient while claiming "we just need more money to fix it". Privatization seems to be the only way to enable accountability.
Privatization doesn't fix that; the state just ends up continuing to chuck money every time the companies (who are now in charge of critical infrastructure, and thus can't be allowed to fail) cry poor. It ends up being less efficient with a bunch of extra money flowing to the private sector. At least this is the Australian experience.
The endless streams of private contractors blowing through deadlines, budgets and billions of dollars on government contracts doesn't really agree with that assertion.
I don’t think it’s about accountability, after all democracy has more or less the same accountability mechanisms as a publicly traded company.
Given the massive public interest, there is probably at least an order of magnitude more oversight of public offices than there is for private companies.
In the end it’s the same challenge that every team, department, company has to solve: how to have people that care about their job?
Here my impression is that that’s often not the case, leading to the effects you described.
Given the often severely reduced pay in public jobs, compared with industry, I don’t find that overly surprising, you get what you pay for.
Fire departments aren't something open to a public which doesn't give a damn about it being shared property, (fire department equipment is typically only handled by the trained people employed by the department) nor do they typically involve much infrastructure that incurs constant wear and tear.
The solution to the MTA being exceedingly wasteful and unwilling to enforce rules isn't to just make it easier for them to be even worse.
If these people already feel such little civic responsibility for city infrastructure as to be skipping the fare and effectively taking advantage of everyone else, it's going to get much worse if it appears to them that they aren't even being asked to pay. Deciding to just make it 'free' would be the same as deciding just not to measure things that reveal inconvenient facts and celebrating that as having solved the problem.
Not to mention that the fire department in many places will also send you a bill if you happen to use their services. It's usually a very small bill (a few hundred bucks for a service literally worth hundreds of thousands), and your insurance will usually cover it.
If you need an ambulance ride, that bill can be thousands, but is covered by health insurance.
I think when you have a finite resource like seats on a bus, having a usage-based fee helps to promote more efficient usage.
I have lived in communities where buses were free to ride, and it was a great option to get around. But these were relatively small and wealthy communities where demand for public transportation was relatively low. I'm not sure the same system could work in NYC.
There aren't really finite seats on a bus. The hardest problem with mass transit is being able to operate routes at enough frequency that people will use mass transit instead of driving because the next train is too long a wait. If you can get more people to ride it then you can justify more frequent service and further increase usage -- which gets more people out of cars, reduces pollution and traffic congestion, etc. These are public goods.
And most buses are not going to be 100% full most of the time. So if you have an empty seat, the cost is zero. If you don't have an empty seat, now you can justify another bus/train, which reduces latency and causes several more people to take mass transit, which is good.
Mobile day centers for the unhoused? Surely there is a more efficient way of going about that. A lot of people avoid the bus due to safety concerns, not due to paying the fare.
The difference is that the fire department is only used for emergencies. If you call the fire department to help you get downtown you are probably getting a bill.
Where I live, the fare ticket's affordance is the ability to kick homeless off public transportation as it is the most comfortable place they have during hot summer days.
I wish they would also kick off people who eat on the train and leave their mess behind, but they never confront nuisance-makers.
> just think about it as a critical piece of making a city work
That's what the NYC MTA is... and they're $42 billion in debt. And they need to "borrow" another $23 billion from taxpayers to fund themselves for 2025-2030.
I think it's wrong of you to group "revenue generating" and "self funding" together like they are the same thing. Public transport should absolutely be self funding, if even partially, to provide the right value structure for both riders and the planning agency when choosing when/where to ride/set routes.
Of course we should but I think you will quickly find yourself out on the street as a politician if you propose this. I don’t think proposing free anything these days goes over all with the public who often won’t benefit from it.
Public transit fares are generally malformed. I personally never pay the LA Metro fare. Why? Because I pay the Metrolink fare, which by their own admission covers same-day Metro transit. But police will actively seek me out as a person who looks like they have money and give me a hard time for not “tapping”, all while folks who very clearly have no money waltz on into the metro, stopping only to smoke crack on the elevator up. There’s a general problem in this country of what to do with law breakers who do not have money. It seems like the answer is to make them work and garnish their wages, but for whatever reason we are against that.
It didn't used to be a problem, but over the course of the last 12 years or so, people have abdicated any agency they had. It started out in areas like the SF panhandle where well meaning folks got the cops to not arrest delinquents for trespassing, mistreating animals, loitering, begging, etc. Some got tired after a while and they passed redundant sit-lie laws... that stuck for a tiny bit, till riots were used as excuse to engage in all kinds of unlawful behavior and that in combination with Covid and a national defund-the-police movement led to a substantial increase in quality of life crime and petty crime that has now pervaded and has entrenched itself like an invasive species but the people responsible for this are loath to admit a mistake and now pretend it's not really an issue.
Maybe people will tire of this and hold officials accountable --but it will take a change of perspective from bleeding hearts and lots of time as well. It can be done. The wild west was tamed. This can be tamed as well but it takes will and commitment.
> substantial increase in quality of life crime and petty crime
Do you have any sources for that?
I was only able to find numbers on violent crime, which have gone down recently, and weren't as bad as thirty years ago. The 70s through 90s were pretty rough.
I've heard other people say that these minor crimes go unreported and undercounted, but then it's difficult to get past anecdotes without some kind of meaurement, for example perceptions may have shofted due to more news coverage, or as we've gotten older.
I notice more beggars in general. I take that as mental health, drug and poverty than crime. I also notice less traffic law enforcement and more reckless driving. A lot of other things seem to depend on the neighborhood.
I agree that mistakes have been made in some localities. Some of problems are too big to sweep under the rug.
Yes. Even on this very form, a suggestion that folks who break the law are held accountable for their actions and are made to pay back society for their transgressions results in an immediate downvote brigade.
The simple truth is that urban progressives no longer believe that the poor owe anything to society in general. The idea of enforcing the law against such a presumably disadvantaged group is anathema. Until there is a cultural shift where you can discuss the idea of mutually upholding the commons more and more city services will devolve into taxes on honesty.
In the case of the NY subway, it would cost a poor person receiving subsidized fare about $2.20/day to do their part, or about 9 minutes of work at minimum wage. It is not a crime to ask a person to participate in their own survival.
It doesn’t matter. Each individual has an obligation to be unobtrusive to those around them. Maybe society will reciprocate and provide support to the individual in return—the US certainly gives poor people more than poor people give society. But the obligation to society comes first.
Because at the end of the day, there is a (small) percentage of the population that will do the absolute minimum they can get away with. Or even less than that (criminals).
So you’ll get what you tolerate, and often somewhat worse (depending on strength of enforcement).
Is that fair? In at least some cases, probably not.
Should that matter enough to stop enforcement? That is the classic ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’.
Of course not, but that doesn't mean that we can have a functional society without having rules about what conduct is allowed in public places, and enforcement mechanisms to make sure that those who violate the rules are removed from society.
How about removing their disadvantage first and enforcing the law next?
What's the point of wasting increasing amounts of money on escalating enforcement against people behaving socially because they were pushed out of society instead of working to being them back into society first?
Being poor does not cause dysfunctional behavior. There’s lots of Eastern European countries much poorer than NYC and SF that have a fraction of the dysfunctional behavior you see on public transit in NYC or SF.
>Transit should be free, like sidewalks and parks.
And most similarly, roads. The theoretical 'farebox recovery ratio' of most roads is 0, but this is never part of the conversation. Maybe if it were, transit would look much better in comparison.
Strange. 48% is a lot, and the difference indicates that there may be design problems.
By design problems I mean... For a while my bank's ATM gave me only large-denomination notes and the bus company's machine didn't accept those. So I'd stand there, money in hand and unable to pay.
Later, when I had my first child, a few of the tube station entrances only had ticket-stamping machines at the stairs, not at the path I had to use with my baby pram.
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Nobody worries about whether the fire department is “breaking even”, you just pay for it through taxes because it’s essential
Toxic empathy, ironically, is antithetical to building functioning transit systems. To get buy-in from the public to direct tax dollars to transit, you need to have pleasant, orderly, clean systems that people who can afford to drive want to use instead of driving. You can’t get that if half your riders are law breakers.
Do not forget that NYC charges a substantial income tax, and also a substantial sales tax. As such, the empathy is 100% justifiable.
When public transportation gets the reputation of being the place of juvenile delinquents and petty criminals, people start to ask why their tax money is spent on it, and it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.
I may sound like a cold bastard but I'd rather have public transportation system frequented by middle class families and commuters, because that's how you get these people to demand more public transportation.
But if you're not actually excluding the deplorables then the fare is just a regressive tax and a deterrent to mass transit use for everyone.
The real problem is that you have unsheltered people without taking effective action against it and then the subway is a form of shelter. If you want to help them then you fix the zoning so more housing can be built, provide shelters, etc. If you want to be a cold bastard then you give them a one way ticket to a lower density city. Charging 10% of the cost of the transit system as a fare, which costs about as much to collect as it generates if not more, is neither of those things and counterproductive.
Given the massive public interest, there is probably at least an order of magnitude more oversight of public offices than there is for private companies.
In the end it’s the same challenge that every team, department, company has to solve: how to have people that care about their job?
Here my impression is that that’s often not the case, leading to the effects you described.
Given the often severely reduced pay in public jobs, compared with industry, I don’t find that overly surprising, you get what you pay for.
I would not describe it as “infinitely inefficient”.
The solution to the MTA being exceedingly wasteful and unwilling to enforce rules isn't to just make it easier for them to be even worse.
If these people already feel such little civic responsibility for city infrastructure as to be skipping the fare and effectively taking advantage of everyone else, it's going to get much worse if it appears to them that they aren't even being asked to pay. Deciding to just make it 'free' would be the same as deciding just not to measure things that reveal inconvenient facts and celebrating that as having solved the problem.
If you need an ambulance ride, that bill can be thousands, but is covered by health insurance.
I have lived in communities where buses were free to ride, and it was a great option to get around. But these were relatively small and wealthy communities where demand for public transportation was relatively low. I'm not sure the same system could work in NYC.
And most buses are not going to be 100% full most of the time. So if you have an empty seat, the cost is zero. If you don't have an empty seat, now you can justify another bus/train, which reduces latency and causes several more people to take mass transit, which is good.
I wish they would also kick off people who eat on the train and leave their mess behind, but they never confront nuisance-makers.
That's what the NYC MTA is... and they're $42 billion in debt. And they need to "borrow" another $23 billion from taxpayers to fund themselves for 2025-2030.
[0] https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/osdc/pdf/report-3-2025....
Maybe people will tire of this and hold officials accountable --but it will take a change of perspective from bleeding hearts and lots of time as well. It can be done. The wild west was tamed. This can be tamed as well but it takes will and commitment.
Do you have any sources for that?
I was only able to find numbers on violent crime, which have gone down recently, and weren't as bad as thirty years ago. The 70s through 90s were pretty rough.
I've heard other people say that these minor crimes go unreported and undercounted, but then it's difficult to get past anecdotes without some kind of meaurement, for example perceptions may have shofted due to more news coverage, or as we've gotten older.
I notice more beggars in general. I take that as mental health, drug and poverty than crime. I also notice less traffic law enforcement and more reckless driving. A lot of other things seem to depend on the neighborhood.
I agree that mistakes have been made in some localities. Some of problems are too big to sweep under the rug.
- should that matter? And if so, how much?
Because at the end of the day, there is a (small) percentage of the population that will do the absolute minimum they can get away with. Or even less than that (criminals).
So you’ll get what you tolerate, and often somewhat worse (depending on strength of enforcement).
Is that fair? In at least some cases, probably not.
Should that matter enough to stop enforcement? That is the classic ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’.
https://new.mta.info/agency/new-york-city-transit/subway-bus...
What's the point of wasting increasing amounts of money on escalating enforcement against people behaving socially because they were pushed out of society instead of working to being them back into society first?
This is an excuse to fund more cops. Transit should be free, like sidewalks and parks.
And most similarly, roads. The theoretical 'farebox recovery ratio' of most roads is 0, but this is never part of the conversation. Maybe if it were, transit would look much better in comparison.
Sidewalks and parks cost $0 for people to walk on, or let their dog shit in. Maybe $15/hour for the guys in blue jumpsuits to clean it up once a week?
NYC has the largest subway system in the world _by_far_ (and also one of the oldest). It's extremely expensive to operate.
Don't compare it to walking around on sidewalks or in parks.
It absolutely does not. It is the 12th in length and 10th by ridership: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems
An extra walker a day on a sidewalk costs the same marginal $0 or so an extra rider on the trains does. Both are expensive to run on large scale.
Deleted Comment
By design problems I mean... For a while my bank's ATM gave me only large-denomination notes and the bus company's machine didn't accept those. So I'd stand there, money in hand and unable to pay.
Later, when I had my first child, a few of the tube station entrances only had ticket-stamping machines at the stairs, not at the path I had to use with my baby pram.
Do NY buses have that sort of problem?
https://archive.is/e7agL btw
Doo-wah diddy and bust in with the pre-roll
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itStM-gwUyU