Mass transit should be free.
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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Fare evasion is like stealing bread. It's a crime of desperation.
This kind of budgetary indulgence only indicates the MTA doesn't much like the public of the city it serves.
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If it was free, conservatives would put more effort into killing it off like they did in the 60s and 70s when they killed off trains and subways in a bunch of cities, killed off the trolley systems in several cities, etc. Otherwise their donors would lose too much money on people switching from driving. But yeah, it's almost entirely funded by taxes anyway. Would be logical to make it 100% funded, but keeping a small fare keeps it a smaller target of conservatives.
Yes bad actors are always a problem. So I guess we should never do anything substantial to reform the system because rightwing shitheads will try to sabotage it.
I didn't say that. It's just that first we need to fix the election system that is totally broken through gerrymandering, funding cuts, re-expanding mail in voting and early voting, making election day a mandatory holiday for all but emergency services, get the big money out of politics by removing personhood from corporations and thus removing their "right to free speech" as well as their ability to donate unlimited funds through various means and possibly even making all election ads paid for by public funds that are equally distributed if requested, etc. Then once everyone can vote without losing their job for having to take off almost an entire day and they can vote for local politicians rather than ones that will mostly be responsible for conservative areas connected to their sliver of the city, we need to organize progressive people to actually do it. But I think once it becomes apparent that their votes actually have some chance of making a difference, it won't be as hard as it is now.
Oh sure yeah lol none of this is realistic as our election system, and our representation system are massively defective, and of course a lot of people have lost their fucking minds.
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Mass transit cannot be free.
It should however be without toll. It can quite reasonably be funded with tax.
But free? No. Someone somewhere has to pay for the infrastructure and operations.
Free to use, funded by taxes. Like how healthcare should work.
This seems like needless nitpicking. The end result is the same, it's still free at the point of use.
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Maybe they should start electing people to charge property taxes correctly to those ultra luxury condos.
America won't achieve that with such low tax rates
Mass transit barely exists in most of America.
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Local mass transit should be free. It is already really heavily subsidized, often almost entirely subsidized, so it wouldn’t cost as much as you think.
It's a service that costs money to maintain
Yes it is. Luckily we have a system of taxation. By ‘free’ I mean of course ‘at the point of use’. We could provide 100% subsidies for mass transportation for probably around 100 years before we would approach equity with the subsidies we have given to fossil fuels and private transportation.
The reason people don't use public transport is because right now it absolutely sucks in most places if you want more people to use them then they need to be privatised so a business that actually has an insentive to provide a good service can take over and make them great ( for example look at Japan). This way you can also lower taxes a bit which is great for the economy
Oh I agree. Use cost is one major problem, quality and non-existence is the other. However privatization is neoliberal bullshit. It doesn’t guarantee quality. It guarantees that profits will be extracted and therefore use cost will increase and/or quality will decrease.
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roads and car infrastructure costs money to maintain, but anyone wealthy enough to buy a car can use it for free
anyone wealthy enough to buy a car can use it for free
Anyone with a car is paying additional taxes for fuel and car registration.
Those typically don’t cover all of transportation dept budgets, and fuel taxes are on the permanent decline.
Ticket prices don't cover the full costs of train infrastructure and maintenance either. The point is the statement "anyone wealthy enough to buy a car can use it for free" is demonstrably false and using a demonstrably false statement as a counterpoint is...inadvisable.
Felt there was an implicit understanding that cars need gas, but yeah that’s fair.
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fuel tax in the US is a joke, in Europe it’s higher but still doesn’t cover anywhere near the infrastructure cost.
This video illustrates it nicely.
Ther's ussually tolls there too
this
The title should be "NYC wastes money on software that doesn't work rather than reducing fares or eliminating them entirely".
Lmfao, I'm pretty sure the idea is that it will return them more money than it costs. You just want free subway rides or something? It's fucking $2.75 to go ANYWHERE.
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what a great use of resources 😒
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