Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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Yay!
Be better if it was free though.
Small steps :)
I could see it being justified as a progressive measure to increase capacity. Lower the prices , increase demand and get more people on the bus paying fares that you can use to expand service to meet the new demand. Once the infrastructure is built to handle the increased demand then you can make it free.
Vs. if you make it free right away demand spikes with no resources to increase capacity.
You could make that point but I wouldn’t give Burnham that much benefit of the doubt. He may be better than starmer but he’s not so progressive.
Free would definitely be better, but requires solving other problems in lockstep. E.g. homeless people using the busses as a place to exist/stay warm. It disrupts the bus as a function.
A small (deliberately) token fee gets the best compromise. It's akin to charging 10p for a plastic bag. For most people 10p isn't enough to be problematic, in the grand scheme of things. It does massively reduce frivolous usage.
I would prefer pushing it down to £1 return, or even lower, but £2/trip is still better than the current option.
Oh, and just to clarify I also definitely believe we should be using taxes to give homeless etc somewhere better to exist. The busses/trains/underground are not the place for that to happen.
The thing is that ticket machines, staff whose job it is to check tickets, all other infrastructure that exists in order to enforce fares, also all cost money... so at a certain point it becomes absurd to have very low fares because if it's free, you can get rid of all that infrastructure. I don't know enough about public transport in the UK to know how the calculation works there.
That's fair. However, a lot of it is already in place and is quite automated. E.g. on busses they have a contactless card reader. Many have already moved to a fixed ride fee too. Basically you just tap as you walk past the driver, who already has to be there.
The London underground has intermittent enforcement. A lot of the time the honour system is all there is. You just swipe your oyster card or bank card at the read point next to the entrance. They do random checks just to keep people honest.
Even if you expand things, the cost of the tech is low enough to almost be a rounding error.
The goal is to limit completely frivolous usage saturating capacity or otherwise forcing the target riders off completely.
Anecdotally, LA works pretty well as a case study on this particular matter: https://youtu.be/vTS897tcu6Q
There has been research done into this, showing that free stuff can exhaust a resource like this much faster. E.g. cheap tickets could get drivers out of their cars, but not the people who'd walk two blocks. Plenty of countries with free public transport that seem to work just fine, but you might end up happier with cheap public transports rather than entirely free buses. Not having to deal with tickets would be really nice though, for everyone involved.
Link it
The entire municipality of Fredericia has free busses and literally none of the problems everyone keeps describing has happened.
Right, I live in a town where the only public transit are buses which are totally free, it's excellent and nobody is "exhausting the resources" or whatever.
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11116-016-9695-5.pdf
My opinions on this subject are nuanced. While I think free fares are definitely the ideal assuming unlimited resources, they are probably not the best intervention you can do for improving the overall transit posture of a given city. Infrastructure investments are almost always going to be a better bet.
Why do you have to assume unlimited resources? That is frankly a very dumb approach to this topic. Social mobility pays for itself. It is a net-positive for a city to allow residents to move freely and easily, even if the bus, when nothing else is accounted for, does cost fuel. Busses, trams and trains are infrastructure investments.
I think you might be misunderstanding. My point is that resources are not unlimited, and hence prioritizing infrastructure investments - meaning a more comprehensive transit network with better headways - is preferable to fully removing user fees.
I think you are misunderstanding my point. Removing at-use fees enables social mobility that strengthens the economy far beyond what the fees would ever dare charge for the service. You can make it free and improve its service. Those are not mutually exclusive. This is entirely a political barrier, and any rational society that believes in the future would just make the damn bus free, because there are no downsides and a lot of upsides.
There are hundreds of studies on exactly this topic in disciplines from economics to public health. They are most common on the topic of universal healthcare and ensuring timely access.
The consensus has always been that charging a nominal fee (e.g. £5) drastically reduced unnecessary usage and increases access across the population. Policy proposals generally recommend for a set number of free appointments per year for the subset of the population below an income threshold.
Just search for it.
Buses, and this might shock you, aren't as sensitive to waste as other systems. If you need to get from point a to point b and using the bus is faster than, say, walking, then it wasn't a wasted trip. And if it wasn't shorter, the person who wasted their time is the one punished for wasting their time.
So, no, vague unlisted studies about other systems isn't relevant here.
It's directly relevant and buses are just as susceptible to waste and scarcity of capacity as any other system.
Sorry reality doesn't agree with your internally constructed and parasocially reinforced narrative.
Maybe people would believe you more if you actually posted something that actually backs up your claim rather than repeating the same "the facts are on my side" claim and resorting to ad hominems 🤷
Reality doesn't agree with your assertion that £5 is a nominal fee for a bus ride.
£5 is not a "nominal fee" if you take multiple buses a week to get to multiple places, transport over a month could add up to hundreds of pounds
A nominal fee would be like 5 pence
Bullshit. I lived in countries with both fully free healthcare and with a small fee, and if anything the system works better in the countries where it's free.
Cool, data and scholarship disagree with you. But, I'm sure that we've all been enlightened by your layman's opinion on a well-studied topic.
Are the data and scholarships in the room with us now?
I've read 16 independantly verified deep studies across multiple economic states that proved conclusively that buses being free increased the productivity of a populace, reduced time taken off, and directly increased lifespans of the participants. I had a link to these studies somewhere... hold on...
None of which you cite.
Have have absolutely no conception of reality whatsoever if you consider £5 a nominal fee. None whatsoever. Of course you don't understand buses. You don't use them. At all.