Mass transit should be free.
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.
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
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In the UK, it’s a tad different. The Tube and buses are nationalised but the National Rail is privatised which explains why it’s shit and yet so expensive.
Mass transit barely exists in most of America.
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.
this
It’s a service that costs money to maintain
Damn, if only we paid taxes that could be used for maintenance.
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.
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.
I should have specified “… can use the infrastructure for free”. The car will cost money, but you can only use it because everyone subsidises roads, bridges, parking and much more.
Car drivers are demonstrably paying taxes for the ability to drive on public roads, they are demonstrably not “using the infrastructure for free”. They pay taxes for every mile they drive on a public road. Gas is taxed and cars have regular registration taxes.
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.
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Nobody detected you and went to find you. That…just isn’t a thing. Fare evasion here in the UK is handled by checking tickets. I don’t know what you saw, but it wasn’t what you thought it was
On San Francisco MUNI broken machines mean rides are free. It was a common policy in the States taken advantage by a penny protest in the mid 20th century, in which a fare increase by pennies was responded to by riders paying exclusively in pennies, quickly jamming the machines.
DDG won’t find it since Daniel Penny recently killed someone in NYC by choke hold in the subway system, so all the news is about that.
what a great use of resources 😒
