I think there is a half sentence missing at the end of the fare jumping question - “the impact of...”
For me, this debate has moved me more toward saying government should make transit free. I know all the arguments for not doing that - people, including low income people, rank better service higher than free service in surveys, and there’s a fear if it’s free then it will get cut in the future (since raising fares is then mostly off the table). But, we have a road system that’s almost entirely free, schools and libraries that are free, and then we aren’t all worried about toll jumping or school tuition jumping and such. And libraries have in fact mostly abandoned late fees.
The argument from advocates of decriminalization of fare jumping that is more persuasive to me is that we end up spending more money in police to assault lower income people who sometimes even are entitled to a free fare (like kids in DC, who are supposed to have free fares) but who couldn’t navigate the bureaucracy to get the documentation, or it broke (one of our kids ride free cards broke, and we got a new one), or it’s stolen. I’ve fare jumped on buses when my card didn’t work or the auto reload stopped working and I didn’t have time to get that fixed right away.
So just making this vital public service free seems better than punishing people who have to get to work or school and sometimes have legitimate reasons the fate paying has broken down, or sometimes they don’t but can’t afford it, and we shouldn’t be worried about them affording it.
But also I do agree people should follow rules. Sometimes that means the rule has to change.
By the way, I notice a lot of speeding. What are we doing about that?
Haha, I wrote this late at night and so didn't proofread before hitting publish.
I'm not strongly against making fares free and I'm all for a few cities trying it and seeing how it goes. But I think the main issue is just that transit systems have limited resources.
Say your city has an idea for a billion-dollar expansion to the subway system. It's going to be way easier to convince elected officials to put up $500 million and finance the other $500 million with bonds backed by fares than to convince officials to put up the entire $1 billion. And if the elected officials are willing to put a full billion dollars into the transit system, you'll be able to do twice as much if you're charging the new riders.
But more fundamentally I think elected officials need to decide. If they want to make the subway free, they should make it free. If they want to make it free only for low-income people, they should set up a system to do that. If they want people to pay, there should be proper enforcement so that people actually pay. The current system is the worst of all worlds because people who pay feel like suckers, disabled and elderly people can't ride for free, and the system is out a significant amount of money.
One thing I've been mulling for a long time, and probably should write about, is that I think I fundamentally disagree with the notion that transportation planning is about limited resources. Sure, government budgeting OVERALL is about limited resources, but in my experience, governments making decisions to pay more or less for transit - or any transportation - is rarely about them explicitly deciding a tradeoff between $500B for transportation idea A vs $500B for transportation idea B.
Here are 2 examples:
1) In 2014, the DC Council decided to cut the much-maligned and long-delayed streetcar program. The mayor (Gray, at the time) had proposed a funding model that would allocate $800M a year for construction, and the council decided to take that away.
Did they put it toward lower fares, better buses, Metro track repairs, dedicated bus lanes... no, they put it toward tax cuts. Now, there are fine arguments that were made that the streetcar actually wasn't a good project or that tax cuts were a good idea in 2014, but whichever side of that you were on or, in retrospect, wish you had been on, it was never about "how do we use $800M a year for transportation, and what's the best way to spend it?" It was, "how do we spend $800M a year on anything?"
2) Last year, the DC Council decided to make buses free inside DC, and also beef up late night service. This will cost $42M a year.
Did this money come from transit construction, or maintenance, or roads, or bike lanes? No, it came from... well, nowhere really. The city has a budget surplus, and it kind of is coming from that. (Technically I think they still have to actually allocate the money in the budget, but it got unanimous support, so I think people believe they will allocate the money). In the absence of doing this, they'd have done who knows what. No one thing - it's just a lot of items in a $18 billion budget that add up to a total number.
In practice, that's how the budget is. There's a large pot of money and everyone is trying to propose things to do to spend it that are the most popular or that they most like or whatever. And the most popular ones, at least among the legislators, win out. If a kind of transit spending is appealing enough, it'll get spent; if not, it might get cut. But it matters very little what the second best transit spending is; what matters is how this transit thing compares to the "bubble" spending things that are on the margin overall, whatever those might be. Maybe the jurisdiction could afford to spend 10x as much on transit, or might spend 10% as much, not because of the merit of transit projects vis a vis each other or other transportation projects, but because of their merit in the overall cauldron of budgeting.
There is a group of people (I'm not pointing the finger at you here) who are very smart and I respect, some of whom are my friends, who nevertheless direct criticism at every transit project that's not the perfect one, but don't direct the same level of criticism at every other government use of funds that's not as good as a transit project - be it a highway, a tax cut, health care, whatever. And I worry the effect is that elected officials subconsciously basically conclude, "it's okay for me to spend money in on anything that's popular, as long as it's not a transit project." I'd like the government to spend every dollar in the best way, ideally, but also, I'd like them to do more for transit too, even if that means something like free fares which has some upsides and also some downsides.
I saw a number of the usual transit takes, like one from Jarrett Walker, and some mainstream articles quoting people, all criticizing the free fare concept, but most of the arguments were also along the lines of "this isn't the best way to spend this money on transit." But it was never "we have this money for transit"; if Charles Allen hadn't come up with this, it wouldn't have gone to a less sexy transit project, it would have gone wherever.
One note: it's true that *inside WMATA* they do have to trade off things like service vs fares. WMATA wouldn't have made fares free on its own, but WMATA isn't the level of government at which this decision was really going to get made, it was at the level of the entity that funds WMATA - here, DC - and can decide to fund it more or less as it sees fit.
It's like, we have this company that runs a system to collect school lunch money. It's a government contractor. That contractor can't decide on its own that school lunches should be free, but the government can. I think people should think much more about WMATA as a service provider the government hires to run transit. And when there's something people don't like about transit, the people to contact are elected officials, not the WMATA board, since the board has to operate within a narrow set of constraints, but those constraints are set by the local governments, and can be changed by the local governments.
Now, WMATA is a public authority and so has more autonomy than the school lunch contractor, but it still ultimately is funded by the local governments rather than being fully self-sufficient, and so that means the real decision-making power lies with the people with the purse strings.
These are all good points thanks! I am not necessarily opposed to free fares. If for whatever reason it's easier to get the DC council to pay for free fares than for other improvements to transit, you certainly won't see me lobbying against that. There's certainly a sound economic logic that says that the marginal cost of an extra subway rider (at least outside of rush hour) is basically zero and so the system should set prices accordingly.
But it seems like the DC actually did the opposite: by decriminalizing fare jumping they undercut WMATA's ability to raise revenue internally without providing an alternative funding source. They should either restore the ability for WMATA to enforce fares or put up enough extra money to compensate for the lost revenue.
I completely agree that rules need to be reasonable and that this implies they occasionally need to change. Marijuana basically had to be legalized because it was functionally legal for college kids and upper middle class/rich people, and illegal for poor/working class people in parts of town where you're sometimes searched by police. Which has downsides because it's not an entirely benign drug, but having two different legal systems depending on social class is unsustainable for society too.
The fare vs speeding issue is similar to a certain extent, although cars are more attainable for all but the very poorest, and speeding isn't really enforced anywhere. As a recreational runner though, I've felt more in danger as a pedestrian lately than I was in the pre-COVID times. So my bias is that we should ticket a lot more.
Does this imply that Big Venture Capital is sowing the seeds of its own demise (and arguably that VC twitter has itself to blame for San Francisco's lack of law enforcement, and should stop whining)? They seem to have adopted rule ignorance at scale as a business strategy, prominently exemplified by Elon Musk trying to get out of paying rent and back out of deals he's legally agreed to, although thankfully Delaware's corporate legal system at least forced him to go through on the Twitter deal.
Yes, I thought about including Musk's behavior as another example because I think it's the same issue. Luckily we have a pretty good legal system that at least does force people to make good on big deals like the Twitter purchase. But having the world's richest man behave like a grifter is really not good for our social fabric.
Thanks for taking the time to answer my question. Looking back I feel like I worded it poorly (I really need to sleep more), but you ended up answering what I was trying to ask anyways.
Great question set. On jumping fares, here in St Louis we have a very noticable segment of cars that just leave their temp tags or expired plates on vehicles. It's so prevalent it's basically a meme (see below for 3 random reddit posts from the last month).
This absolutely has a corrosive effect on trust, and makes people who do pay their car property taxes and vehicle registration fees feel like suckers when others go without paying and no penalties for years on end.
I think there is a half sentence missing at the end of the fare jumping question - “the impact of...”
For me, this debate has moved me more toward saying government should make transit free. I know all the arguments for not doing that - people, including low income people, rank better service higher than free service in surveys, and there’s a fear if it’s free then it will get cut in the future (since raising fares is then mostly off the table). But, we have a road system that’s almost entirely free, schools and libraries that are free, and then we aren’t all worried about toll jumping or school tuition jumping and such. And libraries have in fact mostly abandoned late fees.
The argument from advocates of decriminalization of fare jumping that is more persuasive to me is that we end up spending more money in police to assault lower income people who sometimes even are entitled to a free fare (like kids in DC, who are supposed to have free fares) but who couldn’t navigate the bureaucracy to get the documentation, or it broke (one of our kids ride free cards broke, and we got a new one), or it’s stolen. I’ve fare jumped on buses when my card didn’t work or the auto reload stopped working and I didn’t have time to get that fixed right away.
So just making this vital public service free seems better than punishing people who have to get to work or school and sometimes have legitimate reasons the fate paying has broken down, or sometimes they don’t but can’t afford it, and we shouldn’t be worried about them affording it.
But also I do agree people should follow rules. Sometimes that means the rule has to change.
By the way, I notice a lot of speeding. What are we doing about that?
Haha, I wrote this late at night and so didn't proofread before hitting publish.
I'm not strongly against making fares free and I'm all for a few cities trying it and seeing how it goes. But I think the main issue is just that transit systems have limited resources.
Say your city has an idea for a billion-dollar expansion to the subway system. It's going to be way easier to convince elected officials to put up $500 million and finance the other $500 million with bonds backed by fares than to convince officials to put up the entire $1 billion. And if the elected officials are willing to put a full billion dollars into the transit system, you'll be able to do twice as much if you're charging the new riders.
But more fundamentally I think elected officials need to decide. If they want to make the subway free, they should make it free. If they want to make it free only for low-income people, they should set up a system to do that. If they want people to pay, there should be proper enforcement so that people actually pay. The current system is the worst of all worlds because people who pay feel like suckers, disabled and elderly people can't ride for free, and the system is out a significant amount of money.
One thing I've been mulling for a long time, and probably should write about, is that I think I fundamentally disagree with the notion that transportation planning is about limited resources. Sure, government budgeting OVERALL is about limited resources, but in my experience, governments making decisions to pay more or less for transit - or any transportation - is rarely about them explicitly deciding a tradeoff between $500B for transportation idea A vs $500B for transportation idea B.
Here are 2 examples:
1) In 2014, the DC Council decided to cut the much-maligned and long-delayed streetcar program. The mayor (Gray, at the time) had proposed a funding model that would allocate $800M a year for construction, and the council decided to take that away.
Did they put it toward lower fares, better buses, Metro track repairs, dedicated bus lanes... no, they put it toward tax cuts. Now, there are fine arguments that were made that the streetcar actually wasn't a good project or that tax cuts were a good idea in 2014, but whichever side of that you were on or, in retrospect, wish you had been on, it was never about "how do we use $800M a year for transportation, and what's the best way to spend it?" It was, "how do we spend $800M a year on anything?"
2) Last year, the DC Council decided to make buses free inside DC, and also beef up late night service. This will cost $42M a year.
Did this money come from transit construction, or maintenance, or roads, or bike lanes? No, it came from... well, nowhere really. The city has a budget surplus, and it kind of is coming from that. (Technically I think they still have to actually allocate the money in the budget, but it got unanimous support, so I think people believe they will allocate the money). In the absence of doing this, they'd have done who knows what. No one thing - it's just a lot of items in a $18 billion budget that add up to a total number.
In practice, that's how the budget is. There's a large pot of money and everyone is trying to propose things to do to spend it that are the most popular or that they most like or whatever. And the most popular ones, at least among the legislators, win out. If a kind of transit spending is appealing enough, it'll get spent; if not, it might get cut. But it matters very little what the second best transit spending is; what matters is how this transit thing compares to the "bubble" spending things that are on the margin overall, whatever those might be. Maybe the jurisdiction could afford to spend 10x as much on transit, or might spend 10% as much, not because of the merit of transit projects vis a vis each other or other transportation projects, but because of their merit in the overall cauldron of budgeting.
There is a group of people (I'm not pointing the finger at you here) who are very smart and I respect, some of whom are my friends, who nevertheless direct criticism at every transit project that's not the perfect one, but don't direct the same level of criticism at every other government use of funds that's not as good as a transit project - be it a highway, a tax cut, health care, whatever. And I worry the effect is that elected officials subconsciously basically conclude, "it's okay for me to spend money in on anything that's popular, as long as it's not a transit project." I'd like the government to spend every dollar in the best way, ideally, but also, I'd like them to do more for transit too, even if that means something like free fares which has some upsides and also some downsides.
I saw a number of the usual transit takes, like one from Jarrett Walker, and some mainstream articles quoting people, all criticizing the free fare concept, but most of the arguments were also along the lines of "this isn't the best way to spend this money on transit." But it was never "we have this money for transit"; if Charles Allen hadn't come up with this, it wouldn't have gone to a less sexy transit project, it would have gone wherever.
One note: it's true that *inside WMATA* they do have to trade off things like service vs fares. WMATA wouldn't have made fares free on its own, but WMATA isn't the level of government at which this decision was really going to get made, it was at the level of the entity that funds WMATA - here, DC - and can decide to fund it more or less as it sees fit.
It's like, we have this company that runs a system to collect school lunch money. It's a government contractor. That contractor can't decide on its own that school lunches should be free, but the government can. I think people should think much more about WMATA as a service provider the government hires to run transit. And when there's something people don't like about transit, the people to contact are elected officials, not the WMATA board, since the board has to operate within a narrow set of constraints, but those constraints are set by the local governments, and can be changed by the local governments.
Now, WMATA is a public authority and so has more autonomy than the school lunch contractor, but it still ultimately is funded by the local governments rather than being fully self-sufficient, and so that means the real decision-making power lies with the people with the purse strings.
These are all good points thanks! I am not necessarily opposed to free fares. If for whatever reason it's easier to get the DC council to pay for free fares than for other improvements to transit, you certainly won't see me lobbying against that. There's certainly a sound economic logic that says that the marginal cost of an extra subway rider (at least outside of rush hour) is basically zero and so the system should set prices accordingly.
But it seems like the DC actually did the opposite: by decriminalizing fare jumping they undercut WMATA's ability to raise revenue internally without providing an alternative funding source. They should either restore the ability for WMATA to enforce fares or put up enough extra money to compensate for the lost revenue.
I completely agree that rules need to be reasonable and that this implies they occasionally need to change. Marijuana basically had to be legalized because it was functionally legal for college kids and upper middle class/rich people, and illegal for poor/working class people in parts of town where you're sometimes searched by police. Which has downsides because it's not an entirely benign drug, but having two different legal systems depending on social class is unsustainable for society too.
The fare vs speeding issue is similar to a certain extent, although cars are more attainable for all but the very poorest, and speeding isn't really enforced anywhere. As a recreational runner though, I've felt more in danger as a pedestrian lately than I was in the pre-COVID times. So my bias is that we should ticket a lot more.
Does this imply that Big Venture Capital is sowing the seeds of its own demise (and arguably that VC twitter has itself to blame for San Francisco's lack of law enforcement, and should stop whining)? They seem to have adopted rule ignorance at scale as a business strategy, prominently exemplified by Elon Musk trying to get out of paying rent and back out of deals he's legally agreed to, although thankfully Delaware's corporate legal system at least forced him to go through on the Twitter deal.
Yes, I thought about including Musk's behavior as another example because I think it's the same issue. Luckily we have a pretty good legal system that at least does force people to make good on big deals like the Twitter purchase. But having the world's richest man behave like a grifter is really not good for our social fabric.
Thanks for taking the time to answer my question. Looking back I feel like I worded it poorly (I really need to sleep more), but you ended up answering what I was trying to ask anyways.
Great question set. On jumping fares, here in St Louis we have a very noticable segment of cars that just leave their temp tags or expired plates on vehicles. It's so prevalent it's basically a meme (see below for 3 random reddit posts from the last month).
This absolutely has a corrosive effect on trust, and makes people who do pay their car property taxes and vehicle registration fees feel like suckers when others go without paying and no penalties for years on end.
Examples from the past weeks:
* https://old.reddit.com/r/StLouis/comments/10hdpyf/if_youre_gonna_write_your_own_temp_tags_you_might/
* https://old.reddit.com/r/StLouis/comments/10giqkf/well_if_your_going_to_raise_on_a_single_double/
* https://old.reddit.com/r/StLouis/comments/10frq05/ill_see_your_temp_tag_and_raise_you_a_2for1/