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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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.
Anecdotally, LA works pretty well as a case study on this particular matter: https://youtu.be/vTS897tcu6Q
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.