"and a good system collects fares from their users"
I don't know where that fact was taken from, but it sure sounds like a baseless claim.
I would even say that transit users evading fares is a symptom of a growing section of the population that is unable to pay for their basic needs, like transportation to their jobs - from experience, people don't jump the metro to go drinking, they do so because they need to go somewhere and don't have the money.
Metro fares using long term passes also grows the issue : if most of the revenue in the metro came from monthly pass users, fare evasion wouldn't matter - thr cost is covered. The issue is that one time tickets are thousands of percent more expensive than long term passes, but are only available to people with large income. Users with less money can't afford the pass and pay a highly marked up price. The one time passes are basically paying for the service, while the mnthly passes users make the largest part of the userbase.
We are basically offering low transit prices to medium-high income people to the cost of financially strangling the poor that are required to use the transit service. Transit should be free!
The monthly pass seems to be priced at 32 * (max cost/ride), so that for $160 you could take as many $5 or less trips as you liked within the month. But most people are taking at most two rides per day, so that practically speaking this is about a 50% discount.
Fare capping can be used to offer free rides for the rest of the day, week, or month once you’ve paid the equivalent of a daily/weekly/monthly pass.
Free transit sounds nice but I would rather have better transit. If a transit system sucks and a low income person has to buy a car that’s a sign it needs to be improved not made free at the point of use (confirming it’s an inferior good). Waiving all fares deprives the agency of funding needed to keep frequency high and therefore waiting times low, extend service late into the night, maintain cleanliness and safety, etc. eliminating fares invites pathologies like people residing in the vehicle or station.
I'm really not sure how turnstiles aren't cheaper than uniformed employees checking for proof of payment.
There's an awful lot written in the article arguing for proof of payment but the DC system does sound an alarm when somebody jumps a turnstile and there is a metro employee roughly 8 feet from any turnstile so the issue is not that they can't catch fare evaders.
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If you really want a free metro through you need to let the metro actually recoup the benefits it provides. Apartments adjacent a mass transit system routinely go for 500-1000 more per month than ones ~5 mins away. If the metro owned the land around it and was allow to rent it out for retail/housing it'd be rolling in dough.
Proof of payment saves passengers time. It increases capacity. Not waiting in line for a turnstile can be the difference between missing a train or not. In bus networks it has the most dramatic difference as one person digging for cash can hold up dozens of other riders.
For the DC metro I don't think pop will save any time. The only times I've seen a line at a turnstile there has also been a line on the stairs / escalator. Any time saved from not waiting at the turnstile will just translate to an increased wait time at the stairs before you get to the platform.
w.r.t. bus networks, the article is about the metro. But yeah, I'd agree pop is faster for buses. I think it was Italy where I took a bus once and there were several payment machines on the bus (not next to the front door) so you could board and then afterwards pay without causing a line out the door.
> And an excellent system involves collecting fare revenue from riders.
This is far from self-evident. There are at least two ways to fund such a system (and variants within), and most systems are funded by a combination of taxes and user-fees. Unlike roads, which are usually free at point of use, and this model should probably be applied much more often to public transport if we are to wean ourselves off driving everywhere.
> The answer is that you’re not spending it to halt X, you’re spending it to halt 10X down the road.
You need to justify this somehow to justify spending X > Y on enforcement. This is very far from self-evident, and my hunch is that these numbers are either relatively stable, or correlate with economic 'health' of the community, which is to suggest that the 'network effect' doesn't apply here as you suggest.
Your enforcers will not be (anywhere near) 100% effective either. At best, maybe you can expect to break even, but even that is probably difficult, and since 'breaking even' means significant negative impact on individuals, and has serious risk of scope creep and perception issues with the 'transit cops', it doesn't sound at all worth it.
What happens when someone gets caught dodging the fare and fined? They can't afford to pay the transit fare, and now they can't afford a fine that is, what, 20X the fare, and it just adds to their stress / debt load / collections coming after them. Meanwhile, since they can't afford it, they don't pay it, and the city doesn't actually collect any revenue from this endeavour. This is like library fines - the people who most need the system either get excluded from it or it even starts actively working against them.
Unless the system is running into capacity limits (or capacity break points), the marginal cost of freeloaders using the system is effectively zero; the trains run anyway. The ROI on paying for enforcement is almost certainly going to be terrible. It's very reactionary 'wrongdoers should be punished' thinking that doesn't actually solve anything.
Remember that governemnt services like public transit shouldn't be operated like for-profit businesess. The product of their efforts, and the way to judge them, is people transported, not dollars.
I don't know where that fact was taken from, but it sure sounds like a baseless claim.
I would even say that transit users evading fares is a symptom of a growing section of the population that is unable to pay for their basic needs, like transportation to their jobs - from experience, people don't jump the metro to go drinking, they do so because they need to go somewhere and don't have the money.
Metro fares using long term passes also grows the issue : if most of the revenue in the metro came from monthly pass users, fare evasion wouldn't matter - thr cost is covered. The issue is that one time tickets are thousands of percent more expensive than long term passes, but are only available to people with large income. Users with less money can't afford the pass and pay a highly marked up price. The one time passes are basically paying for the service, while the mnthly passes users make the largest part of the userbase.
We are basically offering low transit prices to medium-high income people to the cost of financially strangling the poor that are required to use the transit service. Transit should be free!