Take public transit. Transit in general is a tremendously regressive area in the United States. Road maintenance, mostly benefiting those who drive cars, is publicly and universally funded, while mass transit like buses and subways are largely funded by charging fares to riders. Those riders, of course, have disproportionately less wealth than the drivers on tax-funded roads. We socialize transit for richer people, and force poorer people to pay per ride.
We do this despite the ecological benefits of mass transit: You might think we’d want to incentivize people to ride buses and subways, but instead we incentivize them against it! And funding these systems through fares means that the NYPD can spend hundreds of millions of dollars abusing and arresting people who can’t afford their subway fares then, in true ass-backwards dystopian logic, say that this is necessary to keep the system funded.
Given that the pay-per-ride system for public transit is regressive, unjust, and cuts against the benefits of having mass transit even in a simplistic Econ 101 universe, there are shockingly few American cities that offer free and universal transit. Even internationally, pay-per-ride is the norm. What’s happening here? The answer is that cities around the world have been convinced that making public transit free invites only “undesirable” riders. This is disappointing to put it mildly, but I think it offers us a valuable lesson in how to approach our arguments for universalizing services.
A recent example is instructive. Kansas City, Missouri City Council recently voted unanimously to make its public transit system free. This has mostly been celebrated, but a Jalopnik piece cast doubt on whether it’s a good idea. Writer Aaron Gordon cited a 2002 report for the National Center for Transportation Research, which found that “while fare-free policy might be successful for small transit systems in fairly homogenous communities, it is nearly certain that fare-free implementation would not be appropriate for larger transit systems.” Is your racism detector going off yet? Might want to turn down the alarm volume for what comes next:
A fare-free policy will increase ridership; however, the type of ridership demographic generated is another issue. In the fare-free demonstrations in larger systems reviewed in this paper, most of the new riders generated were not the choice riders they were seeking to lure out of automobiles in order to decrease traffic congestion and air pollution. The larger transit systems that offered free fares suffered dramatic rates of vandalism, graffiti, and rowdiness due to younger passengers who could ride the system for free, causing numerous negative consequences. Vehicle maintenance and security costs escalated due to the need for repairs associated with abuse from passengers. The greater presence of vagrants on board buses also discouraged choice riders and caused increased complaints from long-time passengers. Furthermore, due to inadequate planning and scheduling for the additional ridership, the transit systems became overcrowded and uncomfortable for riders. Additional buses needed to be placed in service to carry the heavier loads that occurred on a number of routes, adding to the agencies’ operating costs.
The problem with fare-free systems, you see, is that the riders are not “choice riders” and that these non-”choice” riders were rowdy and did vandalisms. Note that these results come from three fare-free experiments: one year programs in Denver and Trenton in the 1970s (but only for off-peak hours) and a full fare-free experiment in Austin from October 1989 until December 1990. So, if pearl-clutching about non-”choice” riders and young hooligans doing graffiti sounds straight out of the 1970s The Warriors fanfic, or a product of “super-predator” politics, that’s because it is.
Notice what else is going on here. “Vagrants” onboard buses bothered other riders. Ridership overall went up, which is viewed as a negative because the city failed to accommodate the increase with more service. So the reasons we shouldn’t have fare-free transit are: (1) we have made it illegal and/or untenable to exist in so many physical places as a houseless person that people with nowhere else to go will spend their time on free buses; and (2) more people rode transit overall. Because we have failed to house our neighbors (despite there being more empty houses than houseless people, even on a city by city basis), and because we don’t want to actually meet demand with funding, the report concludes that we have to keep our horribly regressive transit funding model.
This is a clever rhetorical move. The report and Jalopnik article conclude that free public transit doesn’t work because (due to our failure to house people and provide sufficient bus service) people still drive their cars. Getting cars off the road is a reason to make public transit free, but it’s not the only reason. The report and the Jalopnik article quietly shift the goal of free public transit so that it is only focused on reducing drivers and not at all on equity. Fare-free systems are failures because they don’t cause people to shift from driving to riding the bus. Of course they don’t. Someone who drives 12 miles round-trip to their office every day, following several direct bus routes, doesn’t do that to avoid paying the $4 roundtrip bus fare. The incentive against driving is helpful, but it can’t be the whole reason to do fare-free public transit.
Instead of focusing on drivers, the best reasons for fare-free transit are about the riders. Ridership in all of the fare-free experiments increased, sometimes dramatically, meaning that people were avoiding public transit due to the fare. Some of those people might have been looking for a free place to sit, but if overcrowded buses were a complaint, then it is a safe bet that many were going places they wouldn’t have otherwise gone because they could do so for free. This is a good thing.Those people might be going to work, or to buy things, or just to visit friends or feel a little bit of joy they wouldn’t have otherwise felt. Transit justice should be about people being able to move around, to live their lives as they see fit regardless of wealth.
Once again, you can argue here that what you really need is means-testing: free rides for people under a certain income threshold, so that little Trumps do not get to ride the bus without paying. But we can give the same reply: Assessing people’s income before they can ride the bus is humiliating, inconvenient, administratively costly, and will inevitably mean that people who should be entitled to ride the bus free, and would do so, choose not to. Not to mention the administrative costs created for the transit system of evaluating and tracking riders’ income, buying, maintaining and upgrading fare collection equipment, and policing fare evasion. All of this is unfair and unnecessary. We need to say so loudly and clearly.
No comments:
Post a Comment