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.
Nah definitely not. If you’re that desperate where are you even going on the subway? I’ve literally seen homeless people pay the fare. The only time I’d consider it justifiable is if you’re in a rush, the train is right their, and your payment isn’t working. Otherwise like what, where you gonna go and what you gonna do if you can’t even afford $2.75?
If it was free, conservatives would put more effort into killing it off like they did in the 60s and 70s when they killed off trains and subways in a bunch of cities, killed off the trolley systems in several cities, etc. Otherwise their donors would lose too much money on people switching from driving. But yeah, it’s almost entirely funded by taxes anyway. Would be logical to make it 100% funded, but keeping a small fare keeps it a smaller target of conservatives.
Yes bad actors are always a problem. So I guess we should never do anything substantial to reform the system because rightwing shitheads will try to sabotage it.
I didn’t say that. It’s just that first we need to fix the election system that is totally broken through gerrymandering, funding cuts, re-expanding mail in voting and early voting, making election day a mandatory holiday for all but emergency services, get the big money out of politics by removing personhood from corporations and thus removing their “right to free speech” as well as their ability to donate unlimited funds through various means and possibly even making all election ads paid for by public funds that are equally distributed if requested, etc. Then once everyone can vote without losing their job for having to take off almost an entire day and they can vote for local politicians rather than ones that will mostly be responsible for conservative areas connected to their sliver of the city, we need to organize progressive people to actually do it. But I think once it becomes apparent that their votes actually have some chance of making a difference, it won’t be as hard as it is now.
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 cannot be free.
It should however be without toll. It can quite reasonably be funded with tax.
But free? No. Someone somewhere has to pay for the infrastructure and operations.
Roads should be tolled. Every single one.
Governments waste obscene amounts of money building car infrastructure, which loses money with no return.
Capitalism makes it not free just like it holds people’s lives hostages to pay a fee to live
But doesn’t life always come with a fee to pay? If we had no society you’d still have to work in terms of finding food
Yeah but for it to be free they’d have to raise taxes so it’s better to just privatise them which would lower taxes and provide a better service
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.
The reason people don’t use public transport is because right now it absolutely sucks in most places if you want more people to use them then they need to be privatised so a business that actually has an insentive to provide a good service can take over and make them great ( for example look at Japan). This way you can also lower taxes a bit which is great for the economy
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.
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.
The title should be “NYC wastes money on software that doesn’t work rather than reducing fares or eliminating them entirely”.
Lmfao, I’m pretty sure the idea is that it will return them more money than it costs. You just want free subway rides or something? It’s fucking $2.75 to go ANYWHERE.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=T_Uxe5sCyvw&
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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what a great use of resources 😒
I haven’t paid for the NYC subway or bus for probably 15 years… XD
I hope that’s cause you moved out of NYC 15 uears ago. Otherwise fuck you, this is why we can’t have nice things. Why do some people only accept paying for things if we force it out of their paycheck instead of just when they use it?
