On the other hand, no charges mean you can get rid of a lot of cruft: no tickets, no gates/turnstiles, no machines, no payments, no paperwork thereof, no ticket inspectors, etc etc. So in fact having 0 charge is unequivocally better than having a residual charge.
In other words: charge price = cost, or don't charge at all and get funded by public revenue.
In every city I know of, the fares for public transit more than pays for the cost of collecting. Also, in every city I'm aware of, even the ones with high transit ridership (Tokyo), there is lots of room for adding more transit and getting even more people on, but money is lacking to do that.
I'm also aware of no place where people who use transit to consider cost one of the major barriers to using it more. The barrier, even for the poorest people, is almost always not cause, but the service just doesn't meet their needs. Which is to say most transit systems need to raise their fares a little more and use that extra money to give people the service they actually want.
If the train was going to run regardless, and there isn't that high of a demand on this level of off-peak, adding the weight of a person or two is practically nothing to the rolling of the train.
You make a lot of assumptions here and it's pure speculation:
- demand absolutely rises with free services, as evidenced by other cities that did that, costs do go up
- who said "off-peak" in this context? we're talking free service, not "sometimes free"
- "adding the weight of a person or two" - again, you don't know that. Also, it's not the weight, it's the demand vs capacity, which inevitably increases the frequency of the service.
I am all for good public transport but a nominal price is better than free. It's a similar issue with public health system: a completely free one gets abused.
> You make a lot of assumptions here and it's pure speculation
Both of us are in both of our comments.
> demand absolutely rises with free services
Its not free, its 49 euros a month.
> "adding the weight of a person or two" - again, you don't know that. Also, it's not the weight
My response was to the "It should cost at least enough to cover the energy expenses" part, which the energy cost is practically entirely the weight of the passengers and their cargo. Which for a whole train the marginal energy cost of a person riding a train that was already going to go on that journey and probably already had capacity on board is miniscule. We're talking about a train that weights hundreds of tons and you're adding like <100kg to it for some fraction of a $49 euro monthly pass.
I don't doubt it will increase the demand that much, but at the same time its "off-peak". That inherently means there's extra capacity. If a massive amount of people shifted their schedules to meet this new "off-peak" ridership time I'd imagine the "off-peak" schedules would update...otherwise they wouldn't really be on and off peak schedules anymore by definition would they?
> JOHN COCHRANE: I think the activists who wanted toilet equity did not imagine the solution would be no toilet or a fight with businesses over who's going to be able to use the toilet.
> [...]
> BERAS: Without that incentive, Nik-O-Lok was right. The free public toilets were overrun with people who had to go or people abusing drugs or having sex. Cities were changing. In lots of places, they struggled to fund and maintain public places. With no income from the toilets, taking care of them was harder than ever. Cities couldn't deal. Eventually, they closed them or let them fall into disrepair. The pay toilets may have been flawed, but they served a purpose that no public or private entity has been able to effectively fill since. John says this is a classic tale of a price control, when the government imposes a price.
I think the case for at least allowing nominal payments for toilets is pretty strong. Anything that is free either requires significant and expensive oversight to mitigate anti-social behaviors, or a society that has equivalent anti-social checks baked into the culture (which the U.S. definitely does not have). We should aspire to ubiqitous free toilets, free transit, etc, but there's an infinite number of things people want to be free, or at least subsidized. The public has to pick & choose and allocate its resources wisely.
Note that almost everywhere in the U.S., transit is strongly subsidized and often effectively free for the most in need, but it might require some legwork. In SF where it's quite trivial to get this subsidy (https://treasurer.sf.gov/economicjustice/sfmta-transit-disco...) people still balk at the requirement, though I think the people who complain the most are the ones far too wealthy to have to worry about these things. Some government programs, especially Federal programs, have onerous application and reporting requirements specifically designed to dissuade use, but individual transit subsidies aren't generally structured this way. In SF and to a lesser degree California, there are armies of people paid to hold people's hand through these processes (mostly for Federal and Federally subsidized programs, as many state and especially local programs tend to be very low friction).
Always funny to me how people try and put laws on things for homeless people when the ills people are worried about with homeless people are already illegal but not being enforced. E.g., "we must charge for transit, to keep homeless people off as they could smoke meth on the platform." Never mind smoking meth on the platform is already illegal. Never mind that it isn't getting enforced. Never mind that this lack of enforcement on meth usage suggests farebox enforcement isn't going to suddenly out prioritize meth usage enforcement and be successful to combat meth usage in some round a bout way.
It ends up being about the optics of politicians getting to advertise that they are doing "something" and never mind if it works or not, because the people clamoring the loudest, angry suburban whites usually, aren't even the ones using these systems to begin with. They are told in their propaganda bubbles that these systems are dangerous rather than experiencing it with their own eyes and making any conclusion. They demand action for a system they will never use. After whatever action passes they don't become users either, the goalposts move to some other slight or ill that is really a proxy for "I don't feel safe around black or brown people."
This has crossed my mind for other things too, like immigration.
People say they don't want immigrants because of crime (whether that's a reasonable concern is a different topic entirely), but it presupposes that laws against crime aren't enforced. If we had stricter law enforcement would people worry about (immigrants, the homeless, etc.) less?
Exactly. Even if you support ICE and its efforts, surely you would consider every nonviolent noncriminal who contributes to society in the form of labor and taxation a massive waste of resources to go after and deport, relative to those who actually do victimize people and are a burden on society?
Yeah, and I think one problem is that we don't enforce our laws evenly or consistently, so when we _do_ enforce them it's overly draconian. And, of course, there's bias, privilege, etc (a poor immigrant who doesn't speak the native language will probably get worse treatment than a wealthy native person with the right accent/class/connections etc., and that's unjust)
No, south sits to the right of east, west to the right of south, and north to the right of west.
All chinese card games go counter-clockwise. And the compass directions have a standard order, from 1-4: ESWN. Which is why the seat order is not the same as it would be on a compass.
if there's one surprising thing I've learnt from HN users, it's that there're loads of people out there who run browsers with zillions of tabs open all the time
Meanwhile I do 50% of my internet-ing in private mode and get annoyed when I change between apps the wrong way and loose my 4 tabs lol. I think this particular issue happens because firefox-android must get told by android-OS to free up RAM as it's now a background-app.
But there's another private-tab-killer, and it happens when the screen times-out automatically or manually (eg, when you push the power button). I don't have a passcode or anything, so when I push the power button to power the screen on, it shows the simple "swipe to unlock" screen. The problem is that FF leaves a "private browsing" notification — and FYI, if you click on any notification on my lock screen, it will unlock and go to straight to that app — so of course I see that notification and think "shit yer, here's a shortcut" and click it, to which it unlocks the phone and opens FF, but it wipes all my private browsing tabs in the process!!! But if you unlock it by swiping, then your tabs will survive...
Actually, as I'm typing this, I think it might wipe ALL tabs, but that's not so bad for regular tabs (as you have history, cookies, etc), but it can still ruin your "state" of a search/scroll/etc.
Edit2: I'm also just realising that the way it wipes tabs when I click the notification sounds just like the first issue I mentioned (which I presume is android-OS garbage collecting the memory held by "background" apps). I have a POCO phone that runs Xiaomi HyperOS, and if it's running a non-standard lock-screen "app" by default (because I'm using the default whatever with settings that suit me), then perhaps that's why clicking a notification counts as "changing apps"?! (or perhaps even the default android lock screen counts as its own app?) But this idea seems strange because it would imply that the "swipe to unlock" feature is not part of the "lock screen app"...?
is it to do with patten matching maybe? maybe autists can spot sociopaths 'cos they behave just ever so slightly differently ... and maybe you can recognize AI text 'cos you see a pattern in the content which non-autists do not?
