All of fare enforcement goes away. All the ticket kiosks. IT to support them. Credit card processing. Customer support that isn’t helping arrange/plan rides or deal with safety/service issues. Drivers spending time accepting fares instead of driving. Cages to separate buses into paid and unpaid sections when there’s a second fare collector. And with it goes all of the cost to riders of dealing with those things.
Fares dictate the physical layout of transit systems to accommodate collecting the fares. Stairs up from one platform down to another so that a fare can be collected between an arterial service like a subway and a peripheral service like an underground tram. Or leaving and re-entering a station for commuter rail instead of having a cross-platform transfer.
The whole system is better if the people who benefit from it (everybody, businesses, industries, vehicle users benefiting from decreased traffic) pay for it in the simplest way possible without a bunch of extra steps.
@hissingmeerkat@pageflight Expanding on "Drivers spending time accepting fares instead of driving. " and physical layout:
It’s better for bus timing and passenger efficiency too. You can now board and disembark from the back or front of the bus because it just doesn’t matter any more. You aren’t required to slowly board up front to pay the driver. An in->out flow *may* be nicer, but dropping the requirement will still help and speed things up.
One of the ironies is that this is what ‘conservative’ folks claim to want – to dispense with the bureaucracy, with the stress and the requirements and the governance. To have a simple system, which just works, plain and straightforward.
Removing fare requirements would do that! But that’s not what they want. Not really.
They want a system which is entirely simple – and exclusively for them.
The fossil fuel industry is desperately seeking every possible avenue to keep their captive consumers & stop a necessary phase-out of their toxic products.
@pageflight There’s always something like that that you don’t see unless you’re somewhere in the business.
The usual problem is that they’re different budgets held by different public bodies, so that the council (or whatever) having to put in the investment isn’t the one making the gains, and getting the one to cross-subsidise the other is often simply too much bureaucratic and political hassle. Like the savings you get in the criminal justice system from putting in CCTV (perps are more likely to plead guilty after seeing themselves on screen, which saves *lots* of money in the court system).
I wouldn’t have thought of the judicial/policing ramifications.
All of fare enforcement goes away. All the ticket kiosks. IT to support them. Credit card processing. Customer support that isn’t helping arrange/plan rides or deal with safety/service issues. Drivers spending time accepting fares instead of driving. Cages to separate buses into paid and unpaid sections when there’s a second fare collector. And with it goes all of the cost to riders of dealing with those things.
Fares dictate the physical layout of transit systems to accommodate collecting the fares. Stairs up from one platform down to another so that a fare can be collected between an arterial service like a subway and a peripheral service like an underground tram. Or leaving and re-entering a station for commuter rail instead of having a cross-platform transfer.
The whole system is better if the people who benefit from it (everybody, businesses, industries, vehicle users benefiting from decreased traffic) pay for it in the simplest way possible without a bunch of extra steps.
@hissingmeerkat @pageflight Expanding on "Drivers spending time accepting fares instead of driving. " and physical layout:
It’s better for bus timing and passenger efficiency too. You can now board and disembark from the back or front of the bus because it just doesn’t matter any more. You aren’t required to slowly board up front to pay the driver. An in->out flow *may* be nicer, but dropping the requirement will still help and speed things up.
@hissingmeerkat @pageflight
One of the ironies is that this is what ‘conservative’ folks claim to want – to dispense with the bureaucracy, with the stress and the requirements and the governance. To have a simple system, which just works, plain and straightforward.
Removing fare requirements would do that! But that’s not what they want. Not really.
They want a system which is entirely simple – and exclusively for them.
But markets aren’t bureaucracy! /s
For real though, the smaller and more frequent the transaction the more of burden it becomes.
literally cheaper to give power to the people
@bluemoon @hissingmeerkat
Koch Network has waged a multi-decade war on public transportation
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-public-transit.html
Hate anything where the races & classes mix.
Even kept money-losing ripoff artists like Uber & Lyfft afloat to kneecap public transit
https://jacobin.com/2019/08/uber-koch-brothers-david-charles-rideshare-public-transit
The fossil fuel industry is desperately seeking every possible avenue to keep their captive consumers & stop a necessary phase-out of their toxic products.
That includes funding fascists.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/20/us/politics/koch-network-2024-election-trump.html
@pageflight There’s always something like that that you don’t see unless you’re somewhere in the business.
The usual problem is that they’re different budgets held by different public bodies, so that the council (or whatever) having to put in the investment isn’t the one making the gains, and getting the one to cross-subsidise the other is often simply too much bureaucratic and political hassle. Like the savings you get in the criminal justice system from putting in CCTV (perps are more likely to plead guilty after seeing themselves on screen, which saves *lots* of money in the court system).