So buses are going to be free in Washington DC. Hooray? A short thread: 1/ washingtonpost.com
You have to ask: What's the effect of making the buses free but not trains? When we encourage people to use a bus where there's also a rail line, we're encouraging them to do something that makes transit less efficient, which means we ultimately have less of it. 2/
Buses run out of capacity at a lower level of ridership than trains do. When you get overcrowding you have to put out more buses, which is expensive! Operating cost is mostly labor, and short shifts to manage brief crowding are especially expensive. 3/
So if you have to put out a bus just to handle overcrowding right next to a rail line that has capacity to spare, well, that's a bus that could have provided better service, or even the only service, to an area with no trains at all. 4/
(And once more: When I say "bus", I don't mean the physical bus. I mean the bus operator's time, because that's what's expensive. That's why bigger vehicles like trains are better when lots of people want to go the same way at the same time.) 5/
All this may not be a problem as long as ridership is low, but that won't be true forever. (For example, we are already back to severe bus crowding around school times, which is why free buses-but-not-trains for youth also makes me nervous.) 6/
So when we offer free/discounted fares for buses but not for trains in the same network, we encourage people to travel in ways that will cost the transit agency more. That's bad for everyone who uses transit or benefits from it. 7/
(Of course, I've also just made an argument against all bus/rail fare differences, including those in DC. This is also an argument against all charges for changing buses, or from buses to trains.) 8/ humantransit.org
It's easy to say "we should focus on buses because poor people use buses and wealthier people use trains." But the purpose of buses and trains is not to symbolize poles in the class struggle. They are tools that combine to create an optimally liberating network for all ... 9/
For bus and rail to work together, you have to use each one where it's the right solution, and make it easy (physically, financially, culturally, and in terms of information) for people to make trips involving both. 10/
So let's have the debate about free fares! But the debate has to be about free public transit, not free buses. 11/11
Loading suggestions...