Don’t think of it as a giveaway to the undeserving
Imagine even thinking this about bus fares, when there's corporate welfare, subsidies, bailouts, and a tax code that heavily favours the wealthy.
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2026
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I'm all for taxing the wealthy and using that money to fund public services.
Whatever city simulation game you use, it is usually better to make public transit free, and it pays on the long run. I wonder why...
Is it that people ride the bus?
I'll bet it's that people ride the bus.
My dad retired a few years ago, he spent basically his whole life driving to work and anywhere else he needed to go himself.
Where we live, senior citizens can get a pass so they don't have to pay bus or train fare.
So now he takes the bus everywhere, sometimes he basically just goes and rides it for fun, doesn't really even go anywhere in particular, just gets on a bus and rides around for a bit, gets off at some random stop, and waits around for a bus going back the way he came from.
Weird hobby, but I guess it beats collecting stamps.
So I think that makes a pretty compelling case. If you make it free, people will use it
This is a great hobby 😊
If he starts to show signs of dementia you need to show him how to share his location with you guys by default. This hobby sounds like it could make something stressful even more stressful if not prepared.
Thankfully, this hobby would help stave off dimentia if onsetting, as it is highly cognitive and forces an amount of exercise 🙂
Locally, our transit system gets most of it's funding from a payroll tax on all the businesses in the Tri-County area (why it's called "Tri-Met", Multnomah, Washington, and Clackamas counties.)
https://trimet.org/budget/pdf/2025-adopted-budget.pdf
$62.4 million from passenger revenue.
$540.4 million from payroll tax.
The payroll tax is 0.8237%.
So...
0.8237/$540,400,000
x/$602,800,000
Solve for x...
0.8237 x 602,800,000 = 496,526,360
496,526,360 / 540,400,000 = 0.9188126573
So if we increased the payroll tax 0.0951126573, an amount absolutely nobody would notice, we could make our mass transit system here free.
You should also take into account that expenses are reduced because the need for payment infrastructure and processing disappears.
Plus the millions cities like NYC waste catching and prosecuting gate jumpers
While all that is true, at least in Portland it will be partially off-set by the need for added security.
We ALREADY see it as is with the paid system, it would just get worse in a free system:
While I am broadly speaking in favour of free transit, one thing that should be noted in any conversation about it is that it often does not significantly increase ridership by users who were previously not using transit - the increase mainly comes from increased utilization by prior users, and sometimes you can get negative effects such as the newly free transit trips displacing walking.
Hence, other investments into the transit system may be prudent - for example, expanding the system, increasing headways and so on.
We should try to be brave enough to do all of the above, but sometimes you're forced to choose one or the other.
Walking? Didn‘t know thats possible in the US!
My very limited experience says that it's possible but risky and unpleasant. NYC is probably a bit different, as is always the case in the U.S.
Walking works quite well in Sweden however