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I agree with a lot of what you're saying here -- I can never understand why people in LA constantly complain about traffic while at the same time the MTA has to raise fares because it is so underfunded. Make transit FREE and it could have a lot more impact on traffic.
No. Make transit FREE and it will become so infested with vagrants and gangbangers that no regular citizen will dare to ride it except maybe at the height of the rush hour, and maybe not even then. The Staten Island Railway has had problems of this sort for years, ever since they stopped collecting fares except at the ferry (last, northernmost stop). IIRC we discussed this issue here a week or two ago, in connection with one of the European cities.
What about a system similar to aircraft now?
Economy (near free), and Business (the bulk of the train), so that commuters can buy their way away from most of the vagrants.
The new Dubai Metro will have three car trains.
One for women and children, one "VIP" with leather seats and one Economy car.
AFAIK, the only "class" system Urban Rail.
Alan
It still leaves the problem of intimidation and muggings at the stations. And subsidized buses and railcars are a hellishly expensive way to provide free heat and A/C for the vagrants and gangbangers.
And anyway, with the cost of energy going ever upward, it seems very, very foolish to subsidize energy-intensive services, especially when the subsidized purpose - riding around and around for no reason at all - is no purpose at all.
In Sweden, sometimes the social services pay the bus fare for homeless people so they can ride a bus all night during winter.
Hello PaulS,
We have free buses here in Chapel Hill, NC. It's a college town so if every college student drove it would overwhelm the road system. The bus is free. There are all kinds of people that use the buses: Students and UNC workers, families with children, some homeless, mexican workers...perhaps because this is a small town that it works. Even grade school students use it. There is also a carrier for bikes so you can use your bike and take it with you. We have a good bicycle pathway system which is improving year to year. It works for us.
"...perhaps because this is a small town that it works. Even grade school students use it." Yes indeed.
In bigger places, many parents will not allow their grade school kids to walk anywhere on their own, much less use a city bus on their own, even though IMO the objective risk in the cases I see is much less than it was where and when I grew up doing things like that. But times have changed - these days, putting the kids on a city bus might almost be counted as reckless endangerment. Even if it doesn't earn a hostile visit from Social Services, it will draw the opprobrium of aunts and uncles, of friends and neighbors. So the kids get chauffeured to and from school, or, failing that, a parent (usually the mother, it seems) waits with them every morning at the school bus stop, and waits again every afternoon until the school bus arrives.
This may be a symptom of a larger issue as Mike M downthread posits, but all the same, it is what parents do. And, after all, once in a blue moon something bad does indeed happen. When it does, it's hyped up in scary bright yellow lettering on freeway signs, and retold endlessly in breathless TV reports, all across the entire country. Under those circumstances, and after more than 40 years of the "consumer" movement browbeating people and scaring them out of their wits about even the most utterly insignificant risks, parents will not be handling the issue differently anytime soon.