Fairly recently, the DC City Council decided to decriminalize theft of transit services— to put it in non legal language, it decided that stealing a ride on a bus or train by jumping the fare gates or sneaking onto the bus without payment would not be cited by DC police. Since then, there has been a cottage industry of commentators documenting the number of thieves on DC trains, with reports of dozens of fare jumpers during peak hours. The response to this discourse has been a growing (and very obnoxiously expressed) sentiment among urban lefty online types that public transit should be free anyway.
None of this is really surprising in its own terms— the DC City Council is concerned with law enforcement interactions with poorer and darker-skinned citizens, the public, given a chance to take something for free rather than pay its sticker price, jumps the gates more and more, and urban extremely online lefties would like their transportation choices to cost them as little as possible and love any opportunity to insult people who don’t share their politics. So far so good.
But I think the responses to the online lefties— pointing out things like (1) transit costs money, and absent the utopia where everything is paid through taxes on rich people, depriving transit agencies of funding through the farebox is going to make transit worse, and (2) you can’t build a high social trust society like the cultures lefties admire in places like Scandinavia without mass obedience of generally applicable rules and laws— misses another point. It’s why a lot of things can’t be free, and it especially applies to something like transit where there would be massive public policy benefits (such as the slowing of global warming) if more middle and upper income people got out of their cars and used the service.
The point is this— free and cheap things tend to be bad. To understand this, consider a thought experiment. Suppose for some reason the government decided, despite the global warming issue, that it was a public policy priority for everyone to be able to fly for free between Los Angeles and San Francisco. If you could afford to buy a ticket on Delta or Southwest, would you nonetheless take the free option?
Obviously some people would— because some people are cheap and care about nothing other than a bargain. (Indeed, those people are a big reason why airline service in economy class has markedly declined over time.) But a lot of people would not. Why? Well, could you imagine what that free airline would be like? Every flight would be overcrowded. Service would be terrible because the airline would be fully reliant on whatever spending it got from the government, which would always be in danger of being cut. There could even be safety issues. And the planes themselves would be full of the types of people who currently can’t afford a plane ticket— the unemployed, the drug-addicted, the homeless, religious cult members, etc. You’d be miserable flying that airline, and I think many people would make the rational calculation to just buy a ticket on a better carrier.
We all understand this. Why, for instance, is shopping at Saks or Nieman Marcus a better experience than shopping at Walmart? I have nothing against Walmart and shop there, but because Walmart’s sole goal is to sell things as cheaply as possible, there’s very little customer service. And this isn’t only a classist point— the reality is that even when members of the working class enter into a store like Saks (as they might for some important purchase such as a prom dress for their daughter), they will make sure they look nice and will obey the rules and customs of Saks. Similarly, I recently attended a recital at LA’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion— the recital drew a class-mixed crowd, but everyone in that plushly carpeted, wood paneled, chandelier adorned space was on their best behavior. And in contrast, even wealthy people who are supposedly schooled in politeness will act like jerks at the DMV, the budget airline’s gate at the airport, Walmart and other places where things are cheap or free. So it’s not really about being around members of a lower social class— it’s about being in a place where there is informal and formal enforcement of behavior standards. Price acts as a signal that such standards are in place.
Free transit will become the haven of people who have no social investment and don’t adhere to rules and norms. You’ll have trains full of graffiti and violence and station platforms that reek of urine. And the middle and upper class people who you want to ride transit, because if they get their cars off the road it will confer immense environmental benefits on society, will not ride it because they don’t want anything to do with the freak show.
Now none of this is to say that transit should be priced as a luxury good (as it sometimes is with ritzy commuter rail products like LA’s Metrolink, which has comfortable seats, plugs for laptops, and clean bathrooms on its trains). It should be possible for lower income people to get discounted fares, through monthly pass programs. For workers who work minimum wage, the fare for such products should be as low as possible. There should be similarly highly discounted products for the disabled, for whom transit is often a lifeline. But there’s a hard line between such discounts, even if they are steep, and free transit— those programs are aimed at people who have an investment in keeping transit nice, rather than those who don’t want to follow rules at all.
There’s a broader point here that needs to be understood. It’s a form of Milton Friedman’s dictum that there is no such thing as a free lunch, but it is a little more specific than that. It’s that the way you have nice things is to pay for them. The truth is that the public has pulled airlines and shopping in the wrong direction, for instance, by insisting that the only important thing in the world is getting a bargain. Nice things are worth paying for. And that includes transit.
The Cleveland Zoo has historically had free admission on Mondays. You can guess which day I avoid when scheduling a family trip to the zoo.
I don't know that I agree that it is a function of well-appointed environments bringing out the best in people. I think the issue is simpler - people who have a high monetary opportunity cost, and a relatively low value of time tend to be poor people. Those poor people will be drawn to a free Zoo - they won't mind the longer lines, as long as the price is favorable.
People who aren't as price sensitive won't want to deal with the crowds, and will instead happily pay to visit the zoo on another day.
The case of the zoo is especially instructive because the product itself doesn't change day to day - only the clientele changes.
What do you make of the fact that public transport in Luxembourg is free and generally of a pretty decent standard?