Comment on Here’s why some people still evade public transport fares – even when they’re 50 cents

• ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The zero price effect: “If something is free, you are the product”.

  Not in this case. It’s not really free: people pay for public transport in their taxes.

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  • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    A more crucial question is: if public transport is nearly free but still generates overhead to manage and enforce fares, why not make it completely free and eliminate the overhead entirely?

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    • ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Oh come on, you know what I mean: completely free as in you’re free to dump stuff in public trashcans but someone still has to pay for trash collection, and that someone is the taxpayer.

      If a bus fare costs. say, $4, and $3.50 are subsidized so the apparent cost to the bus riders is 50c, someone pays for the $3.50 and that’s everybody, including those who don’t ride the bus. Just like everybody pays for road maintenance in equal parts even if they don’t drive a lot.

      If policymakers decided to make everybody pay for 88% of a few people’s bus fare, they might as well make everybody pay 100% and safe the cost of printing bus tickets, programming bus cards and paying ticket controllers to catch fare dodgers.

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      • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Yeah, I understood your point. I used “free” the same way you did. There was no need to move the goal posts. .

        We tend to distrust “free”.

        How many "free’ offers do you have in your inbox right now? How many do you think are scams? We assume there are some sort of hidden costs, or that the service is “worth what you paid”. If it is offered “completely free”, it will be broadly avoided.

        When charged a token amount, we get the impression of value. A bargain.

        The “penalty” for fare evasion should be the cop looking the other way, or handing out “$5” passes and asking them to “pay it forward”.

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• Jumuta@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  do you seriously not have enough brain cells to understand publically funded services like healthcare

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• Zagorath@aussie.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  They seem to be enforcing fares much like Frederick the Great guarded his potato fields.

  They are absolutely not. If they were, it would be a good idea IMO. Keep the token fare to make tracking data easier and discourage bad behaviour. Enforce it only rarely, and mainly on routes where they have been said behaviour issues. But in fact reports are that their fare enforcement has not slowed down at all.

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