<story><title>Utah expands public transportation with rapid bus transit, free until 2021</title><url>http://rideuta.com/news/2018/08/UVX-Service-Starts-August-13</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gumby</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t understand why road taxes aren&amp;#x27;t used to pay for free public transport.  The more people on public transport the more room for cars.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bobthepanda</author><text>Free public transport is a can of worms; in general, free tends to attract walkers and bikers but not drivers, since price is not really how a car competes with public transport. And attracting walkers and bikers would probably be a negative. There&amp;#x27;s also a negative cycle where some walkers and bikers will switch because the free service is good enough, so the services become overcrowded, so more service is provided and the increased frequencies make public transit even more attractive to walkers and bikers. So you end up increasing costs quite a bit with no increase in &amp;quot;revenue&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s also the fact that in even moderately busy systems, the amount of fares collected is not insignificant. As an example, New York&amp;#x27;s MTA: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;interactive.nydailynews.com&amp;#x2F;project&amp;#x2F;mta-funding&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;interactive.nydailynews.com&amp;#x2F;project&amp;#x2F;mta-funding&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;$6B out of $15B is quite a lot of money. Raising taxes to cover $6B in lost revenue would be quite the feat. And why wouldn&amp;#x27;t that $6B be better put towards housing, or hospitals, or schools, or even better public transport services? It&amp;#x27;s generally better to make services more useful, than to just make existing subpar service free.</text></comment>
<story><title>Utah expands public transportation with rapid bus transit, free until 2021</title><url>http://rideuta.com/news/2018/08/UVX-Service-Starts-August-13</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gumby</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t understand why road taxes aren&amp;#x27;t used to pay for free public transport.  The more people on public transport the more room for cars.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Nasrudith</author><text>If it is anything like the situation in Pennsylvania I can see two causes - politics and representation of the rural and further-suburban disapproving of services &amp;#x27;just for the city&amp;#x27; and the current road taxes alone being insufficient. Free while great for adoption also has a bad revenue curve in the more people who adopt it the less money they make in addition to increased operation costs&amp;#x2F;decreased quality from more crowding of the system. And then there are issues with metrics and success or failure. If public transit makes the road only need repaired every ten years instead of every notice its benefits may not be accounted properly or in a really bad case not even realized if they have roads on fixed repair timetables and only accelerate them if they clearly need repair ahead of schedule.</text></comment>