As I was doing my laundry today I saw an editorial from the San Francisco Bay Guardian. It was in support of eliminating the collection of fare from passengers on the Muni, the San Francisco Municipal Railway.

From the Guardian:

For more than 30 years, San Francisco activists have been promoting the idea of a special tax district downtown, with revenue going directly to Muni. It’s got political and economic logic: a significant amount of Muni’s operational budget goes to ferrying workers to office buildings in the Financial District, and since those buildings tend to be vastly undertaxed (thanks to Proposition 13), the city ought to levy a special fee every year to help underwrite transportation.

They even admit they are targeting business owners to pay for something mostly used by another group.

The money would come from those most able to pay — building owners and the (typically) large, wealthy businesses that rent downtown. The benefits would go to the (typically) less-wealthy people who ride the buses every day.

The San Francisco Chronicle covers Mayor Newsom’s ideas here.

In a different article the Chronicle has weighted in with some good information:

Every major American public transit system that has tried a fare-free program quickly abandoned the initiative due to a rise in crime and rowdiness aboard buses and a mounting burden of funding operating costs — issues that may influence San Francisco officials considering elimination of Muni fares.

They then document the different cities that tired free transit before abandoning it. The article also points out some successes of fare free structures, like the city of Commerce and the big island of Hawaii. I recommend a full reading of the article.

I don’t like this fare free public transit idea. The costs are merely being shifted from one group of people to another. The riders who use the buses and trains should pay for them.

Aside from the problems mentioned in the article, a fare free system will be less responsive to the riders’ concerns. If riders are dissatisfied now they can carpool or take other forms of transportation. With set funding in the fare free system the riders will lose this recourse. There will be no incentive for improvement in the system and the service will decline. People will end up paying for the buses even if they are terrible and refuse to ride them.

My Experience
Right now I am paying for transit services I don’t want to. As part of my University fees I am required to pay $58.50 a semester for unlimited AC Transit rides. I can only remember using the bus once this semester. One of my friends has not even picked up his bus stickers for the past year because he never uses the bus. We make a choice to not use the bus; why do we have to pay for it?