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Fare free buses?! This monster needs to be stopped.
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this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025
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Hi I'm a socialist transit worker and I thought free bus fare was a no brainer until I worked in transit, it's an awful idea. Transit cannot function effectively as transit when it is being forced to operate as a mobile shelter and bottle and wagon transit system. Fund shelters and ease the burden shouldered by transit.
(By all means make transit incredibly inexpensively accessible to anyone who needs it)
I apparently wasn't clear enough here, I'm sure there are places where free transit works great because people are so well cared for and general safety is so high that it's not an issue. That sounds wonderful, I want that here. However, I have learned the hard way that transit needs to continue being accessible to the majority even when there are people who have slipped fully into the margins who present hazards to transit customers. (Customers meaning people who need transit to travel)
Point blank, that is not an issue caused by free transit. This is the logical equivalent of saying the school system is broken because people keep showing up to them with guns.
Point blank, the inability to deny people entry to transit and to use transit as a mobile shelter is having catastrophic impacts on overall transit use. This is the equivalent of saying the school system is broken because people keep showing up at schools and screaming at people, assaulting people, soiling themselves and the facilities and the staff have no ability to separate them or remove them from the school, so the rest of the students get home schooled or private schooled and effectively don't have access to public school. (Oh yeah, and tons of teachers and staff quit)
They need HELP and a transit system as a shelter and drug safe use space is just about the least efficient way I can imagine to help them and makes it less safe and accessible to everyone else.
You can care and advocate for more than one thing, just so you know. Housing someone is less tax money on you personally than keeping them on the street costs and there are more empty living spaces than there are folks without a home.
But, go ahead and villainize the people with nowhere to go and no other option, they're definitely the problem, aren’t they?
Edit: You’re literally just bitching about your job and asking for this to not affect you personally. That’s a shitty as fuck take on the situation.
I feel like you didn't actually read what I wrote. I ABSOLUTELY WANT THEM TO BE HOUSED AND CARED FOR. I am in no way villainizing them, this situation is not their fault. The reason we have a giant crisis of homelessness and drug use is not because we "let them". The system needs to be fixed so that population can be helped and the numbers falling into that are cut. In the meantime though, we are doing nothing and it doesn't work!
This is specifically a post about doing something. Notice that first box of words in the picture?
Yes... I was in favor of a lot of it... I was trying to educate people that there is more to the issue of free bus fare. Because I'm a transit worker who used to think free bus fare was a no brainer, but now believe it is unworkable without FIRST significantly improving other issues.
Okay, I can't tell if you're trolling at this point so unless you convince me otherwise I'm disengaging here. Say what you think I am saying and what you think is incorrect about it and I will say if you are wrong about what I am saying, wrong about your point, or right and I am wrong, either in how I communicated, or in what I am currently believing to be true.
Luxemburg has a great free transit system, what you guys need it to deal with homeless people and drug addicts. I mean this in a humanly way, where these people get the help they need.
Couldn't agree more, a system where the number of homeless drug addicts and marginalized people is so low that we literally don't need to worry about it sounds much better. But in the meantime the people who aren't using the bus as a shelter have a civil right to access to safe and effective transit as well that they are currently not getting and transit is dying because of it. I have no illusions on the ways in which society has failed these people, they are largely foster kids who aged out of the system and people who were only a little on the margins but functional until rent went up AGAIN and they literally couldn't afford to have a place to live anymore and spiraled from there. Free transit won't fix that though, the interim period where free transit doesn't function is very real and valid.
Also, seriously though, Luxembourg conservatively has less than a twentieth the poverty rate as the US.
well duh. that's not a transit issue, that's a shelter issue.
Agreed, the problem comes when the issue gets pushed from the shelter system onto the transit system.
Staten Island (the forgotten borough) has a free subway. It works pretty well.
Never been let alone worked in Staten Island, couldn't tell you if there's more to the story there or not. Sounds great though, hope it stays great. (I do think islands have a decent ability to be insulated from some amount of societal problems that tend to accumulate in city centers, I know the staten island ferry is free but it still may provide some barrier)