Friday, October 22, 2010

Give it away

I have always believed that the one single thing we could do as a society to promote transit (and solve a myriad of problems in one fell swoop) is to make it free to use. I finally have come across people that share the same view.

I pose this question to my readers - would you be inclined to take transit more if it was free?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

No. Just thinking of all the other social benefits that would be lost if public transit had to be fully subsidized. Not to mention the fact that transit would be extremely unsafe all of the time if it didn't cost anything to ride. Just take a look at the c-train in the free-fare zone late at night. Even the entire line can be testy at night if drunken hooligans aren't concerned about riding without fare.

Karl Plesz said...

I should have worded the question better. I was operating under the assumption that we could afford to do it and other services would not suffer as a result.

You bring up a good point though about the 'hooligans' riding the train for no reason (except maybe to stay warm). That could be problematic.