The Public and Public Transportation
Commuter services always cry poor, because they have to spend the money they receive on keeping up and improving services instead of keeping it themselves. Yes, there is a government subsidy, and yes, it is an investment in mass transit over private vehicles. But the arguments presented to change the fare structure don’t really make sense. Persons with a low income buy single, full-fare tickets, and middle to high income persons buy weekly or even quarterly periodic tickets, which are discounted. Why is this so? Because middle and high income persons can afford to shell out a larger sum of money at one time than poor people can. A poor person who puts down $30 a week has the perceived disadvantage of not having some part of that sum to spend on daily necessities, while the higher wage earners can make it part of their budget. It is much more difficult for someone earning a marginal wage to even have a budget, let alone live by it. So how do you make fares fair? Do you remove the incentive for the middle class to use public transportation by raising periodic fare rates? That doesn’t actually help anyone, does it? You’re not going to discount the single fare ticket, are you? Instead, everyone pays the full rate and the subsidy goes away and nobody who can afford it takes the train anymore because it just got cheaper to use your own car and to hell with everybody else. Traffic gets worse, pollution increases, the rail system crumbles (more), and before long it’s L.A. and it will be decades before you can fix it. The way to fix the system is to invest in it: upgrade the tracks and trains and build more lines with more connections; clean up the graffiti while you’re at it. This can be done with the subsidy still in place. The CityRail executives will just have to defer getting richer.