“The reason most public transportation is seen as ‘losing’ money is precisely because it charges for trips. If you don't charge fares, suddenly it can't ‘lose’ money. It just costs money, the same as the roads.”
This random comment has given me my new favourite argument for removing fares from public transit.
@dx #Vienna provides a practical plan for how to get to that point: around half of residents have a 1€/day "Jahreskarte" year ticket, so we already have the feeling of transit without tickets. This has been expanded to the #Austria -wide "Klimaticket", which is the same idea, but for all railways and public transit in the whole country. I think this approach is much more politically possible than trying to just flip systems to have no fares.
