If you could get buses to run more miles in an hour, by speeding up boarding without fare collection, plus eliminating cash and credit card processing costs, it would cost the authority zero dollars -- but it would mean job losses -- and lead to schedule alterations that might be unpopular due to faster buses.
Imagine a transit system where there are no turnstiles, where the police presence is minimal because cops aren’t lurking around to enforce fares. Picture a subway and bus network that is free, open and functional because those who profit most from it pay for it.
Lawmakers in Kansas City, Missouri took a step in just this direction earlier in December, passing a bill that directed the city’s manager to set aside $8 million a year to cover the fare of $1.50 for every rider. It is expected to save frequent bus users in the city of 490,000 people about $1,000 a year.
Tweeting his admiration, New York City Councilmember Brad Lander (D-Park Slope) called the step “visionary,” adding in parentheses that it “might take NYC a while, but this really is where we all need to aim.”
The push for free mass transit is part of a large democratic socialist (or social-democratic) resurgence — Medicare for All, free public college, a Green New Deal — in which demands for free, universally available public goods are rising and finding receptive ears.
Here in New York, we already have an example of free public transit: the Staten Island Ferry. In 1997, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani lifted the ferry’s already minimal 50-cent charge as a gesture of gratitude to the city’s only majority-white borough, whose voters had helped nudge him to a narrow victory four years earlier.
I think there is even a better case for making transit free in upstate cities -- they collect so little revenue from it -- it's almost a moot point. If you could have faster boarding and exiting from the buses, the savings of not collecting and processing fare payments would mean the whole system would actually be cheaper for taxpayers to operate.
In the coastal city of Gulfport, Mississippi, the state's first fully-electric bus will soon be cruising through the city's downtown streets.
The same goes for Portland, Maine—it just received a grant to buy that state's first two e-buses, which are set to roll out in 2021. And Wichita expects to have Kansas' first operating electric bus picking up passengers as early as this month after receiving a federal grant.
As cities and states across the country set ambitious mid-century climate change goals for the first time and as prices for lithium-ion batteries plummet, a growing number of transit agencies are stepping up efforts to replace dirtier diesel buses with electric ones.
Nearly every state has a transit agency that now owns—or will soon own—at least one electric bus, according to a recent report from CALSTART, a clean transportation advocacy group.
When the narrator of Simon and Garfunkel’s classic 1968 song goes to “look for America,” he takes a Greyhound bus. Fifty years later, there’s never been a better time for America to go looking for Greyhound.
In the last three decades, the struggling inter-city bus company has gone through two bankruptcies and been passed from an American conglomerate, to a Canadian conglomerate, to a British one, FirstGroup. And in May, FirstGroup put Greyhound up for sale.