Pretending that making buses free in NYC is impossible suggests a lot about what people think about public goods.
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Plenty of cities have free buses for people over 65, and many make buses free on smog days to get fewer cars on the road. That just shows that it's a simple, straightforward budget choice.
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Public goods? The things the 1% wants to privatize?
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What idiotic naive ideas will they think of next? Free public parks? Free public libraries? Free public schools? A free boat to and from Staten Island??
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We're about to have no buses or regional rail in most of the Philadelphia region because people don't get this. And they also fail to remember that humans invented the concept of money. So tired of our species' bs.
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Because kids under 7 ride the CTA bus free with a fare-paying adult, our kid and his junior kindergarten class have taken the CTA bus everywhere this summer. It opened the city to them and he knows more bus route numbers than me. It’s been the absolute best.
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What’s the argument against free busses? It seems pretty easy to do. Imagine if people could get to work and school without the extra expense. How great would that be? Imagine the boost to the economy!
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😭
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If libraries weren't already entrenched, they'd be saying those were impossible too
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buses are free in Richmond! and several other cities!
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Ironically, the only places where I've lived with free busses were red states. No one ever mentions those things (both Fayetteville Arkansas and Greenville NC). I'm sure there are others.
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We've got free buses in Alexandria, Virginia. Just the DASH buses, which are city only. The Metro buses that run into other jurisdictions still charge.
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I live in a red county in Florida. The buses here are free.
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Make life bearable? Okay, Pollyanna!
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This is a n to the fact that people are against investing in infrastructure in general which is an economic loss for everyone. We need roads and childcare and car carvers and to fix the NY tunnels before they collapse
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Anytime they hear "free", they think of giving labor or goods without income. This is far from true, because we don't pay out of pocket to use public roads or enroll our children into public education.
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Hah! You are so right. Free bus takes one thing: about 30% (…or whatever…) more public funding. It’s fundamentally a simple problem. Maybe you’d rather do something else with the money but we wouldn’t need to invent anything for it.
