Iowa City is in Johnson County. A 2024 point-in-time count of the chronic homeless population--the highly visible population noticeably encountered in public spaces--in Johnson and Washington Counties combined is less than 200 people. See https://opportunityiowa.gov/media/5390/download?inline#page=... There are also only 13 bus routes, and it's a college town with a significant percentage of price-sensitive student ridership (i.e. highly elastic demand) that either wouldn't qualify or wouldn't bother applying for fare subsidies or passes (common in major metro regions). The context is incomparable to major coastal cities.
We know free transit works in many cases. There are plenty of examples. But it's rare to compare and contrast the contexts. (But, see, e.g., this 2012 National Academy of Sciences report: https://cvtdbus.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/2012-07-TCRP-...) It's far easier to promote free transit than it is to address underlying issues, like regulatory barriers to housing production and infrastructure projects, that limit organic improvements to social welfare and which are likely to cause free transit to fail long-term in large, diverse metro areas.
I live there in that city. There are hardly any homeless at all here. Not like other cities at least. I could see it being a major problem in other places.
It does seem that it should be possible to offer "free buses" without having to also offer "free hotels inside of the free buses". As an example, I can go to a local store and experience free parking or go to my nearby town and park for free downtown. I can't, however, park and sleep overnight in my car in that shopping centre or in that town.
Who’s supposed to enforce it? Is the driver supposed to pull over and wake up a sleeping person who has a small but real chance of stabbing them? Any situation where they call the police could be quite a hassle for the other passengers.
Because you can’t make a subjective judgement with regard to the worthiness of a particular passenger of a public resource. A car on private property eventually becomes trespassing.
Can you please not post in the flamewar style here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are?
It's always possible to make your substantive points thoughtfully, so please do that instead. You may not owe people who are wrong about use of buses by the homeless better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
> also offer "free hotels inside of the free buses".
Is the inciting flamewar style spark. There is nothing in the article about this specific part. Is it not bad faith argument to insist that all buses every where are used as hotels just because of a few bad experiences? The way the commenter discusses all homeless as either dangerous, addicted drugs, smelly, etc. is incredibly flamewar intending to push stigma on the topic.
If the people who are pushing unfound truths can’t be called out for it, then I guess the FUD spreaders win. The community doesn’t need me. Please scramble this username to something random. I’m out.
I hear you that there was a provocation in that bit. But it's a matter of degree. From my point of view, the GP comment may have been wrong and even bad (let's assume that's so), but by itself that doesn't break the site guidelines. People are allowed to be wrong in comments; it's up to the community to debate what's right vs. wrong and sort that out.
The way to respond to wrong comments is to refute them with better arguments and better information. This can be done without breaking the site guidelines. Of course there are downsides to this approach—it's a lot more time-consuming to patiently refute wrongness than to post it in the first place. But the downsides of breaking the site guidelines are much greater—that path basically leads to conflagration, and we'd like to avoid having this place burn to a crisp. Scorched earth is not interesting (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
I would be in favour of (for example) someone who is attempting to “reside” on a bus being referred to a social worker that then sees to it the person ends up referred to an appropriate shelter.
We are not. I don’t believe homeless people are “using the bus as a hotel” because I actually ride buses unlike the commenter who is afraid and probably has never volunteered or talked to someone less fortunate in their community in their life.
Their username is literally trollbridge! I mean come on.
Last time I visited New York I was lucky to have a companion who knew all the ways to get around including the free bus lines. The people using these buses were no different from those using buses and other public transportation that charged fares.
Ipso facto, eliminating fare collection eliminates crime. Fare evasion as a crime amounts to make-work for cops. Not all value, and often least of all value in public goods, is derived from charging at the point of use.
Everyone, but especially the working poor deserve a civilized way to get to work. Without screaming, smelly, sleeping, druggies taking up the seats. Or worse.
Bus drivers don't seem too excited to enforce the fare either. They're not exactly law enforcement; it might be dangerous and it would delay everyone else on the bus.
This is just an anecdote, but I got the sense from living in North Liberty, near Iowa City, that the police didn't have much to do. That is, I was pulled over for minor things like going 5 over the speed limit and running a yellow light (when I could have conceivably stopped).
So when I see stories like this I compare it to people suggesting we adopt a Scandinavian public school policy, it worked for them why not us, proposal.
Whenever I hear about this criticism of free public transit I always wonder why the question isn't "how do we keep homeless people from living on our busses" and is instead "why don't these homeless people have some place to live that isn't a bus?"
> I always wonder why the question isn't "how do we keep homeless people from living on our busses"
Similar questions get asked often enough. The problem is that there aren't any easy answers or solutions. Cities have tried different things but none that appear to work for medium to large sized cities.
If you see a city employ a workable solution that can used as a model and be deployed everywhere, that would be awesome.
>Whenever I hear about this criticism of free public transit I always wonder why the question isn't "how do we keep homeless people from living on our busses" and is instead "why don't these homeless people have some place to live that isn't a bus?"
Exactly. and asking the wrong question is nothing new either. there were plenty of folks wondering aloud about how to "get rid of" the homeless people back in the 1980s in NYC (then the homeless population there was ~50,000).
Usually it was some sort of "arrest/detain them all, then reroute them to shelters." The shelters being places where they can be warehoused and victimized over and over again without disturbing the normies or, heaven forfend, the tourists!
Only once did I see the right question being asked. I've searched and searched but have been unable to find the article online. It's an op-ed piece from the Village Voice, circa 1987 by Nat Hentoff or Dan Ridgeway entitled" What Do Homeless People Want?"
Fortunately the question posed in the title is answered in the very first sentence of the body: "Homes, mostly."
Why is it that we're not asking (or acting upon the obvious answers to) the right questions? That's not really rhetorical, although the answers will likely be pretty ugly.
Here in the US we can* do better, and we should do better. This is not a new issue that requires new solutions. Give homeless people, you know, homes.
But that's evil and wrong and absolutely Stalinism that will end up with tens of millions dead, right? Please.
I don't live in Iowa City but do live in Iowa; the (visible) homelessness population is still nearly zero. I have to imagine that anyone who finds themselves homeless for long enough will eventually find a way to move indoors (couch surfing, shelters) and become less visible or, if possible, leave the state entirely for warmer climes. Winters just aren't survivable here for the "traditional" homelessness we think of when we envision camps of people in California metros.
There's nothing "made up" about it. It actually happens. There are areas of this country with endemic homelessness and absolutely no strategy to address it. So, you get the obvious:
Yeah but what are the actual problems? It shouldn’t be a crime to not have a house. We should probably focus on actual problems like peeing or being intoxicated on the bus which are the actual harms.
Falling asleep on a bus is a great way to get victimized. The homeless are most likely to be victimized by other homeless. It almost never gets reported to the police.
It's not a shelter and it's not meant to be converted into one. To me it's an indication of an overworked and failing system that leaves people in bad situations because it has nowhere else for them to go.
Sure, you could argue that because there's currently no obvious major problems, that you could just leave it as is and be entirely unconcerned with it, or even go so far as to suggest that anyone who does want to fix it is doing so in bad faith. I think that's cruel and lazy.
The actual problem? These people need _real_ shelter.
Whilst it's not a crime not to have a house, providing housing via free buses is a very poor way to address people who don't have houses, and it has an unfortunate side effect of pushing people who would otherwise use public transportation away from using it.
You see this in public libraries in major cities. They're open to everyone, so they become shelters of last resort for homeless folks. The large presence of homeless people discourages the public at-large from using the library as a library. That in turn weakens the political will to continue funding libraries.
I live in an area where the homeless by and large are well served (lots of halfway houses), so despite being a generally impoverished area in terms of bottom quintile of income or percent of population on food stamps and so forth, public facilities like buses and libraries get to be used for their intended purpose.
A library levy recently passed despite being in a deep-red political jurisdiction. If families couldn’t use the library without contending with people using it as a residential facility, it wouldn’t have passed.
It must not have anything to do with free fares, then, so it seems like an irrelevant thing to bring up here. There are no major west coast cities with free buses.
Homeless already often get access to free or cheap passes, often that allow unlimited rides.
Insisting that we charge everyone a bus fare because we think otherwise it might make it eaier to homeless people to use the bus is not only uninformed, but also heartless.
If you have problems with homeless people on buses, then figure out why those people aren't in a better shelter and solve that problem.
which is all low income housing on top of a conference center with maybe 1/4 of the units for people who had been unhoused. I think most of the people there are not criminally minded and keep to themselves but there are a few people there who are starting fires, dealing drugs, and causing damage. (Note a few windows in that image are busted out) Many homeless people have dogs that are important to them and wouldn’t be housed if they couldn’t bring their dogs, but… last year they had an outbreak of parovirus because dogs were having puppies and the puppies weren’t getting shots. A friend of mine got bit by a dog across the street from that place and thought it belonged to someone who lived there.
Some of it is people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder can be almost impossible to live with if they aren’t getting treatment and I’m worried that deinstitutionalization will have a even more profoundly negative legacy seen 50 years from now than it already does. Not least, a 20 year old today spent many years of their life in a classroom where a ‘special’ kid sucked all the air out of the room and will probably be highly receptive to the notion that if we ‘get rid’ of 5% of people we can live in a utopia. If being in public means being in a space dominated by someone screaming at the demons they hallucinated then people will move to the suburbs instead of the downtown, they will not support public transit, they will order a private taxi for their burrito instead of eating out. They’ll retreat to Facebook.
I didn't claim it would be easy. I do claim that it will be more effective than pretending that charging people to get on the bus will have any real impact.
Alternate institutions that turn the 5% into productive members (but not necessarily CEOs) would probably get Lasch's stamp of approval)
EDIT to atone for the snark:
Good candidates for such alt institutions already exist; "just" need to test their policies on an expanded student body. Bonus, some (myself included?) consider these "conservative":
U.S school admin acted like the kind of "manager" who judges you by the lines of code you produce and the number of commits you make. DOD school admin were the kind of people who judge you by the impact you made.
What do you mean made-up problem? This is an extremely common problem in many areas. Sketchy characters will definitely stay on the bus and create unsafe environments for the bus driver and the customer unless there are systems in place.
They're not, and it's not really an HN thing to respond like you did. The guidelines ask you to assume best intent and engage in good faith.
Here good faith curiosity would have led you to where peer replies are pointing you: that free transit in big metros tends to come with loitering issues, and if they become too extreme, it can make the transit system pretty inhospitable and uninviting for the families and working people meant to be using it, undermining the purpose of making it free.
It's a genuine challenge that metros of a certain scale need to address, although the OP is maybe (or maybe not) wrong in assuming that it would be an issue in a fairly small/high-trust college metro like Iowa City. But, in best interpretation of their comment, that's why they were asking it as a question.
So you advocate for executing all homeless? Thats more then 800,000 people.. What about homeless adjacent to? If you dont earn more then the median income what we get to enter you into some sort of hunger games elimination match?
>So you advocate for executing all homeless? Thats more then 800,000 people.. What about homeless adjacent to? If you dont earn more then the median income what we get to enter you into some sort of hunger games elimination match?
Absolutely! But don't stop there! There are billions of useless subhumans out there who require a final solution[0] .
Kill those subhuman scum dead! Hell we should just set up gas chambers, that would be even cheaper than bullets, guns and people to shoot them!
That's a great suggestion, westpfelia!
Yes. We should kill every undesirable. The real trick is figuring out who decides which people are undesirable. You wouldn't want to be considered "undesirable" would you? That could be dangerous and unhealthy (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).
[0] Poe's Law[1] strikes again, eh? I'm tripling down on it as you seem pretty gullible. It's almost a shame I'm copping to the satire. Heck you might start foaming at the mouth and try to doxx me. Calm down, chief! You're gonna give yourself an MI.
Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture which says that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views.
Homeless people aren’t living in the bus. Cool your stigmas. It’s weird your biggest concern is the people who need the most help. Life must be pretty good for you to attack those in need.
I did for a year in DC. There were some folks who were struggling - talking to themselves, intoxicated, fragrant. I sort of liked it. Made me feel alive.
