> You can pick free, or scalable, or financially sustainable (and without sustainability, a political shift will kill it), but you cannot have all three at once.
Real polities are of finite size, so you don't need (infinitely) scalable.
Here in Singapore we could sustainably afford to make public transport free, if we wanted to.
However I agree with you that charging for public transport is the right thing to do. (And to charge users of government provided services in general for everything, and to give poor people money.) If nothing else, you at least want to charge for congestion at peak hours, so that there's always an epsilon of capacity left even at rush hour, so any single person who wants to board the train at prevailing prices can do so.
In Singapore there is no MRT congestion prices only for private cars, right? Trains get crowded but still workable. It’s not clear if people would start working 6am to 3pm or something if you did. Overall I think charging money made more sense when there were more private, profit seeking companies involved as it’s the name of the game… buts it’s cheap enough that it’s hard for someone with an ok job the get bothered about it
> In Singapore there is no MRT congestion prices only for private cars, right?
Singapore charges for MRT rides, but it's not explicitly a congestion charge. Every once in a while they experiment with discounts for off-peak train usage, which can sort-of be interpreted as a congestion charge.
> Trains get crowded but still workable.
At the peak of rush hour you sometimes have to wait three or four trains before one comes that still has standing room. (It's not as bad as it sounds, because during rush hour trains come every three minutes or so.)
IMHO, varying train charges more with congestion would make a lot of sense; but the system as it is works well enough that it's probably not worth for any technocrat to spend the political capital to seriously do anything about it.
> Charging more for publicity transit during peak hours won’t make people use it less, there’s a reason why so many people commute during peak hours
You don't necessarily need all people to use it during peak hours, just "enough" people. There are people who do have flexible schedules, but they may simply may not have had enough motivation to change old habits (yet).
I actually think riding on a crowded train would be more deterrent than a fare increase, so I feel like that would be needlessly punishing people already suffering the full trains because they have to.
See sibling comment by eru: they said there isn't a fare increase congestion charge; instead "Every once in a while they experiment with discounts for off-peak train usage"
The point of a congestion charge (whether on driving or on public transport) is to alleviate the congestion 'punishment'.
As a mental model: congestion works a bit like an auction. Getting from A to B during rush hour brings people some benefits (otherwise, they wouldn't bother). Benefits differ between people. But that travel also costs, both in terms of fares and in terms of annoyance and perhaps delays.
So We can imagine every prospective commuter weighs their benefits against the costs. I say it works like an auction, because there's limited capacity, and the people who are willing to endure the most price + annoyance are going to 'win' the auction and will commute. Everyone else shifts their commute around or stays home.
The people you mention who 'have to' travel during rush hour are just the ones willing to bear the highest costs in our model, and thus they 'win' the auction. (Winning an auction isn't necessarily good..: after all, you have to pay the price.)
Having a congestion charge means different people can bid not just with their tolerance for annoyance and delay, but also with actual money.
So now people compare fare + congestion charge + annoyance against their benefits. Assuming benefits on the right side of the equation have stayed about the same, the breakeven point for 'annoyance tolerance' is going to be lower, just because the other part of the left side grew.
A similar example: if tomorrow your local Walmart was handing out free 20 dollar bills with every purchase, you can bet your hat that pretty soon the queues for the cashier at that shop would grow until the wait-in-line for the marginal customer cancels out the free 20 dollars. Keep in mind that the marginal customer isn't the average customer: the queue would mostly be made up of people who have more time than money.
Conversely, in our congestion charging scenario the winners of our auction will tend to shift towards the crowd that has more money than time (or tolerance for packed trains).
The nice thing about letting people bid with money is that afterwards someone else has the money and can spend it. When you bid with your capacity to endure frustration and delay, no one else gets any benefit from that. It's just a poor waste of society's resources.
on the other hand. gdp is ~200 days of work. 1 day is 0.5% gdp. 1 hour (assuming 8hr day) is 0.06% gdp. gdp/capita is nearly us$90k. 1hr of work is >us$5k!
it might be more cost effective to expand public transport to transport every singaporean to where he/she needs to be on time, than to make them wait..
> charging for public transport is the right thing to do
It's a simple matter of supply and demand so even if the transit system operates on tokens but those tokens are given away for free, my weird brain would still want to the system to exist to track how the system is being used.
> You can pick free, or scalable, or financially sustainable (and without sustainability, a political shift will kill it), but you cannot have all three at once.
Real polities are of finite size, so you don't need (infinitely) scalable.
Here in Singapore we could sustainably afford to make public transport free, if we wanted to.
However I agree with you that charging for public transport is the right thing to do. (And to charge users of government provided services in general for everything, and to give poor people money.) If nothing else, you at least want to charge for congestion at peak hours, so that there's always an epsilon of capacity left even at rush hour, so any single person who wants to board the train at prevailing prices can do so.