Public transportation: Should cities provide Free Ride zones?

In My Humble Opinion
1

After 40 years, Seattle is ending its downtown Free Ride zone in an effort to save money.

I’ve used the free bus service very infrequently. When I take the bus it’s from the Park & Ride into downtown, which is not free. Pike Place Market is only half a mile from work, so it’s an easy walk if I want to grab something there. So ending the free rides will not affect me.

But on our street there are a lot of homeless people. There are also a number of services for them in the general area. I think there are going to be free vans that they can use, but they won’t run as often and don’t stop at as many places. They’re not going to have the extra $2.25 to ride frequently on busses.

I think the original idea was to provide convenient, free transport to encourage tourists. I don’t know how many tourists know of the Ride Free Area, but I assume it’s mentioned when they are planning their trips. I know that the free maps available at PPM depict it. Since I only take a half-hour for lunch, I just walk everywhere. I see a lot of tourists walking from here to there. Maybe the end of free rides won’t make a difference.

Or maybe it will. Will tourists visit fewer places and spend less money if they can’t ride the busses free? If so, how much tax revenue is lost? Many people live in the area. Will they be less inclined to make larger purchases if they have to haul them home on foot? If they have to use their cars (assuming the have one), would they go to stores farther away, which may be cheaper and have more selection than the local ones?

Free public transit encourages tourists to visit more places and spend more money. It encourages local residents to buy more, since they do not have to carry their purchases all the way home. The down-and-out need to get to what services are available to them, which would be more difficult if they had to pay nearly five dollars for a round-trip.

On the other hand, free bus service is expensive. In the current economy, something has to give.

So what do you think? Is it worth the expense for the (presumed) increased tax revenue, the ‘good image’ of a tourist-friendly city, and the humanitarian benefits? Or is the expense too great?

2

I travel a lot for vacation, and the lack of free rides would not affect my choice of whether or not to visit a destination or go anywhere in the least. I’m on vacation, and if I want to go somewhere, I’m going to go there, whether I need to drive, take a taxi, take a bus, train, etc. A couple bucks is so insignificant in the average tourists travel budget it doesn’t even register.

In fact, I would probably tend to take the free buses less than a paid bus, just due to the fact that I would expect more homeless people, panhandlers, and generally crazy people just hanging out on the bus since it is free.

I vote for good idea on the part of Seattle.

3

The thing I noticed about the free ride zone in Seattle is how it changes the logistics (for lack of a better word). If you were riding outbound from downtown, you’d pay the fare when you got off the bus. At the busy downtown stops, riders didn’t have to line up for the fare box or to swipe their cards; the driver would just open both doors and get the passengers off and on quickly. It sped things up considerably. I always figured that was the reason they did it.

Some European cities take it a step further. You aren’t forced to pay a fare when you get on the trams or buses. There are inspectors who travel around and you must show them a valid ticket, monthly pass or timestamped ticket, when they ask. The fine for not having a ticket is high enough, I assume, to make up for the rarity of being caught. But it makes a difference, not sitting around waiting for everyone to board single file.

4

I haven’t ridden a public bus since 1987, so it wouldn’t affect my travel plans.

5

$2.25 seems very high to ride the bus. Maybe I’m just a country bumpkin, but sheesh. Tucson gives (for $2 a year) poor people low-income bus IDs that allow them to pay much less than regular- maybe Seattle could think about doing that since they’re taking away the free rides.

6

See, as soon as I saw the Title I was thinking “no there shouldn’t be free buses”, because the homeless will ride them. Not because the homeless shouldn’t be able to get where they are going, but because buses aren’t mobile homeless shelters, and too many homeless people will drive off other customers who might then drive, increasing traffic issues that buses are supposed to help prevent.

7

I don’t think the end of the Ride Free Zone will end up causing many problems. Many homeless people get or could get disabled passes that reduce the fare to 75 cents. A lot of social service organizations also hand out bus tokens, and the city (or county or something, I forget exactly now, but I read it in the paper) is planning to increase the number of tokens available. And then there’s the planned shuttle. Everyone will adjust.

As for increasing tourists’ travels, etc., I just don’t think it will make much difference.

But I’m really glad I don’t have to take the bus right now, during these first confusing days where everything will probably be a mess. Paying as you enter at busy stops shouldn’t even be a big deal if anyone had any goddamn sense, but since they don’t, and don’t decide to start hunting for change until they get up to the box, there will definitely be delays.

8

I was a tourist in Seattle and I walked my ass off. No idea that there were free busses! Super expensive pay parking lots, though!

I did ride the monorail, which…wasn’t free was it? Then I had to walk some more. Ugh.

9

You have to look for the cheaper parking. There’s a lot near the office that charges an ‘early bird’ $9/day for some spaces. Less than half a mile away there’s a place with a $5/day ‘early bird’ rate. And yet just a couple of blocks from the first place I mentioned, it’s like $25/day according to some people who mentioned it to me.

Since I’m only going into the office twice a week now, it’s worth the extra $5 over the cost of bus fare for the convenience of not having to ride the bus.

10

Most tourists have no notion of public transit and it doesn’t even occur to them to check out options unless the city is particularly famous for its mass transit, like DC, SF, or NYC. Quite a few people who don’t use mass transit day in, day out as a normal part of life have a distrust of mass transit and actively avoid it.

11

Portland also just cut its free ride zone, as well as having certain zones be cheaper, (all zones are gone - full fare now), while simultaneously increasing the fare to $2.50 / 2hrs. The free zone was a few blocks downtown so I didn’t see the real need for it; removing all zones and raising the fare, pretty irritating.

12

When I lived in Seattle I used the free zone downtown all the time. It was a great way to get from one end of downtown to the other, say, Westlake to the ID. I loved the no hassle.

13

Same here. I walked all over Seattle’s downtown, mainly because I like to explore the cities I’m visiting on foot. But I was another who didn’t know that Seattle had a free ride zone.

I did ride the monorail a few times. That was fun!

14

I used to visit a friend in Seattle and, on the rare times we got out of her apartment, we’d go to Pike’s and browse around. The Underground tour was interesting too, though I don’t think that was close to Pike’s.

Anyway, it occurred to me that, if the purpose of having a free zone was to encourage tourism and/or the purpose of dropping it was to discourage homeless ridership, then perhaps the businesses in the formerly free zone would find it worthwhile to either. . .

[ul]
[li]Pool their money and establish the zone so anyone could ride free, paying a fixed rate or a percentage of profits to Pike’s property management which would pay the bus accountants each month, or[/li][li]Hand out limited-duration passes along with their register receipts. The bus company would charge each store (or charge Pike’s Property Management) either a set amount for each pass it received, or some such scheme.[/li][/ul]
Basically, it makes the businesses that benefit from the free rider zone subsidize the free ridership. There was a train line in Tokyo that did something like that, but I was too late coming back from Kamakura to get the benefit. I think the trolley or busses in San Diego did something like that for a while – or maybe they still do(?)
–G!

I was alone
I took a ride
I didn’t know what I would find there!
. --Paul McCartney (Beatles)
. Got To Get You Into My Life
. Revolver

15

Yeah this, more or less.

As a tourist, I want to maximize my time spent touring. I’ve yet to see a city without a train system have a mass transit system that is 1) fast and 2) relatively easy for someone not familiar with the town to use. I’d never get on a bus in a city that I wasn’t familiar with unless I was VERY certain it was efficient, safe, and I had a reasonably good idea how to get on the right bus.

That said, I very happily use mass transit in cities where I know it’s good. Driving ain’t the way to go in Chicago or Paris, for example - it’s very easy, safe, and faster to hop on the train.

So that’s a long-winded way of saying, nope, I don’t care if a city provided a free ride zone, because I probably wouldn’t use it.

16

For many mass transit systems, the farebox recovery ratio (“the fraction of operating expenses which are met by the fares paid by passengers”) is so low that the operator might make it free, since doing so might encourage casual use, particularly among the middle-class types who own cars. I know that I avoid the buses because I have no idea what it costs for a given trip. (And then there’s all that waiting around for the next bus.)

17

I was a tourist in Seattle just a couple weeks ago. (Loved it, by the way.)

I actually found myself wishing I’d visited after the Ride Free program had ended, because there were a couple times I needed to take the bus out of the Ride Free zone elsewhere. I’ve lived in Arizona most of my life, and while I love useful public transit I don’t have much experience with it. I’m okay with consistent rules, but when there’s special exceptions I start getting nervous that I’ll screw it up somehow. “Pay as you get on most times, except for THESE times you need to pay as you get off in certain areas at certain times” is a problem. “Pay as you get on all the time” is perfectly fine.

Within the Ride Free zone, I just walked or took the monorail.

I freaking love public transit when touristing it up. I did rent a car this trip to make it easier to visit certain places, but for the majority of my trip I stayed in Tukwila and took the light rail into downtown Seattle, then took the bus out to Ballard and other nearby areas. The travel used up a lot of time, admittedly, but it also gave me time to just look at the city around me, and it was a helluva lot cheaper than trying to park in the city.

18

The idea behind the Ride Free zone was to encourage people to not drive in the downtown region doing their shopping. They could park their cars somewhere and then ride the bus throughout downtown. It wasn’t intended for tourists, but for all shoppers in general.

Homeless people haven’t been much of a problem there, in my experience, as the overall ridership downtown is so high that they’re only a small percentage. The Ride Free zone isn’t in effect at nighttime (although it was awhile back).

The elimination of the free zone shouldn’t have any effect on downtown workers, who would be using unlimited-ride monthly passes. I think it will affect only the homeless and people who just want to hang out downtown all day.

19

Well, and re: the “rolling homeless shelters” issue, because of the more or less north-south linear geography of Seattle most of the bus routes only pass through the (former) ride free zone briefly. It’s not like some cities that have a free downtown loop route where you can hop on a single bus and ride around all day-- it would take a bit of effort to stay on free buses for any length of time.

20

I have used the free ride zone in Seattle a lot. I would park just outside the zone (the staging area where the dual mode buses changed to electric traction) and ride over to Chinatown, back to the Pike Place market, maybe to the Koolhaas library (that needed some walking of course) and then get back in the car and drive to Redmond where my son lives. I never saw any obviously homeless people riding those buses. The whole free zone was pretty small in any case. Not like the A train in NY where you could ride undisturbed for two hours (and it runs all night). No, it is just to save money. Too bad. Do they sell a day pass?

Maybe they should now charge a fee for driving downtown. After all if you don’t pay for that, you are getting a free ride.