San Francisco's Muni (light rail + bus) system has a budget of about $1.2B and its ticket revenues are about $200M. That means, 5/6th of the budget is subsidized by the taxpayers of SF. There is no reason why Muni can't be free. Surely a city with a budget of $15B can find $200M (about 1.5% of budget) to make up for the shortfall?
It would directly help the taxpayers of the City. But obviously nobody wants that (sarcasm)!
Example: the City has been trying to get rid of the RVs parked illegally on the streets, dumping their effluents and engine oil all over the City streets. To get these RVs off the streets, the City is spending $36M+ (and counting). So money can be found for the homeless, the RV dwelllers, etc. but not for the city's lawful residents and taxpayers.
Most of the homeless in SF and LA aren't from California. Red states love to "deal" with their homeless by buying them bus tickets to the West Coast (something that Texas used to openly brag about).
If SF and LA shipped the homeless back to where they originally came from, we'd all be talking about the Midwest homelessness crisis.
I don't have sources on hand, but my understanding is that there are a lot of people who come to CA without a good plan nor a social support network, become homeless, and then people misinterpret that situation as them coming here while homeless, which then gets misinterpreted as homeless people being intentionally shipped here.
You can’t unless were willing to forcibly put these people in shelters. Many of the persistent ones are hardcore drug users waiting to die, they don’t give a damn about being rehabilitated.
The number of people who can afford a home is very strongly correlated with how affordable homes are. I therefore propose that if we can make homes more affordable, homelessness will decrease.
Most people here don’t realize how much the homeless are hated and how willing trump voting Americans are to literally let them die on the streets or worse.
Schadenfreude is the dominant feeling of the times, and many if not most Americans would basically celebrate a “purge” of the homeless.
Nice Faith based argument there. Requiring "free" citizens to care about a problem they didn't have anything to do with. No different than saying "if everyone went to church/temple/mosque and and adhered to $DEITY all problems would vanish"
The fee gives a reason to kick them off. Portland's trimet recently made it a policy to not allow sleeping which means the transit police can now intervene when the opioid addict does his dose on the train. Meanwhile the tired professionals are left alone. As it should be
It seems like the more straight forward version of that policy is 'no drugs on the train'. Allowing selective enforcement is a sure path to unintended consequences.
Nah the consequences are more riders. That's a great consequence.
> no drugs on the train
Nonsense. I'd rather have people carry their illegal drugs on the train and take them at home. The issue is people experiencing the effects of the drug on the train and often times making it unsafe for women, children, and men too (it doesn't really matter what your sex is when the drugged out man vomits on you). I honestly don't care if you carry your illegal drugs everywhere, as long as you make sure the effects of said drugs are dealt with privately. I have major issues with people making the consequences of their drug use other people's problem
They will just get on another bus. Meanwhile the entire bus will be slowed down by the inspectors asking everyone to leave the bus so they can check for payment or by holding up passengers exiting at connection stations.
You think it's presence of a fare that prevents homeless people from getting on a bus?? Even the light rail has ways to get on without paying, and the homeless know them.
Some countries have cameras on public transport with security people watching the footage live. If someone misbehaves ever so slightly (like drinking alcohol) the doors wont open until enforcers arrive. With modern AI you can have one person monitor countless cameras. They could even retract before the doors open so that you cant smash or spray them and run away.
Assuming a perfect system this still fails because you have now locked in all the law abiding citizens with someone who has proven they are ready to break the rules, effectively inventing a hostage situation out of thin air whereby a miscreant can terrorize their fellow passengers for the duration of the police response time.
The spiel is to do things you can get away with. You don't know if the other passengers are law abiding citizens. There is no way to tell how they respond when locked up with you.
I believe they don't keep the recordings for long if no arrests are made. It certainly seems like a good idea to not create data sets that are open for abuse later.
Oh which continent? Is it possible that what you assume it's normal and default is colored by your personal experience and not representative of the world at large?
what answer could i possibly give to you that would change your response? antarctica?
> Is it possible that what you assume it's normal and default is colored by your personal experience and not representative of the world at large?
of course this is true. what are you going for here. my objection is to standing up a Train Security Panopticon with "modern AI" and locking commuters (in north america) on a train (in north america) who might depend on a schedule (using a north american time zone) stuck at a station until the (north american) cops can come and pull someone (who statistically, but not for sure, would be north american) off of the car for being drunk (off of beer i've had in my personal experience, coloring this example, which may not be the beer that is representative of the world at large) and napping on the seats
which cultures? which public transportation? is it possible that what you assume is the problem is colored by your personal experience and not representative of members of a country at large?
lol, what? You’re gonna hold 20 people hostage on the bus until some enforcers navigate a busy city to ticket a person who is likely to wipe their ass with the ticket? What country is that exactly?
Seriously, other than law enforcement what else can you do to someone who brazenly refuse to follow the rules? Even law enforcement (at least in the US) highly depends on where you live. In left leaning states and cities, DAs are not very likely to prosecute such small crimes like not paying a bus fare because they know it’ll make them unpopular next election. I live in a very left leaning county and state and it swings between center and left every 4 years or so. The swing is always “look how awful that guy was. He prosecuted vulnerable people for petty crimes for no reason”. Cops don’t wanna have to deal with all the paper work to book a guy for a couple of nights before they get released and do it all over again. If they know the person will not get prosecuted because there is no political capital to do so, why bother with the theatrics and all the paper work of arresting them? Brazenly refusing to pay the bus fare and getting in a verbal altercation with the driver and everyone on the bus is a fun afternoon for some people.
I'm sure the trip to the police station and immediate release is a real setback for these people. Unless they're breaking more serious laws, no one is paying to put these people behind bars for any length of time.
I mean, you're right in theory, but in the real world things are very different.
I don't know, all the places I lived in (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46029488) manage just fine. Must be some crazy black magic rocket science they are doing over in Germany or Britain or Turkey or Singapore or Australia to keep non-payers off their public transport.
And in many places I haven't lived but only visited, too.
You end up with an outcry from the rich “liberals” (for lack of a better word), who never take the bus in the first place, complaining about how enforcing fares on buses is harming the poor who can’t afford transportation and pushing people away from public transportation.
It’s pretty infuriating. I started biking to work 2 years ago and try to bike almost anywhere I can. Mostly to lose weight but also put my money where my mouth is. I voted for every levy and prop to improve bike-ability and public transportation of the city in the last 10 years and figured I’m a hypocrite if I expect others to bike and take the bus and I never do. My tolerance for the homeless on buses has been dropping as I have to deal with them more and more. I was always “It’s our failure in not helping them. If I can’t help, least I could do is let them be” kind of person. Now every other week I end up with a negative interaction with someone on the bus or at a bus stop. Every time I air my grievances with people I know (who never take the bus) I always have to find myself on the defensive somehow.
In my third world big city, a lot of people sleeping in the streets are the ones who don't have money to pay public transport for their far way homes. The jobs are downtown. It's perverse.
They're already mobile benches for unhoused people and druggies. They just get on anyways already and don't pay the fare. And the driver does nothing because they don't want to get in a fight. (Unless a passenger threatens others, then they get the police involved.)
Making the buses free isn't going to produce any more of it.
Yeah comments like the parents are typical from people that don't use public transit. The people who can't/aren't going to pay that some people "don't want" on public transit are always going to not pay and still use it, so why not make it free for everybody?
I live in an area that had outdated payment systems on their bus network. They determined that the cost to upgrade the payment systems would be higher than the revenue of fares, so they just made the buses free.
Edit: A lot of replies associate fare payment with behaviors (and smell?) of riders. I think that it's important to recognize that ones ability to pay a fare does not inherently indicate that they are "undesirable" in some way. Could their be a correlation? Possibly. But dedicate the policing to things that actually matter - an unruly passenger should get policing efforts, not a non-paying one (or smelly, really? Obviously homeless people can be putrid but seriously people smelling bad is not a crime).
I use public transit (mostly SF BART) on a regular basis. It's not a matter of "don't want," it's a matter of public safety. People won't use public transit if they have to deal with mentally ill people or hucksters.
This is very basic economics of public transit. I completely agree with the comment about having a minimum payment and enforcement.
Yes, they avoid streets too. That's one of the reasons that San Francisco shopping around Union Square has collapsed. [0] There were other reasons like COVID as well.
Nah, I’ve rode a bus to work most days forever. It’s my calm place when I go home.
Tragedy of the commons is real, even a nominal stake in a service, thing or place impacts behavior. If you’ve ever shopped at Aldi, they make you put a quarter in each shopping cart. Most people wouldn’t pick a quarter up from the ground, but they almost always put their carts back at Aldi.
Personally, I could care less if a dude smells or is poor. We’re all the same. But I have tolerance for boorish behavior that scares people who are trying to go about their business.
> I live in an area that had outdated payment systems on their bus network. They determined that the cost to upgrade the payment systems would be higher than the revenue of fares, so they just made the buses free.
I'm strongly in favour of free transit, but this boggles my mind. If your payment system is just a box where people drop in tickets/change, it's pretty low cost, never gets outdated, and pretty high compliance.
Selling tickets and collecting change from thousands of boxes is actually quite expensive in terms of manual labor and machines. The boxes themselves are expensive, as they have to be able to sort and count coins. And then the vending machines for the tickets.
And it doesn't raise compliance at all. Why would it?
> The boxes themselves are expensive, as they have to be able to sort and count coins.
The boxes in my city of ~1.7 million don't do this. They're just boxes. Presumably they have some big box at the bus HQ they dump them in to sort the change.
> And it doesn't raise compliance at all. Why would it?
I'm not saying they raise compliance over other systems, I'm saying that observationally, compliance is pretty good. When I take the bus, I see basically everyone either put something that looks like a fare/ticket in the box or show a transit pass to the driver.
Who counts that the coins all add up to the fare then?
Do you have to show the coins to the driver that they add up to the fare, before putting them in the box?
I've only ever seen systems that count and display the amount of coins dropped in, until it adds up to a fare, and then there's an indication that it's sufficient and it beeps and then resets for the next person.
The box is clear, the driver can see what people drop in.
There’s nothing stopping you from putting half the fare amount in nickels in, but really, there’s nothing stopping you from putting nothing in and just taking a seat - bus drivers aren’t equipped to police fare evasion in either case.
In practice, 80-90% of riders have monthly passes that are just pieces of paper that you wave in front of the driver as you get on.
I’m not oblivious to the downsides of such a system, but there are real upsides around low cost, and no technology to ever go out of date.
Seriously? On hackernews you're acting like a "box where you drop in tickets" would be an adequate description for modern bus/transit fare? Obviously they need a system that integrates with the other transit options in the area (the trains and other localities bus providers), and accept electronic payment.
What about transfers? Transfers between buses are supposed to be free, but how would you track that? There is also a reduced price from going from train -> bus. How would you track that? Obviously the system is significantly more complex than "drop some change in a bucket."
I'm not claiming it's modern, I'm just saying that it worked for decades, and it's not like it's a system that's started working less well now that more modern systems exist.
This is literally how my city of ~1.7 million operates now, and it seems... fine? Like it's obviously worse than free transit or a snazzy FeLiCa-based system, but it clearly works to collect fares and move people around.
> What about transfers?
The bus driver tears off a paper slip with a time on it that's good for 90 minutes.
> There is also a reduced price from going from train -> bus. How would you track that?
You don't, all routes/transfers are the same cost.
Again, I'm not saying this is the best system, but it's a false dichotomy to assume that "expensive new fare system" and "no fare system" are the only options. For some cost-value analysis, a basic/cheap fare system beats an expensive system even if it has fewer capabilities.
> The people who can't/aren't going to pay that some people "don't want" on public transit are always going to not pay and still use it, so why not make it free for everybody?
Why? We are excluding non-paying passengers from planes just fine. Why not busses and trains?
And over in many other parts of the world, they also manage this just fine, too. It's not exactly rocket science.
It's because the fare and boarding latency on planes is much higher, which funds the cost of having security guards around and amortizes the check-in time penalty.
Maybe. But in any case, you don't need to re-invent the wheel to check that passengers on busses and trains pay their fare. Just learn from any of the countless successful systems around the world today, or in the US's own past: streetcars used to be widely profitable, and that only worked because they actually managed to collect fares.
(Careful: I'm not suggesting that collecting fares would make streetcars widely profitable again. I am merely suggesting that whatever mechanisms they used to enforce fares can be learned from.)
It's a tradeoff you can make. The US is far from the only country in the world where fare evasion is a problem. I've lived in countries with similarly high inequality and homelessness where fare evasion was such a problem despite enforcement that the bus drivers would simply refuse to pick up certain passengers, and conversely people would then hitch a hike on roller skates behind the bus.
I don't doubt that there are countries worse than the US (in this regard). But that doesn't mean you can't learn from the success stories. Especially since they are really common in a variety of places that don't have much in common otherwise, so it can't be too hard to clamp down on most fare evasion.
> [...] and conversely people would then hitch a hike on roller skates behind the bus.
I assume there's not much overlap between the really problematic passengers (often loud, drunk, aggressive and/or mentally ill) and the skaters? Mostly just because you need a minimum level of physical fitness to pull this feat off, and you need to be organised enough to both have skates and have them at the ready?
In most places I lived in, the traffic police (if nothing else) would nab you for trying to pull this stunt.
> Yeah comments like the parents are typical from people that don't use public transit. The people who can't/aren't going to pay that some people "don't want" on public transit are always going to not pay and still use it, so why not make it free for everybody?
Huh? I never owned a car and taken public transport all my live, and it's never been much of a problem kicking non-paying people off. What kind of lawless hellholes are you guys living in?
(I lived in Germany, Turkey, Britain, Singapore and Australia.)
The bus driver's union doesn't want drivers engaging in fare enforcement -- they're hired to drive, not to get into physical altercations. This was especially after a bus driver was stabbed to death in 2008 in a fare dispute.
There are fare enforcement teams that partner up with cops to catch people evading the fare, that are trained for this kind of thing. But obviously the chances are miniscule you'd ever encounter them on any single bus trip, and all that's going to happen is you get a summons with a $50-100 fine. So it's quite rational not to pay.
And I mean, as a bus rider, the last thing I want is my bus being delayed by 15 minutes while the driver stops and waits for the cops to come to evict someone who didn't pay. I just want to get to where I'm going.
So how do they handle it in the cities you've lived in? How do they kick them off without putting the driver in danger and without massively delaying the bus for everyone else? (And to be clear, we're talking about buses, not trains where monitoring entry and exit turnstiles is vastly more realistic.)
In the subway in NYC I see some people go out the emergency exits (alarm sounds but who cares?) while other people are queued up waiting for somebody to come out the emergency exit so they can come in. It’s a kind of antisocial social behavior like torrenting pirate files.
No it's not, because the cops get there and the bus already left. Or the cops wait around but the bus is stuck in traffic and another call comes in so the cops give up and leave. Trying to pick some arbitrary bus stop somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes ahead based on how fast they think the bus is going and how long some cop (and which one?) will take to get from where they are to that bus stop depending on traffic is just a recipe for missing each other. And cops are a scarcer resource than buses.
Like, if there's a serious crime is being committed in a moving vehicle then sure they'll have someone constantly monitoring and redirecting in order to intercept. It's possible, with high enough priority. But someone not paying a fare does not have that priority.
And the point is the person refuses to get off the bus right away. They stay on it till they get to their destination and then get off.
The most visible enforcement I’ve seen was in Rome. They have people issuing tickets on the bus at random.
It was noticeable in that as a tourist, it seemed like a chill place, but there are lots of police of various stripes and they seemed very serious when enforcing things.
I live in Italy and this is common on the trains and busses. I ride the train a lot and have my ticket checked maybe 1:10 times. The tickets are cheap (~2 euro) and the fines are high (50-200 euro), so it makes sense to buy them. I have seen people get fined though.
What level of punishment should somebody who is trying to move between place to place receive for their lack of paying $1-3? The service was already going to operate, regardless of their lack of payment.
Some public transit has a much more rigid fare collection structure - trains are typically much more controlled entry points. But buses? It's in their best interest to get everyone on as quickly as possible and get everyone off as quickly as passive. Are you going to have gates that block you if you don't scan your card/phone from exiting? Same for boarding. Do you dedicate policing resources to ensuring the collection of what is certainly less than the cost to employ the police officer? Seems wasteful until you hit a very high ridership.
I suspect people want fare enforcement basically because it helps keeps the aggressive/crazy/assholes off. Not because they want to collect more money.
Anecdotally, the bart gates seem to have improved the riding experience.
Some data from LA:
> Of the 153 violent crimes perpetrated on Metro between May 2023 and April 2024, 143 of them — more than 93% — were believed to be committed by people who did not pay a valid fare and were using the transit system illegally.
> I suspect people want fare enforcement basically because it helps keeps the aggressive/crazy/assholes off. Not because they want to collect more money.
Well, it's also a matter of fairness: I'm a law-abiding citizen, and I pay for my bus fare. It's the Right Think to do. But if I'm paying, I want the other guys to pay as well.
I get that; the cost of enforcement makes that likely negative (possibly even very negative) to the system.
My claim is letting trash act like, well, trash and street people wild out on the system drives lots of commuters off. And ime, the worst riders are disproportionally fare thieves.
> What level of punishment should somebody who is trying to move between place to place receive for their lack of paying $1-3? The service was already going to operate, regardless of their lack of payment.
In Germany it's typically something like max(2 * regular fare price, 60 Euro).
I know you asked a 'should' question and this is an 'is' answer, but I hope it's still useful.
It's fascinating seeing your questions about something that's an everyday thing in all of the places I lived.
So in Germany it's typically the (public) companies running the transit systems that have teams that check that you've paid. Gates are almost unheard of for neither bus nor train. (I couldn't name one place in Germany that has gates for public transport at the top of my head.) The police would only get involved, if a passenger is getting violent or threatening to get violent, or won't get off the bus.
In Britain (and Singapore etc) you board the bus at the front, where the bus driver checks your ticket and otherwise will kick you off the bus. The bus driver itself won't get into a physical fight with you. But the bus driver can definitely call for backup and will (presumably) stop the bus and refuse to drive until a recalcitrant passenger has been dealt with. The social contract seems to that all the other passengers will blame the would-be fare evader for the stoppage and back up the driver. But I've never actually seen that acted out completely.
Trains in Singapore and many parts of Britain have gates, and there are usually either some people monitoring the gates for jumpers or at least cameras.
> Do you dedicate policing resources to ensuring the collection of what is certainly less than the cost to employ the police officer? Seems wasteful until you hit a very high ridership.
It's all pretty similar to how parking regulations are enforced: there's some dedicated people who write tickets (not police officers), and the tickets are typically a few dozen dollars.
When I was last in London, I took the tube. Officers were at the exit gates, I presume to arrest anyone jumping the gates. I didn't see any fare evaders.
I can't tell if you're feigning not realizing the thread about San Francisco under a post referencing "Iowa City" is probably referring to the US.
Feels like a coy way of getting to say something as inflammatory as "the US a lawless hellhole" on HN: which is fine enough... but there's also a reason YC isn't a Singaporean or Turkish or British or German institution.
It very well might be genuine surprise. Most people from other countries have an extremely hard time understanding why most U.S. cities allow people to openly break the law in front of authorities with zero consequences.
The U.S. is a pretty far outlier in this regard. It's strange how many people in the U.S. don't realize this at all, and become appalled at when foreigners are shocked by the way things are done in U.S. cities.
Well I now I think it might be genuine ignorance because you managed to read my pretty clear comment ("everyone is mentioning US cities, so obviously they're talking about the US") and contort it into whatever you're on about.
Once might be a coincidence, twice might be me overestimating how carefully people read other comments before jumping into conversations.
Main reason normal people do not use public transport is this attitude and police giving up on enforcing basic public order on transport. Personally I am voting against any public transport funding until all homeless/druggies are kicked off public transport (even if they are willing to pay). You have to pass certain very low behavior bar to use public transport (no intoxication, no aggression to other passengers, no smell, no shouting random things).
It's not rocket science and other countries figured out how to do it.
It's not a policing problem, it's a homelessness and mental health problem.
You'll never have enough police for regular enforcement on buses. The numbers don't add up, not even remotely.
Other countries do a better job when they're able to keep people off the streets in the first place. Which then becomes a much more complicated question about social spending and the civil liberties of mentally ill people who don't want to be institutionalized.
Car-related taxes (vehicle sales, gas tax, yearly registration fees, in some cases tolls) have historically covered the majority of roadway infrastructure costs. I don't think free buses are going to be able to maintain the roadways.
A common misconception; usage fees only covered about 50% of highway-related expenses a few years ago. Feel free to find the latest numbers. This is less than the fare box recovery ratio of many transit systems, though not all.
And that, of course, does not include all the unpriced externalities of roads. For example, if you value a life at $1M, then the 40,000 people killed by drivers each year cost us collectively another $40B.
I kind of agree. I grew up with a well-funded, well-staffed railway which has suffered slow managed decline, so I've got pretty good frames of reference.
A big problem now is people playing loud music, loud TikToks, phonecalls and videocalls on speaker phone (almost the default), feet on seats, vaping, bags on seats etc.
There are now no staff who enforce the norms and laws (Yup some of that legally could land you a prosecution if the railway chooses that).
Yes, society was less anti-social 20-30 years ago but IMO with strict enforcement of heavy punishment, the issues could be stamped out.
What's interesting is that one fairly large section of the railway does still have lots of staff who enforce anti-social behaviour (Merseyrail – they operate somewhat independently) and from what I've read and heard is that there tend to be far fewer issues in that network than the rest of the network. It's interesting to have the two areas to compare.
Unfortunately this governments want to continue defunding the railways, and so are happy with the cycle of managed decline and people opting to drive instead.
I used to be extremely pro public transport but it's fighting a losing battle. Trains are overpriced, delayed, cramped and anti-social
> "Normal people do not use public transit... kick all homeless off (even if they are willing to pay)"
At the risk of feeding the trolls, I have to object to this ignorant, callous, brutal bs. Please, read this account^1 of NBA player Chris Boucher staying alive by riding public transit, and try to put yourself in his shoes for a moment.
> Personally I am voting against any public transport funding until all homeless
Statistically you're just a few days of bad luck from being both homeless and carless. What's your plan for getting to work to not be in that situation?
> Statistically you're just a few days of bad luck from being both homeless and carless.
What makes you think so? The poster you replied to might be sitting on a decent nest egg, have supportive friends and family, and insurance against all contingencies.
And some people are willing to bite the bullet and even say: 'Well, in that case, I shouldn't be on the bus, either.
Though it's fairly clear from context that the commenter you replied to doesn't want to check every person's home address before they are let on the bus. They want to ban anti-social behaviour on the bus, and 'homeless' is just a short hand for that, unfortunate as it is.
And a few days of bad luck might make you lose your home, but won't necessarily turn you into a drunk who shouts a lot.
I don't know the commenter specifically - that's why I said statistically.
> Though it's fairly clear from context
Ah, the classic "didn't mean the well presented part of group X when I said X". That's a cliche way to mask prejudice. No, if they didn't actually mean homeless, I'm calling them out on writing "homeless".
> Personally I am voting against any public transport funding until all homeless/druggies are kicked off public transport (even if they are willing to pay).
That's a bit silly. I have sympathies for your views, but you can't have a policy of literally 0. Even spotless places like Singapore don't achieve that, even though they come pretty close.
>And the driver does nothing because they don't want to get in a fight.
Historically, it wasn't even the driver's job - the bus would have 2 employees: the driver and the conductor. The driver would drive, and the conductor would go around collecting fares after everyone gets on the bus. The conductor could have the angry discussion with the fare-evader without interrupting the driver, and if need be, the driver and conductor could 2v1 the fare-evader.
At some point, before computers were on buses, they got rid of conductors. For "efficiency".
You clearly haven’t used MUNI. Homeless are already riding the buses without paying, and I’ve rarely seen them camp in them. Most bus drivers know these people on a first name basis and very few of them are actually do anything beyond going from place to place.
And if you’re from San Francisco and use MUNI, you’ll also know that half the people don’t pay anyway. There’s no reason to make people pay.
I see a lot of homeless people on the 14 and they’re just chilling going from place to place. 38 however can have some very mentally ill people on it. My friend saw this guy on the 38 who was yelling about how much he hates the Japanese. Funny enough that guy got off at Japantown.
Rambling aside, I think it’s unfair to give people shit because they’re homeless. The real issue is we don’t commit people to psychiatric care when they’re clearly a problem in our society.
> The real issue is we don’t commit people to psychiatric care when they’re clearly a problem in our society.
I’m old enough to remember when we did that. The homeless population absolutely skyrocketed, after all the mental institutions were closed in the 1980s and 1990s.
That said, many of them were hellholes. It’s sort of arguable as to whether the patients were worse off, but one thing’s for sure; the majority of city-dwellers (the ones with homes) are not better off, now. I’m really not sure who benefited from this.
Here, on Long Island (NY), we have some of the largest psychiatric centers in the world; almost all completely shut down, and decomposing.
The campuses are gorgeous, but can’t be developed, because they would require hundreds of millions of dollars in cleanup.
> The real issue is we don’t commit people to psychiatric care when they’re clearly a problem in our society.
Where do you draw that line though? Are you really okay with committing people, i.e. imprisoning and medicating people, because society seems to find those people inconvenient?
Personally I've never understood any justification for committing a person without their consent. The line between being committed and being extra judicially imprisoned seems indistinguishable to me.
> Where do you draw that line though? Are you really okay with committing people, i.e. imprisoning [...] people, because society seems to find those people inconvenient?
Well, that's what prison is, for some value of "inconvenient".
The problem is that at some point, if someone refuses to abide by laws/social norms, and can't be coerced via fines, etc., then the only options the state, and society has are either imprisonment, or allowing those people to ignore laws/social norms. Clearly some social norms (e.g. serious crimes) we aren't okay with ignoring, so it's really just a question of what the threshold is where we do something vs. allowing people to disregard said laws/norms.
> Personally I've never understood any justification for committing a person without their consent. The line between being committed and being extra judicially imprisoned seems indistinguishable to me.
Presumably the process to commit someone can involve the judiciary, so it wouldn't be extra-judicial.
Prison isn't for people that society finds inconvenient and, if on a jury, I hope you don't view it that way.
Prison is for those convicted of a crime by a jury of their peers. There must not only be a criminal law on the books, you must be found guilt by trial.
Involuntary committal involves no laws being broken and there is no jury. I don't know every detail of that process though I am familiar with the general flow, I know multiple people that work in related roles, and my understanding from them is that it is generally not down through a legal proceeding.
Juries are a just an implementation detail of the justice system used by Britain and some of its former colonies.
I'm talking at a higher level - I'm saying that conceptually, "inconvenience" ranges from mild offences to murder, and society has to decide where to draw some line for inconveniences that it will not permit. If someone is determined to re-offend, regardless of severity, the state's only choices are to either let them re-offend, or to use force to prevent it.
In the earlier discussion of involuntary commitment, there is often little or no judicial process offered at all. Its more akin to extra judicial detention than a criminal case.
Part of the surge of mass incarceration was that people who would have been hospitalized in an earlier time now get warehoused in a place that isn’t equipped to treat them.
What scares me about deinstitutionalization is that there are ways that people can ‘exit’ as in: move to the suburbs, drive instead of take public transportation, order a private taxi for your burrito instead of go to a restaurant. If public spaces can’t protect themselves we’ll have nothing but private spaces.
> Part of the surge of mass incarceration was that people who would have been hospitalized in an earlier time now get warehoused in a place that isn’t equipped to treat them.
Puts a different spin on the System of a Down lyrics, "The percentage of Americans in the prison system (prison system) has doubled since 1985" (Prison Song, Toxicity, 2001).
This further reinforces the other complaints (in the song) about drug offences landing people in jail, some of them from self-medicating a mental illness they can't or won't get treatment for
More fear mongering about the 'other'. Not immigrants or religous groups or racial groups this time, but unhoused and addicted people.
The dangerous people are the ones spreading fear - that leads to horrible things. I've had no problem with unhoused people who I am around almost every day. Why would I?
All the fear mongering is wrong. You have nothing to fear but fear itself.
SF's budget doesn't contain $15B of money it can use for whatever it wants. Most of it isn't discretionary, either because of voter mandates or by federal/state government requirements and has to go to specific programs. A good chunk is actually city businesses (hospitals, airport, utility, port, etc.) which mostly break even.
SF was able to spend money trying to getting rid of RVs because it was living on emergency money from the state and shifting capital expenditure priorities around (capital expenditures costs are offset mostly by the asset you're buying, at least in the short term).
That emergency money is gone now, so now we're living in an era of budget cuts, though given SF's history, I full expect it to spend money recklessly and hope revenue turns around, but even they aren't so far gone to add $300M in operating expenditures to make MUNI free with no plan for a source of revenue to make up the difference.
> Example: the City has been trying to get rid of the RVs parked illegally on the streets, dumping their effluents and engine oil all over the City streets. To get these RVs off the streets, the City is spending $36M+ (and counting). So money can be found for the homeless, the RV dwelllers, etc. but not for the city's lawful residents and taxpayers.
I'd have to assume that the ones who are driving the political political pressure for this money to be spent as it is are the so-called "lawful residents and taxpayers"; I'm sure the groups you mention facing extra scrutiny would be happy for that money to go towards the buses instead. It's not hard to imagine that certain issues like RV parking get outsized attention pretty much for the exact same reason that the buses don't.
The net revenue would be lower than $200M. There are substantial costs associated with ticket revenue collection, from the % payment gateways charge, the maintenance and replacement cost the devices and turnstiles hardware, all the software and people who have to manage and enforce the system.
The issue with SF (unlike Iowa city) is that free for all everybody is going to be harder sell to voters when there is large amount of out of city traffic -travelers and greater Bay Area residents who do not pay city taxes.
What is more realistic is extend subsidies to all residents of the city beyond the current programs for youth/seniors/homeless/low income etc.
SF Muni is literally so deep in a financial hole, service may be cut in half next summer if they don't pass a sizable spending measure (the last two both failed). SFMTA faces a deficit of about $320 million starting next year... and that will grow. The system has already been bailed out by the state. We now going to get a $750 million loan is just to keep the system functioning until the measure has a chance to pass.
This platitude of "Muni should be free" has no bearing on reality when the system is literally collapsing as we speak.
> That means, 5/6th of the budget is subsidized by the taxpayers of SF. There is no reason why Muni can't be free.
You'd still want to charge for congestion. Ie when a particular bus (or rather bus route) is reliably full at a particular time of the day, gradually raise prices until it's just below capacity.
Basically, you want to transport the maximum number of passengers while making it so that any single person who wants to get on the bus (at prevailing prices) still can.
Instead of a bespoke dynamic system that adjust prices dynamically, you might want to keep it simple and just have a simple peak / off-peak distinction.
If you add so many buses that there's no congestion at all during the worst rush hour, you'll have enormous extra capacity just uselessly sitting around the rest of the day.
Obviously you'd want both: charge for congestion, and use the price signals you get to help you decide where (and when) to add capacity.
Resources are limited, and buying yet another bus and hiring an extra bus driver just to shave the last tiny bit of congestion off Monday morning might be a noble ideal, but you might be better off using those funds to pay for another free school meal (or whatever other do-goodery is the best use of the marginal dollar).
> So money can be found for the homeless, the RV dwelllers, etc. but not for the city's lawful residents and taxpayers.
But it's those lawful residents and taxpayers paying for it if you make it free anyway. They're just paying through their taxes rather than through fares. So still all taxpayer money, just non-riding taxpayers subsidizing riding taxpayers. Why is that better?
It would directly help the taxpayers of the City. But obviously nobody wants that (sarcasm)!
Example: the City has been trying to get rid of the RVs parked illegally on the streets, dumping their effluents and engine oil all over the City streets. To get these RVs off the streets, the City is spending $36M+ (and counting). So money can be found for the homeless, the RV dwelllers, etc. but not for the city's lawful residents and taxpayers.