KANSAS CITY WARING: FREE TRANSIT BRINGS PRICEY PROBLEMS!!!

This isn't a screed from haters but transit blogger consideration and confirmation of public safety threats our community outlined earlier this week. Checkit:

"In practice, free transit fares has led to varied outcomes. Several smaller U.S. cities currently offer them, including ski centers such as Vail, Colorado, and university towns such as Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Typically, they’ve experienced strong ridership growth. The largest U.S. city to have experimented with it was Austin, Texas. But when the Texas capital briefly went fare-free from 1989 to 1990, it saw “dramatic rates of vandalism, graffiti, and rowdiness” and escalating “vehicle maintenance and security costs” due to repairs from passenger abuse, according to a 2002 review of the program."

Read more:

Does Free Transit Pay Off? This City Will Find Out.

Kansas City, Missouri, made national headlines last week when its city council voted to make bus rides free, becoming the first major metropolis in the U.S. to provide no-fare public transit starting next year. The cost to the city will be $9 million, which is roughly what the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority brings in annually from the current $1.50 bus fares and $50 monthly passes.

Comments

  1. Going to be really tough to take away the free ridership here in KC. Buses are going to be bad. Less routes, more disgruntled employees, lower quality rides.

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  2. I'm betting the mayor and council were so anxious to give stuff away that they never thought about all the negatives.

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  3. NO FREE TRANSIT,

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  4. The goal should be better service, not free service. I do hope performance metric are built into the initiative to determine a level of success (or failure).

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  5. Free rides you their rich relatives living in section 8 out in Johnson County. Got love diversity all !

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  6. City Lab Rats

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  7. WARING! WARING! DAGER WIL RUBINSON!

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  8. With kneegrows invovled it will always cost 100 times more in the end because, they ruin everything they touch that’s why

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  9. It will have an adverse effect on our economy. The market for broken-down high mileage Escalades will suffer.

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  10. With the usual replacement of serious public policy with endless entertainment, the KCMO electeds, led by smiley selfies Lucas, is "making history" almost every day with mindless poorly thought-out ideas that don't even begin to take even basics like how to pay for promises into account.
    "Free" bus service that will cost at least $8 million/year.
    A tenant program that will cost $1 million/year to administer.
    A streetcar extension without any indication of where the hundreds of millions might come from.
    And at the same time continuing to give away millions to developers.
    Arithmetic seems a forgotten fact.

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  11. Top down bottom up policy brought to you by the Democratic Community Commies Organizers Party ...... Keep voting Blue you bunch of dumb bunny's.....

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  12. It is simply awful that this city is giving free bus rides to the poor when they could be using that money to build more garages for luxury apartments, paying companies (and the federal government) to move downtown, and make up for the Power and Light District's annual deficit. Oh they humanity! Where are our priorities?

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  13. The buses always look empty when they drive by.

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  14. Their is simple solution the toy train start paying fares and money they collect goes into public works to fix our world class infrastructure.

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  15. 9:03, the free bus rides will enable the poor to go from doing nothing here to doing nothing somewhere else. At least parking garages will be used by productive members of society.

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  16. ^^^^Thanks, Jeremy. I presume you never plan to run for anything again ever.

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  17. 9:49: Do you have any evidence to back up either your of your claims, i.e., that the poor (I'm assuming you mean "black") will use the bus "to go from doing nothing here to doing nothing somewhere else" and that everyone who uses the parking garages are "productive members of society?"

    Isn't it more logical to assume that at least some people (maybe even some--gasp!!!--white people) will use the bus to go to and from work and even downtown (rather than wear out their cars on the pothole-filled streets and deal with parking issues there) and that some of the entitled dwellers living in taxpayer-subsidized luxury apartments and parking in taxpayer-provided garages are parasitical drags on the economy and anything but "productive members of society?"

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  18. Most jobs are useless jobs

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