this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025
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Hi I'm a socialist transit worker and I thought free bus fare was a no brainer until I worked in transit, it's an awful idea. Transit cannot function effectively as transit when it is being forced to operate as a mobile shelter and bottle and wagon transit system. Fund shelters and ease the burden shouldered by transit.
(By all means make transit incredibly inexpensively accessible to anyone who needs it)
I apparently wasn't clear enough here, I'm sure there are places where free transit works great because people are so well cared for and general safety is so high that it's not an issue. That sounds wonderful, I want that here. However, I have learned the hard way that transit needs to continue being accessible to the majority even when there are people who have slipped fully into the margins who present hazards to transit customers. (Customers meaning people who need transit to travel)
Luxemburg has a great free transit system, what you guys need it to deal with homeless people and drug addicts. I mean this in a humanly way, where these people get the help they need.
Couldn't agree more, a system where the number of homeless drug addicts and marginalized people is so low that we literally don't need to worry about it sounds much better. But in the meantime the people who aren't using the bus as a shelter have a civil right to access to safe and effective transit as well that they are currently not getting and transit is dying because of it. I have no illusions on the ways in which society has failed these people, they are largely foster kids who aged out of the system and people who were only a little on the margins but functional until rent went up AGAIN and they literally couldn't afford to have a place to live anymore and spiraled from there. Free transit won't fix that though, the interim period where free transit doesn't function is very real and valid.
Also, seriously though, Luxembourg conservatively has less than a twentieth the poverty rate as the US.