Huh - are you being serious? Of course the number of seats on a bus is finite. And the number of buses in a city are finite. The raw materials and energy used to produce and power the bus are finite. The pool of labor needed to drive and maintain the bus is finite. The tax revenue to fund all of this is finite.
Yes, it is possible to add more buses. But doing so requires drawing from a finite pool of resources. So it makes sense to incentivize people to use public resources more efficiently.
> And most buses are not going to be 100% full most of the time. So if you have an empty seat, the cost is zero.
I think this is a very good argument for time-of-use based fares. (Of course you don't want to gouge people who are commuting to work/school, but if there's a way to incentivize people to spread out the load while still keeping things affordable, I think that would be a good thing).
Just to be clear, since you have kind of made this about cars vs. mass transit, I'm not at all against mass transit. I'm in favor of applying the same principals to roads to incentivize people to use cars more efficiently as well. Tolls and parking meters (with time-of-use pricing), gasoline surcharges, etc.
> Of course the number of seats on a bus is finite.
It's possible to run more buses and thereby get arbitrarily more seats. The ultimate limits placed on this by the laws of physics are irrelevant because the actual rate limit on how many seats you need is how many people you can get to ride the bus.
> I think this is a very good argument for time-of-use based fares.
But peak hours are the times at which you most want people to take the bus, so they don't clog the roads with cars. It implies that's when they should most be free.
Then off peak will be more likely to have empty seats, implying they should be free then too, i.e. they should be free all the time.
> I'm in favor of applying the same principals to roads to incentivize people to use cars more efficiently as well. Tolls and parking meters (with time-of-use pricing), gasoline surcharges, etc.
And I'm in favor of the same "have the government build this and pay for it entirely from taxes" for roads. The construction cost and most of the maintenance is a sunk cost that doesn't depend on usage. The benefit of their existence accrues to people who don't drive and the benefit of roads to various motorists is proportional to the value of the activity they're engaged in rather than how many miles they drive, which is a much better fit for general taxes than road usage fees.
Also, the collections infrastructure for these things is a large expense, whereas we already have a collections infrastructure for general taxes, so when the incremental cost is negligible and the benefit goes to approximately the entire public it makes much more sense to use the latter. And collecting tolls/fares characteristically involves a significant privacy invasion, because the payments system will then tie your identity to your location history, which we could certainly do without. The main exception to this would be gas tax, which is cheap to collect (gas station is already remitting other taxes), serves as a de facto carbon tax (serving an independent purpose) and avoids most of the location tracking issues.
It otherwise doesn't make sense to waste the public's money and invade their privacy just so they can pay a higher amount for the same thing.
Huh - are you being serious? Of course the number of seats on a bus is finite. And the number of buses in a city are finite. The raw materials and energy used to produce and power the bus are finite. The pool of labor needed to drive and maintain the bus is finite. The tax revenue to fund all of this is finite.
Yes, it is possible to add more buses. But doing so requires drawing from a finite pool of resources. So it makes sense to incentivize people to use public resources more efficiently.
> And most buses are not going to be 100% full most of the time. So if you have an empty seat, the cost is zero.
I think this is a very good argument for time-of-use based fares. (Of course you don't want to gouge people who are commuting to work/school, but if there's a way to incentivize people to spread out the load while still keeping things affordable, I think that would be a good thing).
Just to be clear, since you have kind of made this about cars vs. mass transit, I'm not at all against mass transit. I'm in favor of applying the same principals to roads to incentivize people to use cars more efficiently as well. Tolls and parking meters (with time-of-use pricing), gasoline surcharges, etc.