Iowa City's Bus Experiment Has Been a Remarkable Success

[rcjordan]

^{TLDR; free fare, all the city bad stuff got better}

https://www.newser.com/story/378981/iowa-citys-bus-experiment-has-been-a-rousing-success.html

[littleman]

Honestly, this is the type of stuff I don't mind my tax dollars going towards. It reminds me of how California now gives free lunches to all children if they want it -- no obstetricals, the kids could just go right in and get food if they want it.  The ROI in quality of life goes up for everybody.

[ergophobe]

So cool.

It's an example of why you have to ask the question: what if this goes right?

It's generally easy for us to see potential pitfalls. Buses will get too crowded. With no fare, street people will take over in winter and nobody will want to ride the bus.

It's harder to see that buses will run on time because people don't have to mess with finding fare and driver happiness (and presumably retention) will increase.

As a country, we should do more experiments, but we have set up a system where if five experiments go right and one goes wrong, we forget the five and launch major investigations into the one (see "Solyndra") which trains people to be risk averse.

[Brad]

Our county seat/university modest sized city established bus service to connect the sprawl.  Every bus trip is just $1 (might have gone up).  It seems to have worked well.  You can actually get by without a car.  Good for poor, teens and tweens too young to drive and uni students a way to move around.