A Few More Thoughts About Public Transit
The rail, bus, and horizontal elevator known at Metromover exist in Miami and are supported by the fare box and money from the county that comes from sales tax and grants from Washington.
One of the reasons that public transportation is "public" is that private transportation can be very expensive. Taxis, Uber, Lyft, and Zipcar are not cheap. Parking your car costs money even if you don't pay for it. The cost of capital to buy a car, insurance, gasoline, and maintenance and it doesn't take long chew up a pay check. Building roads also cost money
Driving isn't fun, commuting can get old in a hurry, and traffic from sun up to sundown and after dark does nothing to make driving attractive.
Without a robust public transportation system and an alternative to driving, the problems of the car culture only multiply.
For the last two months I've driven very little. I walk more. And in some ways I am transitioning to a place where public transit will be more relevant than the car culture.
The County Commission is debating whether to raise fares on the Metromover service downtown which is free to all riders and raising fares to $1.00. The main argument is that downtown folks have jobs and they are being subsidized by poor folks that pay $2.25 for their bus service. In a related action there is also a proposal to privatize the maintenance of the Metrorail.
Currently, it costs me nothing to ride the rail or the bus. Candidly, I could pay for a monthly pass which currently costs $112.50 and still save money. I could probably buy daily passes for $5.65 and save even more money.
It's estimated that the fare box pays about 20% of the operating cost of the system. This isn't a fair fight in a lot of ways. Any increase in fares will probably lower ridership as those with alternatives will leave the system and make it more expensive for the car less.
The benefits of letting people get from one place to another for work, shopping, entertainment, doctor's appointments without a car is hard to quantify, but it certainly is worth something.
One of the reasons that public transportation is "public" is that private transportation can be very expensive. Taxis, Uber, Lyft, and Zipcar are not cheap. Parking your car costs money even if you don't pay for it. The cost of capital to buy a car, insurance, gasoline, and maintenance and it doesn't take long chew up a pay check. Building roads also cost money
Driving isn't fun, commuting can get old in a hurry, and traffic from sun up to sundown and after dark does nothing to make driving attractive.
Without a robust public transportation system and an alternative to driving, the problems of the car culture only multiply.
For the last two months I've driven very little. I walk more. And in some ways I am transitioning to a place where public transit will be more relevant than the car culture.
The County Commission is debating whether to raise fares on the Metromover service downtown which is free to all riders and raising fares to $1.00. The main argument is that downtown folks have jobs and they are being subsidized by poor folks that pay $2.25 for their bus service. In a related action there is also a proposal to privatize the maintenance of the Metrorail.
Currently, it costs me nothing to ride the rail or the bus. Candidly, I could pay for a monthly pass which currently costs $112.50 and still save money. I could probably buy daily passes for $5.65 and save even more money.
It's estimated that the fare box pays about 20% of the operating cost of the system. This isn't a fair fight in a lot of ways. Any increase in fares will probably lower ridership as those with alternatives will leave the system and make it more expensive for the car less.
The benefits of letting people get from one place to another for work, shopping, entertainment, doctor's appointments without a car is hard to quantify, but it certainly is worth something.
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