Then erect a small barrier to entry, like the need to request a PTA card to ride the bus - possibly for a flat one-time fee. No card, no ride, even though the ride itself is free. That should keep the problematic impulse riders at bay.

We tend to distrust “free”.

I don’t think so.

Most people understand that free stuff offered by for-profits is sketchy and deceitful, while free public services is just another way of saying taxpayer-supported.

Everybody knows - or at least should know - that a free Google account means Google is going to invade your privacy, while enrolling for free at the local community college or attending school is their right because they paid for it in their taxes.

At least outside the US, that’s the deal most taxpayers understand they have with the state. In the US, people would like free public services but refuse to pay for it because communism or some equally stupid non-sequitur.

Oh come on, you know what I mean: completely free as in you’re free to dump stuff in public trashcans but someone still has to pay for trash collection, and that someone is the taxpayer.

If a bus fare costs. say, $4, and $3.50 are subsidized so the apparent cost to the bus riders is 50c, someone pays for the $3.50 and that’s everybody, including those who don’t ride the bus. Just like everybody pays for road maintenance in equal parts, even those who don’t drive a lot.

If policymakers decided to make everybody pay for 88% of a few people’s bus fare, they might as well make everybody pay 100% and save the cost of printing bus tickets, programming bus cards and paying ticket controllers to catch fare dodgers.

The zero price effect: “If something is free, you are the product”.

Not in this case. It’s not really free: people pay for public transport in their taxes.

From TFA:

A crucial question in the Queensland debate is: if public transport is already nearly free, does fare evasion even matter?

A more crucial question is: if public transport is nearly free but still generates overhead to manage and enforce fares, why not make it completely free and eliminate the overhead entirely?

I mean if they chose to make it almost free, they might as well go all the way.

Neither stupidity nor malice are required to explain self-interest

Yeah but see that’s what does not compute: in what scenario does any oligarch benefit from increasing the country’s nuclear risk? There’s a thousand and one ways to make a lot more money a lot more safely, quickly and quietly.

That’s why I’m of the opinion that Trumsk don’t friggin’ know what they’re doing.

I think Hanlon’s razor applies here: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

I think Trump and Musk haven’t thought anything through and they’re applying Silicon Valley’s idiotic “move fast and break things” motto. The trouble is, while this may be fine to develop a web browser or a social media platform, it doesn’t apply to many things that require forethought and time to do things right because they are literally not allowed to break, such as nuclear shit.

It’s sad to say, but I have a feeling that it will take a totally-avoidable, Trump-made catastrophic disaster to turn a majority of the population against him and his cronies enough to oust them before it’s too late and they turn the Republic into the 4th Reich.

And so sadly, I wonder if a nuclear accident and the subsequent immediate removal of Trump and the Trumpista who caused it, followed by the prompt restoration of the rule of law in this country, wouldn’t be preferrable to years of low-level but cumulative, and ultimately graver damage.