DC subreddit still doing the "if it bleeds it leads," reporting every crime beat I see.

Funny how we don't get breathless posts reporting every single auto crash in the region.

1. People of color ride bikes. I see it in my neighborhood every day.
2. Sorry, no one told me we can only work on one thing at the time. I had previously been led to believe that if any one policy, law, or other change didn't solve all societal ills then it wasn't worth doing.

I'm not a yuppie and I don't live in NoMA. Cycling is not a niche or impractical mode of transportation. More and better transit IS a great part of the solution, you finally told something truthful, good job! The rest of your "facts" are simply unsupported assertions with nothing to back them up.

I'm not interested in administering medicine to the dead, though, so include me out of your little diatribes from here on.

Get mad but you just threw out a bunch of assumptions, lies, and auto industry propaganda. I don't need a logical or persuasive argument when your hot air can simply be dismissed as irrelevant.

Everything you just said is wrong.

And these tragedies will continue to happen until someone in the DC government begins taking them as seriously as they deserve, and begins a complete overhaul of our transportation system that seeks to protect all road users and discourage car use throughout the system. There are so many neighborhoods where even when I'm walking on the sidewalk and crossing in a crosswalk with the cross sign, I am guarded and always a little worried of a driver doing something stupid and injuring or killing me.

This is why I have to remember not to write serious replies to trolls. Your use of the phrase "virtue signaling" alone means your opinion is discarded. Bye.

Why the qualification of "in United States"? When it comes to mass transit, and transportation in general, we should be looking to almost anywhere else than the US, because our governments at every level are owned by various corporations and business sectors that profit massively and directly from both car-focused transportation policies and the massive government subsidies, direct and indirect, that they receive through those policies.

In the US, the main places you will find free transit are university campuses. But there are a number of cities who offer varying amounts of free transit, from small buses that run through areas of heavy tourism and shopping, to citywide free buses. Cities in numerous cities worldwide offer free transit for part or all of their users, and quite successfully.

Your assertions in your reply are not based on anything except misconceptions and faulty assumptions. Any given system that relies on fare collection only expects those fares to cover roughly 10% of its budget. Eliminating those fares increases ridership significantly (which is a good thing), and is seen by many as a low-cost but high-impact way to reduce economic inequality.

>Private businesses/delivery ppl could subsidize certain transportation expenses onto the taxpayer.

As for this sentence, I don't know what it means. Businesses already put the expense of employee travel on the employees who have to buy and maintain cars, and the government which builds and maintains roads, etc. And I can't see delivery people ever significantly relying on trains and buses; even if we successfully ban private vehicles in part or all of the city, commercial delivery vehicles would still likely be allowed, and lots of deliveries in urban areas are made by bike and scooter bikes.

Fare free systems have challenges and would certainly take political capital to enact anywhere in the US. But the net benefits can be significant for business, residents, tourists, everyone. Given our climate crisis, governments should probably be paying and otherwise incentivizing everyone possible to take transit rather than private cars. Just saying you have a robust transportation network that's FREE has difficult to measure benefits for attracting both residents and businesses, which in turn grows the tax base to fund just such a system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_public_transport

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/02/free-public-transportation-is-a-reality-in-100-citiesheres-why.html

https://qz.com/2048165/american-cities-are-experimenting-with-free-public-transit

https://www.inverse.com/culture/free-public-transportation-scientific-studies

I think that's a big part of it. I also think DC in general, and this subreddit in particular, draw in "law & order" types from both the right and center. And local news deciding to harp on it constantly of late doesn't help.

Citations Needed did a news brief episode on it recently that's a good listen: https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/news-brief-dc-medias-fare-evasion-meltdown

Good question, with a complicated answer, but in truth the answer is that there's no good reason. For a myriad of reasons, public transit in DC (and everywhere) should be a public service run by the government and free for all users.

It's always like this when anything comes up about Metro at all. It's extremely frustrating.

Hyperbole doesn't help your case, it's nowhere near half.

You clearly don't understand anything about how any of this works.