Absolutely not. People don’t appreciate free things psychologically. When they don’t appreciate it they trash it: vandalism, littering will all become bigger problems.

To prevent this effect, you have to have a well educated population first. That’s actually an even more difficult problem to solve.

It's unfortunate, but one problem with free public transport absent other changes is that then it becomes de facto free shelter, which degrades the service for people using it as transport.

The problem with free public transport is that it turns into a de facto homeless shelter. And then it isn't safe to use anymore. You let people evade fares and then those people go onto stab people like Zarutska.

It's nice to have an opinion but free public transport causes many issues and isn't great policy, it actually means transport agencies have less money to invest and take out debt on as system use increases which is a very bad position financially. The same issues actually apply to roads as well and are a reason things like congestion taxes are a good idea.

> it makes no sense to dis-incentivize the use of public transport to begin with

MTA serves NYC. People who can't even afford the subway are definitely not driving over there.

Free public transport takes away money that can be used to improve service for everyone. Someone on minimum wage would prefer a bus they can actually use to get to work rather than having to buy/maintain a car because the free bus only comes once an hour.

Have targeted low fares for the poor etc.