Should Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT) seriously be giving the concept of free bus fares a whirl – as some “activists” long have advocated — it should look no further than to the failed experience of Kansas City and kill that notion.
Writing in the Monday’s New York Post, Kansas City City Councilman Nathan Willett and American Transit Union Local 1287 President Nicholas Miller laid out a damning bill of particulars that expose the free-fare idea for the unworkable and putrid public policy that it is.
Kansas City is ending its five-year, pandemic-spawned “Zero-Fare” program. Fares will be charged again beginning in 2026.
While assaults on bus operators prior to 2020 averaged about one or two annually, after introducing no-fare transit, the incidents increased dramatically, Willett and Miller wrote.
“In 2020, there were 14 attacks on operators; in 2021, 15; in 2022, 17; and in 2023, 25. Five years into our free-fare program, in 2024, bus operators faced a record 32 assaults,” the councilor and union boss noted.
“Previously, charging a fare acted as a means of filtering out folks prone to causing major disturbances on the bus,” they detailed, adding that “Zero-Fare has brought us more loop riding — that is, folks getting on our buses and riding for hours with no destination, just to get off the street and out of the weather — and an increase in intoxicated passengers, both of which have created unsanitary conditions on the buses and around bus stops.”
Willett and Miller say that people who used to ride the bus for daily tasks like grocery shopping no longer do so because taking a fare-free bus makes them feel so unsafe.
“In 2019, the last year we charged a fare, the Kansas City system tallied 972 bus disturbances. In 2020, the first year of the free fare, the number rose to 1,460 — followed by 2,187 disturbances in 2021.”
But, of course, those weren’t the only issues with the “Zero-Fare” debacle, as a spot-on artificial intelligence (AI) roundup of the available data suggests. To wit, verbatim from the AI assessment:
- Funding issues: The program was initially funded with federal COVID-19 relief money, but local funding was insufficient to cover the costs, particularly the loss of fare revenue.
- Service degradation: Riders and employees reported that the buses became unreliable and were not well-maintained, leading to a decrease in service quality.
- Lack of ridership from low-income commuters: The program was intended to help low-income riders, but a 30 percent increase in ridership was mostly from people already using the bus, not new, low-income users.
- Lack of accountability: Critics noted that without fare collection, there was less accountability for poor service.
That’s the real cost of “free” public transit. Or as the adage goes, there’s no free lunch.
And as far as PRT goes, with ridership having never recovered from pandemic losses, it’s more important than ever for it to rein-in its seriously out-of-whack cost structure – that, as far as buses go – rivals far larger transit systems nationally (among them, Boston and New York).
And as the Allegheny Institute also has repeatedly noted – but it likely never will see the light of day because of political kowtowing to organized labor – transit workers’ right to strike must be eliminated. It has been nothing but a cudgel held perennially high to extort more and more undeserved funding from John and Jane Q. Public.
Additionally, ending inflationary “prevailing wage” requirements on transit construction projects could save millions of dollars. It’s one of the worst “public service” rackets around.
Only then can there be a serious discussion on reforming public transit funding — its sources and disbursement formulas — in Pennsylvania.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
