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Maybe not a right but more a commitment for governments towards public transportation. Not having a car makes everything so much harder. Having as much coverage as possible within reason, more buses and drivers, expanding metro lines. Right now in my city it is just "bearable", I am at least grateful I can do things like see buses on the map and transferring to trains is easy. Was much worse before! Not like governments wouldn't be able to make their money back, and imagine how many less car crashes and traffic clogs we could have. Not to mention the environmental benefits.
Also electric buses are cool. So quiet and can charge in them.
Edit: To elaborate on why it should be a right: it is not like in the olden days when you could walk to the store or your job. Everything is simultaneously dense and far thanks to how zoning works and cities being car-oriented. The right to mobility exists in America, but what if we took it further and made sure you really could go where you wanted without having to invest in a car?
Public transportation should be free for everyone on top of that. We need to do everything possible to discourage driving in favour of public transport for the sake of the environment and our future selves, plus the bus driver would no longer be able to turn away poor people on hot days.
I've heard that in Sweden there's a group supporting free public transport called Planka.nu, which encourages fare dodging and operates an insurance fund for paying penalty fares.
I wouldn't encourage fare dodging at this point in North America because that would be the destruction of the transit systems.
I think rather it should be free if you are poor, like food stamps. The bus fare definitely stings but I'm always happy to pay it knowing it is going to maintain the system. This is even more important in this hypothetical situation if you have tons of projects towards improving public transportation going on.
Also great username. :)
The reason I think it should be free for everyone is to incentivize choosing public transit over personal vehicles and would gladly pay more taxes to make public transportation free. You have no choice but to pay the tax, so you might as well use the system you've already paid to improve.
And thank you 😊
So then donate that money to the government yourself and don't force everyone else to be stuck with your crappy taxes
It's called social spending and it is part of being a society.
Your ability to drive whenever and wherever you want is literally killing people and you don't even care. That's kinda gross.
Walkability isn't some relic of a bygone era that we can't have back again; it's just a feature of building your city correctly. Traditional development patterns still work better than any of the modernist alternatives we've tried, even in 2023.
In other words, the Suburban Experiment of the last 70 years wasn't actually the progress people thought it was. Instead, it was simply a fuck-up that we need to correct. As such, although mandating access to public transit would be nice to have, it's not actually the necessary solution here. What we actually need is simply to fix or even repeal the zoning code so that property owners are allowed to build appropriately again.
I don't know where you got the idea walkability is an impossible goal, definitely agree with all of it. Much easier in the meantime to build up public transport though than it is to unfuck urban zoning.
They never said it was impossible, they said it was a feature of proper city building
On the contrary, unfucking zoning can be done with the stroke of a pen. Sure, it takes time for the market to react to the change by building more housing etc., but so does planning and constructing transit projects. More to the point, building up public transit requires both legislation and allocating tax dollars, while fixing zoning requires legislation alone.
Fuck that. I don't want the government taking my money just to waste it on this garbage.