Free public transit is a good, as is taking from the rich.

We had a free ride zone downtown until 2012 when Dow phased it out to convince democrats to pass a two-year $20 car tab to improve bus service.

https://www.seattlepi.com/local/transportation/article/No-more-ride-free-zone-in-downtown-Seattle-1919806.php

Tacoma has some experience with this. The streetcar now dubbed the Orange Line, Sound Transit’s first rail project, has been fare free since it began service in 2003. If you want to see what the impact will be of free fares in a larger city, come down to T Town and do a little research on our Sound Transit rail line. We are not as big as Seattle, but far larger than Olympia. And, it’s not a bus. It’s a train, like yours.

Sshh, no one wants to talk about it, but one of the reasons bus service has been successful in Seattle is because they're not used as rolling homeless shelters the way they are in many other large cities. Will ridership be maintained if there's no gatekeeping whatsoever? Kansas City's experiment in this will be instructive.

Portland is thinking about it. It will be interesting to see what happens.

Nah, let's just build guillotines.

No, nor will most big cities (world wide). In general, it makes to do this if you are a town or little city (where fare revenues are tiny) but not if you are a big city with a decent public transportation system. https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/18/free-public-transportation/

Just to put things in perspective, the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority has ridership of about 60,000 a day. Metro has ridership of 500,000. Sound Transit buses carry more riders than all of Kansas City (about 65,000 a day) while the light rail carries 80,000 and about 20,000 people ride (Sounder) commuter rail. As far as transit is concerned, Kansas City is small potatoes compared to us.

@4 Depends on the line and time of day.

The best way to prevent the trains from becoming moving homeless shelters is to disposes the rich and reappropriate their mansions, repurposing them as well as houses of worship as free housing for the homeless.

Ban inheritance. Every kid at age 18 needs to be cut off from financial support by their parents. If you want me to believe this bullshit about how rich people deserve the be rich because they worked hard for the money, then goddamn it, make them get off their fat lazy asses and work for the fucking money.

From now on, when anyone dies, whatever they owned, money, property, any of it, gets redistributed to the poorest members of society, like a potlach. Nobody inherits anything anymore, and nobody gets a goddamn handout from mom and dad. You want money kid? Work for it. Put the Trump kids to work at Taco Bell and make them sweat to pay rent in the rattiest slums of Baltimore.

And if the rich won’t give it up willingly, arm the poor and disable the alarm systems of every mansion in America.

"Nobody inherits anything anymore, and nobody gets a goddamn handout from mom and dad" Yeah, if you're a poor, minority person living in the house that's been in the family for generations, you don't deserve to live there.
The world according to Wandering Stars.

I'm open to a free transit system as long as there is adequate policing to make sure it doesn't become a mobile homeless housing system. Transit's primary role is to aid in economic activity, not hide our societal problems.

When the cost of collecting and enforcing fares is about as great as the amounts collected, it certainly makes sense to scrap fare collection.
That's not the case in Seattle.
Now that WA state has voted to lower car tabs, fare collection is more necessary than ever!
BTW as I recall, most Metro bus drivers were quite happy to see Seattle scrap the no fare zone downtown.

The librarians I know don't care for this idea. The administrative cost of collecting fines seems justified to preserve the incentive to return books in a timely manner and in good condition.

Also, have we forgotten that others may be awaiting for those hard to find/out of print books that lazy patrons have checked out and are procrastinating bringing back?

Make something free and people will treat it like sh*t.

Don't believe me?

Where would rather take a dump, at home or a public restroom?

14,

The most radical ideas have always started in a library. When Rome was overrun with murderous Christians hell bent on attacking women, the Library of Alexandria was run by Hypatia. Karl Marx wrote his masterpiece in a London library. The American institutions that have fought back the hardest against censorship have always been libraries.

I could live rather happily in a world with no churches, synagogues or mosques. I could not live, however, in a world without libraries. Where the former serve to close the human mind, the latter serves only to prise it open.

This is just another example of those most noble of institutions lighting the way to a radical rethinking of our most basic assumptions. The library is a Commons. The very existence of a Commons is a direct threat to capitalism, which has, since its inception in 16th century England, fought to abolish the Commons more ardently than anything else.

The library is the Commons that will not die. Capitalists defame the Commons. The infamously titles “Tragedy of the Commons” is an article of faith that capitalists try to promote as indisputable fact. And yet, the library as Commons proves that Tragedy to be false. Greed is not the basis of all human motivations, and is not as pervasive as the capitalists need everyone to believe it is. If it were, no library could remain operational for more than a few days. Yet, public libraries persist.

And this new, radical notion of the library, even more threatening to your most basic capitalist credo, persists. It has taken root at the Enoch Pratt Free Library of Baltimore. And now, it has set its mossy roots down into the Seattle Public Library, too. It is spreading everywhere. In contrast to your ideology which declares all commons must contract and die, this idea is not contracting, not dying, but thriving and growing and spreading like kudzu.

No wonder you are so quick to predict it’s doom. Despite your prognostications, the Commons lives on.

@16: The Commons lives on but the overdue book still languishes.

17,

To quote Conan the Librarian, “ Crush your enemies. See them driven out before you. Hear the lamentations of their women.”

“ American institutions that have fought back the hardest against censorship have always been libraries.”

That’s funny because Seattle Public Library is trying to ban a group of feminists (WoLF) from having a meeting to discuss modern transgenderism ideology.

19 dear, as usual with trolls, you have left out most of the story just to be a moral scold. But thank you for mentioning it. I had no idea that this was going on. I feel for the poor library staff - should they host an event by a "feminist" group that is in opposition to trans people?

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/amid-outcry-seattle-public-library-weighs-decision-to-provide-venue-for-radical-feminist-event-criticized-as-anti-trans/

“ Karl Marx wrote his masterpiece in a London library”

To think if they’d kicked him out, 100 million people wouldn’t have died in the 20th century.

@21 - It was written in jail.

@21 I know.

Both books are reprehensible yet one gets celebrated by Seattle leftists hipsters. That was my point.

Well, if we're whatabouting that hard, where was the New Testament written, and how many millions (or billions) of people were killed for those words?

@15 -- "Where would rather take a dump, at home or a public restroom?"

Me? on the sidewalk, every time. I'm not gonna stink up my HOME. Also -- bowels just seem to Move better when crouch-walking/'trail-blazing' on the city's concrete..

How 'bout you?

And Mein Kampf* has been on trumpfy's bedside reading
table for decades -- a shitpot of it musta rubbed off. It shows.

*Mein Kampf, in Pictures
(my gawd, but I miss Rodger "Dodger" Goebbels/Ailes....)

@22 -- 'jail'?

From the Wikis: "The Beer Hall Putsch, also known as the Munich Putsch, and, in German, as the Hitlerputsch, Hitler-Ludendorff-Putsch, Bürgerbräu-Putsch or Marsch auf die Feldherrnhalle ("March on the Field Marshals's Hall"), was a failed coup d'état by the Nazi Party (NSDAP) leader Adolf Hitler—along with Generalquartiermeister Erich Ludendorff and other Kampfbund leaders—to seize power in Munich, Bavaria, which took place on 8–9 November 1923.

Approximately two thousand Nazis were marching to the Feldherrnhalle, in the city centre, when they were confronted by a police cordon, which resulted in the deaths of 14 Nazis and four police officers.

Hitler, who was wounded during the clash, escaped immediate arrest and was spirited off to safety in the countryside. After two days, he was arrested and charged with treason.

The putsch brought Hitler to the attention of the German nation and generated front-page headlines in newspapers around the world. His arrest was followed by a 24-day trial, which was widely publicised and gave him a platform to express his nationalist sentiments to the nation.

Hitler was found guilty of treason and sentenced to five years in Landsberg Prison, where he dictated Mein Kampf to his fellow prisoners Emil Maurice and Rudolf Hess. On 20 December 1924, having served only nine months, Hitler was released. Once released, Hitler redirected his focus towards obtaining power through legal means rather than revolution or force."

Gosh, this makes me wanna go to one of hair Furor's famous
Campaign/Nuremberg Rallies, just to see what could happen...

Perhaps I'll wear my MAGAt hat cum Peace Symbol shirt.

Did herr Hitler burn many books?

@26 -- A. Yes.
Just the Dangerous ones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHzM1gXaiVo

I would much rather see increased service than free service. Seattle could stand to double its bus fleet.

@18 - any good Librarian would "shush" any women who were loudly lamenting.