by Tom Parsons

Created on: January 14, 2008

When I was a child living in a large city, buses ran up and down the major streets of the city at very regular intervals. I remember my older sister taking me on a bus to a downtown movie theater to watch Walt Disney's "Song of the South." The year was 1947, I was six, and the bus ride cost my sister a dime each way.

Whoever provides the services of public transportation has expenses that must be met. Equipment. Personnel. Maintenance. Fuel. None of these items are inexpensive.

The real question is not whether public transportation should be free, but rather how should the general public pay for it. There are three options.

Public transportation could be paid for by charging appropriate fares to users of the service. The more people who use the service, the cheaper, to a point, the fares could be.

Public transportation could be paid for by charging appropriate fares to users and by subsidizing the service through taxes. Again, the greater the usage by the general public, the less dependence there would need to be on tax subsidization.

Public transportation could be paid for entirely by taxes. This would make the service appear to be free to users. But, of course, it can never be free. They would simply pay for it in increased taxes.

No matter which system is used to finance public transportation, we, the consumers, the taxpayers, supply the revenue that supports the system.

Traditionally, a combination of fares and subsidies from general tax revenues have been used to finance the system. This is arguably the best way to pay for public transportation.

If I were six today and my older sister wanted to take me downtown, she would not take me on a bus. She would drive me there in her car, using expensive gas, polluting the atmosphere and paying a premium for parking space. This is the real problem. Most of us are not interested in using public transportation. We would rather use our gas guzzling cars to get us from here to there.

Which presents another challenge. Why should taxpayers pay for a system they do not want to use? Make public transportation convenient, comfortable and inexpensive (not free), and its existence could be justified. Then maybe someone's older sister would be willing to take her little brother downtown on a bus.

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