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choosing a basket of positions that only approximates what we really want.

Even worse, those elected politicians only set policy; they don't act to implement that policy. Most implementation is performed by bureaucracies that aren't directly accountable to the electorate at all. Would you want a nameless, faceless office worker to decide what you are going to have for dinner tonight? And tomorrow night?

The same mechanisms apply to public transportation. How are the needs and desires of those that use the service to be accounted for without a cost associated with the use of mass transit?

In the summertime, with the air warm and the sun shining, it is perfectly fine for the bus stop to be several blocks from your ultimate destination. However, our values are different in winter, when there is snow on the ground and a cold wind blowing. In the winter we may be quite willing to pay substantially more to be delivered to the door at the end of our trip. Public decision making in transportation, however, cannot take our values into consideration. Markets and pricing can.

When school is in session it may be important for the busses to run near our schools. During school breaks, however, it is a waste of money to keep running a 50-person bus on that same route when no one has any need to go to the school buildings. Bureaucracies have great difficulties in recognizing the changes in personal values from year to year, let alone day to day.

There are many options for mass transit that can meet the needs of people in society, at a reasonable cost, and recognize the differences in our values. When given the chance many entrepreneurs come up with a wide variety of innovative solutions. When regulations don't prohibit private competition with mass transit, or when those regulations aren't strongly enforced, many people start providing services to help others get around. Some will drive a fixed route and schedule, much like our current systems of mass transit, while others may just drive at random, providing rides to whoever is going in their general direction. Using minivans and microbuses, and full-size buses when the demand is appropriate, thousands of entrepeneurs throughout the world find opportunities providing mass transit at a reasonable cost. And, through the recognition of individual values enabled through pricing and the marketplace, they will change their approach to meet the needs of everyone involved on a week to week, day by day or, even, an hour to hour basis. "Free" government run transportation systems can never hope to be as responsive.

Elimination of the market feedback mechanism of pricing guarantees that individual values can never be represented in the solutions sought. Subsidies reduce that information to the point of uselessness. Regulations that prohibit private competition with public transit ensure that we can never provide a solution that is truly desirable.

Only through markets, competition and choice can the values of the billions of potential users of mass transit be recognized and their needs and desires met.

Public transportation should be free, free from government involvement and interference. But it should never be free of cost because, without pricing, only the values of a small portion of society are used to make choices for everyone.

Learn more about this author, Keith Hamburger.
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