Free bus service in DC proposed

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Lol you’re all living in a DCUM bubble. If you weren’t, you’d know that there is already so much fare evasion going on that this isn’t going to make much of a difference.

Well we won't have to pay people to pretend to enforce fares. And those of us who do pay won't have to anymore.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Tax receipts are about to fall off the table but, sure, let's create a new spending program.

How many times have you come crying wolf about that? It's as long as I can remember.

The city has been living in la la land for years now thanks to low interest rates that created a giant real estate bubble and, with it, send property taxes soaring, and thanks to Congress dumping a mountain of money on state and local governments. All of that is now coming to a crashing halt. You are free to be completely ignorant and assume tomorrow will be exactly the same as yesterday but I'd suggest maybe paying a little bit of attention to what's happening around you. Things are going to get ugly.

I've been reading posts like this on DCUM for 15 years.

Sounds like you've woefully misspent a large chunk of your life.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Downtown is dying. Vacancy rates are throw the roof, which are driving down property values which will mean radically lower property tax revenues, which will blow a giant hole in the city's budget. But, sure, let's focus on...[checks notes]...making buses free?

This is what it's like to be ruled by children.

What is the city government supposed to do to get workers back in empty offices, exactly?

Isn't that kind of their job to figure these things out?

They have to make it attractive for employers to end the work from home model. Free bus is one of many steps in that direction.

Right. People are abandoning downtown because the buses are too expensive.

I love how your definition of people only includes high income people. Like your barista, waiter, street cleaner, etc. don't also need to get to work.

The people who are employing the barista, waiter, street cleaner... don't care about the price of a bus. No business is deciding to return to the office full time because buses are free

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Downtown is dying. Vacancy rates are throw the roof, which are driving down property values which will mean radically lower property tax revenues, which will blow a giant hole in the city's budget. But, sure, let's focus on...[checks notes]...making buses free?

This is what it's like to be ruled by children.

Oh no! Did your favorite steakhouse close and now you have to pick from one of the remaining 7? It must be really hard to be you now.

This is just weird. So you're cool with an entire section of the city becoming a ghost town? And what happens to the city's budget when one of its main revenue sources dries up?

You can hypothesize that all you want, but we've had surpluses for as long as I can remember. Downtown isn't a ghost town except to fox news viewers, but that's your problem.

Uh, what? Speaking of children. You're probably too young to know who Tony Williams is, and you certainly don't remember what D.C. was like before he was mayor, but here's Tony Williams saying the same thing: https://www.federalcitycouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Letter-to-CFO-Glen-Lee-on-Commercial-Property-Vulnerabilities-11.14.22-final.pdf

And who are all the other co-signers? Commercial property owners, dealers, and developers. If you don’t take what they saw with an entire salt flat, please be in touch as I know of a Nigerian prince who desperately wants to make contact with you.

Who do expect to sign such a letter? Do you think all the city's yoga instructors are going to get together to complain about collapsing commercial property values? You can stick your head in the sand if you like, but this is a major problem for the city's budget. Everyone is trying to get out of their downtown leases because the numbers don't work anymore.

The DC metro area probably has more economists and policy analysts than anywhere else on earth. That none of them are signing off on this speaks volumes. Wake me up when you have some objective analysis. Screeds from lobbyists don’t count.

Or you could just pick up a newspaper? Maybe read a little bit about things happening in our world? Try to educate yourself a little bit?

Yeah, but those of us who actually live and work here don’t really need a bunch of developers or Rupert’s media to be trying to telling us that what we can see with our own eyes is not really true.

Property values go down when interest rates go up, and interest rates have skyrocketed. It's just math. Throw the work from home phenomenon on top of that, and real values downtown are headed for the dumpster. Taxes are assessed on values so that will bring tax receipts crashing down with it, which is going to be a big problem for the city.

And yet when was the last time anyone in our government even addressed this? Our elected officials spend more time debating the names of high schools than what to do about downtown. We don't even have a JV government. We have the government equivalent of a pee wee football team.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Tax receipts are about to fall off the table but, sure, let's create a new spending program.

How many times have you come crying wolf about that? It's as long as I can remember.

The city has been living in la la land for years now thanks to low interest rates that created a giant real estate bubble and, with it, send property taxes soaring, and thanks to Congress dumping a mountain of money on state and local governments. All of that is now coming to a crashing halt. You are free to be completely ignorant and assume tomorrow will be exactly the same as yesterday but I'd suggest maybe paying a little bit of attention to what's happening around you. Things are going to get ugly.

I've been reading posts like this on DCUM for 15 years.

Sounds like you've woefully misspent a large chunk of your life.

Absolutely! But imagine the people who've been doing the posting of these posts...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Tax receipts are about to fall off the table but, sure, let's create a new spending program.

How many times have you come crying wolf about that? It's as long as I can remember.

The city has been living in la la land for years now thanks to low interest rates that created a giant real estate bubble and, with it, send property taxes soaring, and thanks to Congress dumping a mountain of money on state and local governments. All of that is now coming to a crashing halt. You are free to be completely ignorant and assume tomorrow will be exactly the same as yesterday but I'd suggest maybe paying a little bit of attention to what's happening around you. Things are going to get ugly.

But the city also has a massive budget surplus that it built up during those la la land years, and a much higher income tax base now than it did the last time interest rates were this high (which was only about 15 years ago anyway, it's not like you have to go back to the worst of the 1980s to compare how the city was doing with 7 percent mortgage rates). And this program costs $42 million out of a $14 billion city budget, so it's not going to be the thing that brings everything crashing down, anyway.

[Anonymous]

i ride the bus w my child to school. while the kids ride free cards are great, i still pay for me. for some families this could be a problem. while metro is complicated due to riders who commute in from maryland and virginia, a lot of the city buses genuinely drive city residents around dc. a lot of lower income residents who dont own cars regularly ride the bus. empty buses driving around are not such a good thing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Downtown is dying. Vacancy rates are throw the roof, which are driving down property values which will mean radically lower property tax revenues, which will blow a giant hole in the city's budget. But, sure, let's focus on...[checks notes]...making buses free?

This is what it's like to be ruled by children.

What is the city government supposed to do to get workers back in empty offices, exactly?

Isn't that kind of their job to figure these things out?

They have to make it attractive for employers to end the work from home model. Free bus is one of many steps in that direction.

Right. People are abandoning downtown because the buses are too expensive.

I love how your definition of people only includes high income people. Like your barista, waiter, street cleaner, etc. don't also need to get to work.

Is there a single person in this entire city who did not ride the bus because it was too expensive? If the answer is no there is not, then making it free it a stupid way to spend money. If you're going to create incentives, the idea is usually to get people to do something they would not have done otherwise. If you're just subsidizing people to do something they were going to do anyway, that is just a waste of money.

Not collecting fares make the bus run faster, which makes it more convenient. Lots of people don't ride the bus because it's not convenient.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You're going to love it when the buses are full of homeless people.

Thanks for checking in, Tom Sherwood

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
Not collecting fares make the bus run faster, which makes it more convenient. Lots of people don't ride the bus because it's not convenient.

Bus improvement from not collecting fares will be marginal, as it is now. The problem is we have existing bus lanes in DC and more planned and they're virtually worthless because drivers insist on parking in them and our intrepid pols are too afraid to enforce the bus lanes. Simple as that. The bus lanes on 14th St NW are virtually worthless.

Not collecting fares won't change that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Not collecting fares make the bus run faster, which makes it more convenient. Lots of people don't ride the bus because it's not convenient.

Bus improvement from not collecting fares will be marginal, as it is now. The problem is we have existing bus lanes in DC and more planned and they're virtually worthless because drivers insist on parking in them and our intrepid pols are too afraid to enforce the bus lanes. Simple as that. The bus lanes on 14th St NW are virtually worthless.

Not collecting fares won't change that.

Sure, do that too. What I'd like to see is priority signal timing for buses -- the bus always gets a green light. That would do a lot more for bus speed than bus lanes. But the point is the way you make buses attractive is you make them competitive in terms of speed with other choices. In cities that have tried getting rid of fares it has sped up buses significantly.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You're going to love it when the buses are full of homeless people.

Thanks for checking in, Tom Sherwood

They're known as "no destination" riders, very common in the NYC system. The WP article said the Council had no plan to deter this under the free buses plan.

[Anonymous]

I think a 100% taxpayer subsidized bus network will be more prone to service reductions and route cancellations.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Tax receipts are about to fall off the table but, sure, let's create a new spending program.

How many times have you come crying wolf about that? It's as long as I can remember.

The city has been living in la la land for years now thanks to low interest rates that created a giant real estate bubble and, with it, send property taxes soaring, and thanks to Congress dumping a mountain of money on state and local governments. All of that is now coming to a crashing halt. You are free to be completely ignorant and assume tomorrow will be exactly the same as yesterday but I'd suggest maybe paying a little bit of attention to what's happening around you. Things are going to get ugly.

But the city also has a massive budget surplus that it built up during those la la land years, and a much higher income tax base now than it did the last time interest rates were this high (which was only about 15 years ago anyway, it's not like you have to go back to the worst of the 1980s to compare how the city was doing with 7 percent mortgage rates). And this program costs $42 million out of a $14 billion city budget, so it's not going to be the thing that brings everything crashing down, anyway.

This is a great example of how the la la land thinking gets perpetuated, by using magical thinking and false information.

DC is not a “city” and it DOES NOT have a “massive surplus” of funds sitting around. It is massively in debt to the tune of $13 billion.

For contrast, Montgomery County, MD, which many believe to be acting fiscally irresponsibly has a debt of $5.5 billion. But it has a 30% larger population and vastly larger land area.

There was a budget surplus in 2020 thanks to Federal COVID relief $ and those funds were legislatively required to be spent on affordable housing. There is no special vault of money sitting around for the District to draw on. Furthermore, by all accounts future revenue estimates are based on irresponsible assumptions about commercial and residential property taxes.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think a 100% taxpayer subsidized bus network will be more prone to service reductions and route cancellations.

Something that, oddly enough, never happens to the 100% taxpayer subsidized roads-for-cars network.