Oh, I work in the industry, I can provide a perspective that may not be considered. Free transit is great, but more transit is better. If the state will supplement the fares with additional revenue and makes it free, that looks good doesn't it?

But there is a backside to that: if they had put that same amount of money into the system but kept the fares, the state can buy way more service, and that's what makes it attractive to passengers. If you take a bus that comes once an hour and now it comes twice, you can make commuting by bus much more attractive. Do that to routes that come every thirty minutes and now they come every fifteen your customers may not even need to look at a schedule. More people will ride. It's the frequency of service that puts more people on transit. Fare cost factors way less into the decision.

However, if the state only supplements the fare revenue making it free, but the service isn't great, it won't convince more people to ride. And, it works against the customer for demanding more service because the canned response is that they don't pay for it: "you get what you pay for".

There is also a deleterious effect that free transit fares can bring. Buses can become rolling homeless shelters. Without fare enforcement, there is nothing to prevent someone from riding all day, every day. This is not an anti-homeless position. They need proper facilities in the community to seek shelter, the free transit bus is not that facility but will be used that way in the absence of proper facilities.

Cynically, free transit only benefits the politicians that vote for it. It lets them off the hook of making real hard decisions about transit, transit infrastructure, and which road users should have the most access to the limited supply of roadways. Initiatives like dedicated bus lanes, level boarding platform stops, real time arrival information are costly and take space from single occupancy vehicles. Those are hard decisions to make, but ultimately benefit transit and drivers alike, they just don't play well in modern politics. So, instead, they go for the easy answer: free transit.