It makes good sense and I'd like to see it done here.

I’d use RIPTA a lot more if it was free and had adequate parking lots. And I’d even pay for a bus segment up to Boston, with free intrastate connections. So would lots of other people.

I’m of the opinion that the current model is generally the most appropriate with it being tax payer-subsidized, but the people who actually make use of the service carry some of the cost.

It’s a public service that’s available but not every single person actively uses it all the time. I think it makes sense that the people riding the bus carry some additional cost there.

I’d much rather RIPTA expand routes and invest in increasing driver compensation rather than making fares free, but if they can secure extra federal grants to cover all fares then it’s fine with me.

As it is for right now, for FY22 (which ended 6/30/22 for RIPTA) total employee comp pretty much equals out to the state and federal subsidies received, coming out to about $86M each. Passenger fares only make up about $9M of revenues, but the overall budget for RIPTA isn’t very high, with the revised FY23 budget coming in around $147M with expectations of about $11.7M in revenue from passenger fares.

It is worth noting that revenues for RIPTA are bit inflated for the next couple years due to extra funding coming from the Covid Relief Fund. Once that dries up, I’m not sure what changes they’ll make.

Free buses are great for transit since transit funding is usually linked to ridership. Making buses free attracts more riders, which brings more funding, which brings demand for better transit, etc. It's a virtuous cycle, and if RI ever wants a real 21st century transit system, free buses are a great first step. Another inbuilt benefit of free buses is faster service. A lot of the delays on RIPTA are from waiting at stops for people to board and pay.

The R Line has been free for a while now and it's jam packed all the time. RIPTA needs to invest in some articulated buses short term for the R Line, and make an East-West R line to match that goes from EP to Olneyville. Both R-Lines would run on the same route between Providence Station and Lasalle Square, giving 5 minute headways on that corridor.

Sounds good to me, I'd be happy to subsidize mass transit even when I'm not a frequent user. It benefits us all.

I’m 100% for it.

Worked great for Newport last summer.

I think it would generally improve the quality of life for many of those who use it and increase ridership. The majority of people who currently use these services come from a lower income background. This would increase their quality of life by decreasing their expenses associated with transportation and reallocate it to other necessary expenses.

Increased benefits could come from transitioning drivers to riders, thus decreasing the number of vehicles on the road, in turn making roads safer. Quality of life would potentially be improved by decreasing noise pollution associated with the vehicles that are now off the road. I feel like these benefits are often unaccounted for when performing some cost/ benefit analysis associated with these changes!

There's a lot of people who will oppose it because they see no benefit for a service they don't and probably wouldn't use, ergo this is a "waste" of their tax money.

I don't agree with them, but it's a significant enough portion of the population that it will probably never get off the ground here until you've got other working examples to point to first. Even then, it's still an uphill battle to sell this.

One thing about public transit in Rhode Island and in New England generally is the stops aren’t labeled well, built adequately and or/maintained and the routes aren’t marked clearly. The system isn’t easy to use and that will always impact ridership. A faded band with an old logo on a telephone pole on the side of the street is not an appropriate way to indicate that’s where a bus to a specific location stops. The dearth of sidewalks in most RI towns makes it even more precarious.

I’d fully support zero-fare. It would be great as part of a larger overhaul that clearly shows how to get people to different places throughout the state.

While most stops could definitely use a lot of improvement, RIPTA hasn't used the telephone pole bands in years. There is one of these metal signs at every stop: https://i.imgur.com/nxPElDp.jpg

Also, the Transit app makes using RIPTA really pretty easy nowadays. All the maps and schedules are in there and it's basically Google Maps but for transit & walking (& biking if you configure it that way). It will tell you when to leave in order to give you enough time to walk to the stop and have a couple minutes leeway. It's officially supported by RIPTA but it works for all transit systems, so you can seamlessly see RIPTA, MBTA, and GATRA (ugh) info together.

That said, there need to be route numbers on signs, and real-time arrival info at major stops at a bare minimum, and I wholeheartedly agree with you about the lack of any semblance of decent pedestrian infrastructure.

We need to get away from the idea that public services are supposed to "make money." It's a public good. Make it free, more people will use it, traffic will be reduced, roads will stay in better shape - it's all wins.

Well, it all comes down to money, or in this case other peoples money to be exact. How it would be funded and by what means. Our State already has quite the budget, and that budget is so large there seems to be a lot of waste in some areas and not enough funding in other areas. Government has a difficult time running anything efficiently, that is the core problem with government programs, they always seem to implode after they are implemented. Last year we had a budget surplus, however god only knows where that money went, I know we didn’t get a refund check. I suppose the State could implement a public transportation tax and keep it separate from the general fund, the key is… keep it separate from the general fund.

There’s a pilot going for the R line currently that is measuring just that. I’m all for it, and I think we should be investing far more into public transportation as a whole. It’s one of the many steps needed to address climate change properly.

I wish the signs were more common and kept updated. In parts of Providence, finding the actual bus stop can be kind of a nightmare as the signs aren't there whether destroyed by others or just not labeled, or are poorly placed or faded to shit.

I rely on the bus pretty heavily as a poor and disabled person but there's been multiple times I've missed my bus because the stop wasn't labeled and I had to guess based on Google Maps markings but apparently guessed wrong.

Like the people who supported the dismantling of the post office or support defunding libraries. Not everything has to be some billion dollar profit enterprise and it's perfectly okay for some things to just exist purely for public service due to the good they do for the community.

I am for it, just hope it doesn't come with gutting lines and schedules. It's not a net positive if we remove a barrier for many but make service unusable for those same folks

It would be nice if the actual RIPTA Park & Rides were served by more than the twice-a-day express routes, but there are some DIY lots that work well.

Twin River is good because there is an ocean of parking and the security is good. The 54 runs every 30 minutes and is express to downtown from there. The 51 runs the same route, except as a local down Charles St. 73 also stops there which goes to Pawtucket.

The parking lot behind the Cranston police station at the start of the Washington Secondary Trail is another good one. The 30 & 31 both stop there and there's a bus every 15 minutes. Parking is allowed for the bike trail there and it's in full view of the security cameras in the police lot, so it's a fairly safe place to park.

Free stuff always sounds good to the recipient... not so much for whoever is footing the bill.

Here's a radical idea: pay your own bus fare. Anyone who is unable to do so, should get some form of assistance (controversial as that is to some), but most people can pay a simple fee.

It seems most of the people who think transit should turn a profit think nothing of dumping billions of tax dollars into freeways. There's a such a mental disconnect when you suggest that roads and highways run at a severe loss and consume far more of our tax dollars than transit funding which would provide such a better return on investment.

Would you be willing to pay for park and ride if the bus saved time by by-passing traffic or you could drive to an even faster train?

Suburban park and ride service is longer than most other trips. It is easy to collect fares without delaying the bus. If their destination is not right downtown, people will use park and ride only if the final leg is a short wait for efficient in-town service at no extra fare. Also, I think infrequency and the risk of being stuck in town after the last bus keeps people away from park and ride more than would paying a fare comparable to in-town parking.

Depends on how reliable the bus is, how frequent it is, how early and late it runs, how secure the parking is, and how much the charges are.

In my experience, most US transit fails on several of these fronts. Some systems fail on every single one of them!

A reliable and usable system should be priority number one. I’ll pay to get one.

Making it free helps with uptake but won’t help if we don’t have a system that’s fit for purpose IMO

Yea the state of most bus stops is atrocious. Terrible sidewalks, always trash, nowhere to sit, no shade, no snow removal, missing/old signs. Non-drivers are always an afterthought and its endlessly frustrating

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.

I use the R line a bit more than I would if I had to pay each time. I really notice the time saved when people can just get on. Most importantly, the service is almost pretty damn good.

If there is a choice between great service at affordable cost or crappy free service, most people would rather pay. (edit: getting to work consistently on time can matter even more when you do not have a lot of money)

I think an honor system for payment would lose less $ to fare evaders than it would save in collection related expenses. That crappy app is going to have be patched and updated forever. Better to pay drivers than coders. If the service is good, all but very few people who can truly afford to pay will pony up.

Oh please yes, bus lanes and signal priority.

We need to be able to say, Hey Drivers, in a hurry? Want to save time? Take the bus!

I haven’t ridden on RIPTA in years after experiencing how slow they are compared to buses in Taiwan. If RIPTA was faster and turned faster, I’d enjoy riding them a bit more.

This is really valuable insight. I agree if the free service is suboptimal or leads to over-crowding of buses, that could potentially reduce ridership. I guess it’s kind of a juggling act between providing quality service and making it affordable.

This 10X. Rhode Island needs better buses. Even when the state made Commuter Rail free for the summer the ridership for the trains went up by 50% but the ridership was still around 400 people per day, a far cry from what it could have been.

For reference even the most conservative estimates from before the stations were built put them at around 1500 riders per day.

I don’t think price is RIPTA’s limiting factor. scheduling, availability, routes, timeliness, park and ride accessibility are more like it.

i rode the bus for years as a commuting URI student from the providence area. i lived on well established and well used routes and i still ran into a litany of problems weekly. it was and is an unreliable form of transportation. which sucks.

Free school lunches, free buses, free CoVID money…this state must be doing great financially!

God forbid we ask people to pay for a good or service…

I already stated, we could provide some form of assistance for a person who is unable to pay for bus fare.

Outside of that extremely small minority, most people can pay their own bus fare. Why should the taxpayers pay the bus fare of people who can pay for it themselves?

If you want to pay for other people, do so. There are plenty of charities. Go ahead.