Thursday, April 22, 2010

Toronto--Not the Brightest Move

"Free" mass transit passes will jump start mass transit use!

Not.

If you sell a condo, you have to buy a year's worth of Metro passes, and leave them in the condo. Which raises the price of the condo by approximately....the cost of a year's passes for the Metro. Which, since that is not the thing most people would buy with that amount of cash, means that buyers will substitute away to other forms of housing.

This is how central cities become ghost towns. They try to use location rents to extract all sorts of social rents, and then when people move out to the suburbs, planners blame greed and racism.

When the actual blame should go to the idiots on the city council.

(Nod to RL, who is looking around)

1 comment:

JS said...

Looks like they need to have some ticket intermediation to get the tickets in the best hands.

Transit advocates often emphasize mode nuetrality for Transporation spending. I think we need a whole lot of more mode nuetrality when it comes to transportation revenue generation.