ABC7 News wanted to confirm what some have already suspected: Muni is losing millions because some people don't pay the fare. Here's what we uncovered.
Claims like “losing millions because some people don’t pay the fare” are like when IP holders claim that they’re losing gazillions to piracy because they treat every pirated copy and then some as a sale they would otherwise have made; legally defensible but don’t actually get at the underlying issues. (Which, in the case of transit, is that it’s silly to fund transit with fares and especially to expect them to be self-supporting. Transit should be free or extremely low cost as it is beneficial to all.)
Claims like “losing millions because some people don’t pay the fare” are like when IP holders claim that they’re losing gazillions to piracy because they treat every pirated copy and then some as a sale they would otherwise have made; legally defensible but don’t actually get at the underlying issues. (Which, in the case of transit, is that it’s silly to fund transit with fares and especially to expect them to be self-supporting. Transit should be free or extremely low cost as it is beneficial to all.)