This is one of those NYTimes "solutions journalism" pieces meant to celebrate the program rather than truly analyze it.
You can pick free, or scalable, or financially sustainable (and without sustainability, a political shift will kill it), but you cannot have all three at once. The minute you push on one, second-order effects pop up somewhere else.
It is a classic wicked problem: solving it literally changes the problem.
Big-city transit has an equilibrium point, and it is incredibly stable. Every serious transit city in the world ends up in the same place: charge fares, subsidize low-income riders, and fund the basic system with taxes.
That equilibrium is stable for a reason. Every major city that tries free transit at scale will eventually snap back to it, because it is the only configuration that does not implode under feedback loops. It keeps demand reasonable, service reliable, and the politics tolerable.
You can pick free, or scalable, or financially sustainable (and without sustainability, a political shift will kill it), but you cannot have all three at once. The minute you push on one, second-order effects pop up somewhere else.
It is a classic wicked problem: solving it literally changes the problem.
Big-city transit has an equilibrium point, and it is incredibly stable. Every serious transit city in the world ends up in the same place: charge fares, subsidize low-income riders, and fund the basic system with taxes.
That equilibrium is stable for a reason. Every major city that tries free transit at scale will eventually snap back to it, because it is the only configuration that does not implode under feedback loops. It keeps demand reasonable, service reliable, and the politics tolerable.