Couldn't agree more, a system where the number of homeless drug addicts and marginalized people is so low that we literally don't need to worry about it sounds much better. But in the meantime the people who aren't using the bus as a shelter have a civil right to access to safe and effective transit as well that they are currently not getting and transit is dying because of it. I have no illusions on the ways in which society has failed these people, they are largely foster kids who aged out of the system and people who were only a little on the margins but functional until rent went up AGAIN and they literally couldn't afford to have a place to live anymore and spiraled from there. Free transit won't fix that though, the interim period where free transit doesn't function is very real and valid.

Also, seriously though, Luxembourg conservatively has less than a twentieth the poverty rate as the US.