That's fair. However, a lot of it is already in place and is quite automated. E.g. on busses they have a contactless card reader. Many have already moved to a fixed ride fee too. Basically you just tap as you walk past the driver, who already has to be there.

The London underground has intermittent enforcement. A lot of the time the honour system is all there is. You just swipe your oyster card or bank card at the read point next to the entrance. They do random checks just to keep people honest.

Even if you expand things, the cost of the tech is low enough to almost be a rounding error.

The goal is to limit completely frivolous usage saturating capacity or otherwise forcing the target riders off completely.

Right, I live in a town where the only public transit are buses which are totally free, it's excellent and nobody is "exhausting the resources" or whatever.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11116-016-9695-5.pdf

My opinions on this subject are nuanced. While I think free fares are definitely the ideal assuming unlimited resources, they are probably not the best intervention you can do for improving the overall transit posture of a given city. Infrastructure investments are almost always going to be a better bet.

The railways were effectively nationalised in 2020. Since then they have been run as management contracts - with the franchisee being paid a flat rate by the DfT per train, and the DfT keeping the ticket revenue. Indeed, Thameslink, Southern and Great Northern, the largest franchise, had been a management contract as early as 2015.

The average profit margin was around 2% of face value, while around 60% went to network renewal. Under franchising, DfT set the price of 40% of tickets. The remainder, set by franchisees, were often cheaper advance offers.

They decided to make it a high speed line. This requires much wider curves, limiting how many obstacles could be avoided. In turn this led to expensive court battles and hideously expensive mitigation, such as the £100m bat tunnel.

Nimbys with Tory connections got the lines put into very expensive tunnels under the Chilterns. This was last minute and incurred an additional billion pounds.

Very high property prices, and poorer ground than expected leading to £5bn in extra remediation.

An overly-generous redundancy scheme at HS2 Ltd.

Deferrment of some elements such as the section to Euston incurred inflation.

The government decided to demand a much longer guarantee period than is normal - the time after completion in which the constructor is liable for any repairs - which bumped up the price of everything.

Thank you so much! I'd like to know more of the details on what reprioritizing means in this context, I'm not certain a dollar off of fares is equivalent to some meaningful green energy projects but at least according to this article they're simply moving from grants to loans which on its surface isn't the worst thing. I think grants make more projects possible regardless of their economic feasibility, while loans are potentially more self-sufficient and reoccurring.

I'd also have liked to see a push for more trains, trams, and street cars. Buses seem to me to be the worst of public transit options. But I'm happy they're getting more long term funding. Roads are a plight but if it helps the UK people value public transit more that's a good thing in my book.

That's very much the point. There's more to the cost/benefit ratio than just ticket price and the provider's profit margins. There's also the cost to the public of people not using buses: road congestion, which adds to everyone's commute times; the productivity impact of those longer commutes; the need for parking spaces when cars are used; the cost of that parking; the opportunity cost of those parking lots not being used for something else more socially valuable such as housing; the externalities such as additional noise, pollution and fatal accidents; the reduced disposable income that results from more costly (at point of use) options.

Most bus routes are already subsidised, as demand is often low in a rural area. Maybe there’s enough demand for a couple of services per day, but that’s inconvenient. Subsidies mandate minumum service levels, but don’t cover the full operating costs, so fares are necessary.

£2 per journey is not usually enough to cover costs, so the remainder is paid as another subsidy.