Fuck Cars

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-29/free-public-transport-tasmania-until-july-to-counter-fuel-costs/106508198

[–] SomeWeeb@lemmy.world 15 points 7 months ago

And in Tasmania now as well

[–] CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 30 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Subsidizing cars by making transit free because cars suddenly got expensive is the most ass backwards way to get people out of cars and it might just work.

(Subsidizing cars because transit riders have been pay in for the transit fares forever but now that car owners can’t afford their cars, it’s ok to make it free.) Transit should be free.

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[–] No_Maines_Land@lemmy.ca 14 points 7 months ago (1 child)

Transit should be free.

Yes.

There is some nuance to this. Transit SHOULD be free, but it takes extremely strong political will to improve transit (add more funding) once it has been made free.

Example: X transit is 50% government funded and 50% fare funded.

Government decides to make if free, 100% government funded. Great!

Or government decides to increase funding to 100%, but fares remain. Now there is a 150% budget to improve the transit.

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[–] silly_crotch@sh.itjust.works 8 points 7 months ago

Yesthat's what scares me about the free transit idea. If you remove fares but also don't increase funding you're just defunding transit.

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[–] Gobbel2000@programming.dev 2 points 7 months ago

Yes, that is the proper reaction. Much better than cutting taxes on petrol and effectively subsidizing people burning fossil fuels, which Poland is planning to do.

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[–] Fleur_@aussie.zone 11 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Nice, we should do this all the time

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[–] pupbiru@aussie.zone 2 points 7 months ago (3 children)

cheaper than fixing myki

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[–] MisterFrog@aussie.zone [S] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Probably not a controversial opinion, but we could save so much money if we stopped hiring consultants for building tech things.

BoM website makeover cost almost $100M.

"Small government" is also the scam the brought us the initial myki rollout fiasco.

This all being said, I agree, public transport should be free and expanded. We can't keep on with the clearly terrible urban planning of urban sprawl and cars

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[–] pupbiru@aussie.zone 3 points 7 months ago* (1 child)

i mean, we should stop hiring business consultants to write software lol

there are small/local consultancies that actually do a great job: just like hiring a team of contractors

large multinationals with a focus on accounting and business with “oh also we do salesforce” is the real problem… they optimise their costs rather than focusing on quality

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[–] MisterFrog@aussie.zone [S] 1 point 7 months ago

Or we could benefit by having a permanent team who will be cheaper in the long-run, because of familiarity with the systems and projects they build and maintain.

Hiring outside consultants of any kind for a permanent government requirement is pure insanity (or in reality, grift) if you ask me.

I'm sure there are consultancies who do a great job. The actual employees are usually not the problem.

But let's just give those same employees a permanent job and cut out the middle men who are offering no value whatsoever.