Previously: #1 In my look back I concluded I want to be more focused and long-term oriented. Roundups by default are the opposite of that. This one was already in the pipeline (I have a rather large for-roundups draft to pull from), and on the margin easy to produce while creating a bank to pull from later. Still, I do note for myself the need to shift emphasis.
For buses at least, forcing some amount of the budget to be from collected fares may incentivize whoever is in charge of them to allocate buses in a way that is good (there are other ways for them to get that data, but the incentive to maximize their budget in a way that is difficult to game is my point).
As a reader, I think that a huge value of what you do is continuing to pull threads forwards, saying, "yup, these trends I pointed to really really are real and still affecting your life," so I would vote for the roundups more than you might, but understand that I'm making that comment without direct exposure to your opportunity costs.
Separately, on DC free bus fares, some data points that are generally agreed within DC resident circles:
1. DC has a unique problem of trying to continue to charge literal millions of annual tourists while making things free for locals -- so is reluctant to remove fare gates for the most tourist-legible part of the system (Metro rail). Its metro rail system, unlike the buses, is also cross-border with MD and VA, and is more difficult to easily change.
2. Overall, DC fare evasion has skyrocketed in the past 3 years by both anecdote and data. Perhaps this is in part because DC made buses free during the pandemic (out of desire to socially distance bus drivers from their passengers, all passengers boarded through rear door and front was screened off). Perhaps this is in part because DC, as part of general criminal justice equity concerns, doesn't want to punish fare jumpers with arrest versus just fines. Perhaps this is in part because DC has, for a while now, given kids free rides on the Metro to and from school, and for some reason it's gotten trendier lately for those kids to jump over the fare gates even though they literally don't need to.
3. Many influential DC residents are literally selected for rule-followingness by professional or security certification as a precondition for their jobs. They really, really, really hate the feeling of being a chump for following the rules and paying their fares while _literally_ seeing the person next to them jump a fare gate.
Given that, I think the greater value here is not only making the system free, but also removing a disproportionately-intense feeling of frustration from people who pay their fare share, while others don't. Avoids undermining social trust much more broadly.
Separately, I predict that the buses being free will lead to much more greater use and economic upside for the community than many expect; the DC bus lines (generally) follow historic streetcar lines, and as a result reflect historic neighborhood patterns that are still quite beneficial. The metro rail network is complementary but distinct, and arguably much more focused on serving city-suburb commuting that is frankly less relevant due to rise of remote work.
I think your point on mass transit prices misses some of the purpose of prices serve. I agree that if you want to increase ridership, you probably should lower the price, even to free, and that fares, as collected and enforced, are possibly not even covering the cost of collection and enforcement.
On the other hand, collecting payments helps track ridership, information needed to optimize routes. The value of that information is non-zero.
Now, you could collect that usage data via zero price Transit Cards or something, but then again that still requires people bother to carry them around and scan them. If they know that won't be enforced, no one will bother.
With no collection of payment (or collection of non-payment) there is no data on ridership, who wants to ride, where, when, and so no feedback on how to run the system properly. Of course, this is why private services tend to work better than public in general. Even with public provision though, it is much harder to provide good service with no information coming the other way on demand for the service.
Restaurants are indeed a strangely specific metric, but I notice that when thinking of "amenity tied to density and/or new development", that's pretty high up on my list of relevant items. There's a lot more broad appeal to a restaurant (across socioeconomic classes!) than...I dunno...a movie theatre or bowling alley.
On office swords to housing plowshares: sometimes I wonder if there'd be benefit in a type of Universal Zoning, where land can be used for almost anything and resulting buildings are flexibly built for possible-conversions to begin with. Like mixed-use but on steroids. One gets the feeling that a lot of zoning woes result from sunk costs and predicting-the-future being, well, actually hard. I'm not sure if For No Laid Course Prepare would be cost-effective, given the gains of specialization...but reducing switching costs between different types of zoning seems plausibly worth pursuing at __some__ degree? Certainly many of the regulations locking in particular types of building extra-hard could use a hard second look (e.g. requiring windows in bedrooms)..."good enough for the office goose, good enough for the housing gander". Or apply that in reverse and make offices a little more home-like, that wouldn't be so awful either. Despite being a horrible flop of a business plan, it genuinely was more pleasant in many ways to visit a WeWork or other coworking office space, vs. a corporately-sterilized Standard Office. The other interpretation of the popularity of WFH is that homes are so much more attractive to work from __because offices are so bad__, rather than homes being better. Relative vs. absolute differences.
>If the answer is ‘Americans but only Americans’ then I can see 4 million in San Francisco proper (assuming it also got its act together in other ways along the way, if not I shudder to consider it)
Indeed. In many ways it's been alarming how __deserted__ some parts of SF have become over the last few years...but getting that back up to profitably-functional levels takes way less than a doubling, nevermind ~4x. I don't even dislike skyscrapers and other super-density solutions, but there really are only roughly 50 sqm. here...and I derive significant benefit from living in one of the poorer residential neighborhoods, away from NYC levels of hustle and bustle. Urban amenities without urban density woes: still moderately possible, if one is willing to pay either a lot or a little for housing.
(90% factory households could be a thing, if the households were just very, very large. Super Levittown.)
On transit fares: agreed that if the choices are between regressive "tax riders" and progressive "use other revenue to make up for taxing riders", the latter is preferable along most dimensions. However, I think that is not a realistic option in many cases. Even in public-sector-bloat-loving SF, people do eventually get tired of throwing endless $ at public transit, when that money doesn't seem to reliably translate into improved service. (As demonstrated by revealed-preference local voting, I mean, not signalling-preferences expressed in polls.) We also have at this point quite a number of carve-out exemptions to paying fares, for a smorgasbord of various <s>identity</s> demographic groups, and that __still__ isn't enough to entice ridership back up to vaguely-normal levels. So I'm a bit skeptical of the price-sensitivity issue here. For the people who do pay, it's also been made really really minimal mindshare...tap cards are ubiquitous, one can also pay purely-digitally via app, and just in my residency time I've seen cash-paying decrease to near-zero. That goes a very long way towards reducing trivial inconvenience and collection costs, and again hasn't enticed ridership enough. (Yeah, I know covid confounds a lot of things related to public transit ridership still...and it's hard to distinguish lack-of-progress from losing-more-slowly. Certainly things wouldn't be __better__ if everyone still had to carry around dollar bills and quarters.)
I also have an intuitive sense that...paying a fare is part of generating Skin In The Game? Truly-free things increase utilization, but also make tragedy-of-the-commons more likely; small fares make me feel like I have some tiny ownership stake in public transit, much more than if the equivalent amount were illegibly extracted from me via taxes. The state of public property here (including transit infrastructure) isn't dubious just because of things like homelessness...it also comes from a basic lack of civic respect, of pride in keeping the beach nice for everyone. People don't graffiti their own cars, or abandon trash on their own seats, or put their feet up on not-meant-for-feet areas - not unless they're prepared to deal themselves with the consequences. I think paying a small fare helps pump that intuition, that "if I mess up this train, I'm that much less likely to pay for it in the future, so I shouldn't".
Inconsistent enforcement is indeed a costly problem, but like with criminal deterrence, I'm skeptical that the obviously-correct solution is to move to no-enforcement, rather than near-universal enforcement with minimal punishment? The Venn diagram of "likely to vandalize public transit" and "likely to evade fares" has pretty significant overlap, you know? The liberal retort is that the 3rd circle of "most needs public transit to begin with" also has strong overlap here, which I concede...but that just goes back to the who's-going-to-pay-for-it issue. The people who can actually afford to finance public transit won't do so if it's too unpleasant for them to ever personally use, and it's a tough lift to argue the positive externalities really do pencil out, no, trust me. I think people can understand that in some ways for stuff like public parks, which have other values like aesthetics...but transit, not so much.
Lastly, did you mean to randomly exclude the #6 tweet from Chris Elmendorf thread? Slightly jarring flow annoyance, pehaps there were reasons.
I'm in Australia and I've said a few times in the last decade that "over the last 30 years we have done too good a job convincing students to go to university instead of pick up a trade, and now we're facing the consequences".
Although the fact this same problem exists in the US where there is (to my understanding) plenty of cheap construction workers available through immigrant labour makes me doubt my thoughts. On the financial independence forums I often see tradesmen from the US post about doing quite well, so maybe the supplementation by immigrant workers isn't as pervasive as I thought?
Anyway, it's not something I ever see discussed in the 'intellectual' spaces I read l. There's more to blue collar work than manufacturing jobs, has the push for a white collar as a marker for success been too successful for its own good?
Revealed preferences can be very important, and having people pay (directly or indirectly) for the services they use seems important in many pro-social ways. US states often partially fund road maintenance with gas taxes, for instance, and that seems like a good solution.
Having riders pay for public transit services seems like a similarly good idea. Also, and again like road maintenance, all of the beneficiaries are not just the people directly using the public transit. People who benefit from less congestion while they themselves avoid public transit should also be required to pay some. Having non-riders pay all of the costs creates anti-social tendencies. It also creates perverse incentives - like wasteful over-ridership, economically inefficient uses, etc.
That said, there are people who would struggle to pay who most would agree should be riding. A specific example would be a low pay worker who cannot afford a car. We don't actually want to force them to get a car and add to traffic, and we can recognize that they are using the service for an economically beneficial purpose (for both themselves and the city). I would suggest a means-tested price available for regular drivers. That is, a monthly/yearly pass available with means-adjusted cost. I strongly disagree with making this free, again for pro-social reasons.
Matt Yglesias regularly deletes his tweets, which breaks links to those tweets. If you're saving them for a roundup later, they might even break before you put up the roundup, which has happened here with the "Small town in Marin County passes rent control" link.
If you want to link to his tweets, I strongly recommend throwing them into archive.today at the point at which you save them, so they won't vanish.
As someone who loves living in rural america, I understand somewhat the appeal of a city. But I ]wonder if some of that appeal will go away with connected technologies. (Last year we got fiber internet out here, replacing the crappy satellite connection... It's f-ing awesome.) So I was trying to list the good things about a city. I hope you will help with my list.
The Matthew Martin's example is nonsense which makes my suspicious of motivated reasoning.
Ulaanbaataar- Yes I had to google it, also yes it is immediately clear that this example falls nowhere near the 'empirical' claim that it is attached to. Its a highly unique situation that has little (nothing) to do with the supposed density issues- starting with the fact that it is the coldest capital in the world (wikipedia) 'The coldest January temperatures, usually at the time just before sunrise, are between −36 and −40 °C (−32.8 and −40.0 °F)', and crap infrastructure heavily funded by the Soviets which means a low economic baseline for the country, lousy centrally planned infrastructure (the first google hit on traffic there mentioned only a single major East<->West throughway)- and to top it all off the population of the city has risen greatly over the past 30 years without alleviating the traffic issue (and I'd wager its probably significantly worse than in 1990). This is just 'I found a low density city with traffic, guess that's proof enough'. Anyone here convinced by the argument that Los Angeles as traffic issues and is a densely populated area? No?
Re: Lack of density makes other options infeasible: He mentions biking which is wrong. High density living is worse for biking (with a few notable exceptions), more people, more cars and more activity means more stopping and maneuvering (and accidents).
As for the rest of his post, he just lists things as if the number of places you go is fixed and density is all that matters. This is clearly not true, just trivially if you have a yard in the suburbs and children you kids can play outside where there is grass and trees without leaving your property, which sounds small until you realize that this applies to things like food deliveries which are a huge logistical pain for massively dense cities and require constant flows of trucks to just keep people fed. Also the density of a city is a reasonably proxy for how attractive a tourist destination it is, which means more people than the listed number with peak seasons potentially being very crowded. Then there is the larger sq footage of roads needed in less dense areas, and congestion is traffic/total road surface, not not total miles driven (more roads also means more ways to relieve congestion when there are backups such as construction and accidents'.
What is the sum result of everything? Don't know, but listing 3-4 things you thought of with a cherry picked example is low value work.
Regarding free mass transit, Seattle stopped enforcing fares for a while during the lockdown (or probably more accurately, during the fallout from the CHAZ/CHOP). The result was that the backs of buses on some routes spontaneously turned into mobile homeless shelters. This makes sense: it's dry, heated, relatively safe, and you can either nap, chat with friends, or do non-obtrusive drugs. At the end of the route, I suppose they got off and hopped on a bus going the opposite direction. Mostly the paying riders stayed in the front halves; it was very obvious when I was riding, without anyone having to say a word. I'm not aware of any serious problems that resulted, but anecdotally, several people I know started not taking transit as much (even accounting for the pandemic) and making vague negative comments about it. They're all left-leaning enough to not talk directly about the problem if it was related to the homeless situation, so I can't tell for certain, but that's my best guess.
As a result, I'd suggest that if you eliminate fares, you'll also want to simultaneously do something about the homeless, to at least provide them with better options than sleeping on public transit. (Bad joke: keep public libraries open 24 hours a day.) But seriously, a lot of shelters cherry-pick the ones who cause the fewest problems, meaning that the homeless people who resort to buses are probably far gone into the triad of mental illness, drug use, and antisocial behavior. It's a serious problem and I don't know of any way to treat it that isn't expensive in time and money*, but I hold out hope that there may be some half-a-loaf mitigations that are easy and cheap enough to reliably implement. As long as we don't let the perfect be the enemy of the, if not "good", then at least the "substantially less horrifying than their current lives".
* Although given that there's approximately $100,000 per homeless person per year being spent in Seattle**, you'd think that there'd be some opportunities to try. And I was pleasantly surprised to hear of one, a few months ago, so maybe that's a good sign.
** Not spent by the city alone, but spent by the city, county, state, and federal governments, and by nonprofits, on homeless people within the city limits. To our best guesses about spending and homeless numbers.
For buses at least, forcing some amount of the budget to be from collected fares may incentivize whoever is in charge of them to allocate buses in a way that is good (there are other ways for them to get that data, but the incentive to maximize their budget in a way that is difficult to game is my point).
As a reader, I think that a huge value of what you do is continuing to pull threads forwards, saying, "yup, these trends I pointed to really really are real and still affecting your life," so I would vote for the roundups more than you might, but understand that I'm making that comment without direct exposure to your opportunity costs.
Separately, on DC free bus fares, some data points that are generally agreed within DC resident circles:
1. DC has a unique problem of trying to continue to charge literal millions of annual tourists while making things free for locals -- so is reluctant to remove fare gates for the most tourist-legible part of the system (Metro rail). Its metro rail system, unlike the buses, is also cross-border with MD and VA, and is more difficult to easily change.
2. Overall, DC fare evasion has skyrocketed in the past 3 years by both anecdote and data. Perhaps this is in part because DC made buses free during the pandemic (out of desire to socially distance bus drivers from their passengers, all passengers boarded through rear door and front was screened off). Perhaps this is in part because DC, as part of general criminal justice equity concerns, doesn't want to punish fare jumpers with arrest versus just fines. Perhaps this is in part because DC has, for a while now, given kids free rides on the Metro to and from school, and for some reason it's gotten trendier lately for those kids to jump over the fare gates even though they literally don't need to.
3. Many influential DC residents are literally selected for rule-followingness by professional or security certification as a precondition for their jobs. They really, really, really hate the feeling of being a chump for following the rules and paying their fares while _literally_ seeing the person next to them jump a fare gate.
Given that, I think the greater value here is not only making the system free, but also removing a disproportionately-intense feeling of frustration from people who pay their fare share, while others don't. Avoids undermining social trust much more broadly.
Separately, I predict that the buses being free will lead to much more greater use and economic upside for the community than many expect; the DC bus lines (generally) follow historic streetcar lines, and as a result reflect historic neighborhood patterns that are still quite beneficial. The metro rail network is complementary but distinct, and arguably much more focused on serving city-suburb commuting that is frankly less relevant due to rise of remote work.
I think your point on mass transit prices misses some of the purpose of prices serve. I agree that if you want to increase ridership, you probably should lower the price, even to free, and that fares, as collected and enforced, are possibly not even covering the cost of collection and enforcement.
On the other hand, collecting payments helps track ridership, information needed to optimize routes. The value of that information is non-zero.
Now, you could collect that usage data via zero price Transit Cards or something, but then again that still requires people bother to carry them around and scan them. If they know that won't be enforced, no one will bother.
With no collection of payment (or collection of non-payment) there is no data on ridership, who wants to ride, where, when, and so no feedback on how to run the system properly. Of course, this is why private services tend to work better than public in general. Even with public provision though, it is much harder to provide good service with no information coming the other way on demand for the service.
Restaurants are indeed a strangely specific metric, but I notice that when thinking of "amenity tied to density and/or new development", that's pretty high up on my list of relevant items. There's a lot more broad appeal to a restaurant (across socioeconomic classes!) than...I dunno...a movie theatre or bowling alley.
On office swords to housing plowshares: sometimes I wonder if there'd be benefit in a type of Universal Zoning, where land can be used for almost anything and resulting buildings are flexibly built for possible-conversions to begin with. Like mixed-use but on steroids. One gets the feeling that a lot of zoning woes result from sunk costs and predicting-the-future being, well, actually hard. I'm not sure if For No Laid Course Prepare would be cost-effective, given the gains of specialization...but reducing switching costs between different types of zoning seems plausibly worth pursuing at __some__ degree? Certainly many of the regulations locking in particular types of building extra-hard could use a hard second look (e.g. requiring windows in bedrooms)..."good enough for the office goose, good enough for the housing gander". Or apply that in reverse and make offices a little more home-like, that wouldn't be so awful either. Despite being a horrible flop of a business plan, it genuinely was more pleasant in many ways to visit a WeWork or other coworking office space, vs. a corporately-sterilized Standard Office. The other interpretation of the popularity of WFH is that homes are so much more attractive to work from __because offices are so bad__, rather than homes being better. Relative vs. absolute differences.
>If the answer is ‘Americans but only Americans’ then I can see 4 million in San Francisco proper (assuming it also got its act together in other ways along the way, if not I shudder to consider it)
Indeed. In many ways it's been alarming how __deserted__ some parts of SF have become over the last few years...but getting that back up to profitably-functional levels takes way less than a doubling, nevermind ~4x. I don't even dislike skyscrapers and other super-density solutions, but there really are only roughly 50 sqm. here...and I derive significant benefit from living in one of the poorer residential neighborhoods, away from NYC levels of hustle and bustle. Urban amenities without urban density woes: still moderately possible, if one is willing to pay either a lot or a little for housing.
(90% factory households could be a thing, if the households were just very, very large. Super Levittown.)
On transit fares: agreed that if the choices are between regressive "tax riders" and progressive "use other revenue to make up for taxing riders", the latter is preferable along most dimensions. However, I think that is not a realistic option in many cases. Even in public-sector-bloat-loving SF, people do eventually get tired of throwing endless $ at public transit, when that money doesn't seem to reliably translate into improved service. (As demonstrated by revealed-preference local voting, I mean, not signalling-preferences expressed in polls.) We also have at this point quite a number of carve-out exemptions to paying fares, for a smorgasbord of various <s>identity</s> demographic groups, and that __still__ isn't enough to entice ridership back up to vaguely-normal levels. So I'm a bit skeptical of the price-sensitivity issue here. For the people who do pay, it's also been made really really minimal mindshare...tap cards are ubiquitous, one can also pay purely-digitally via app, and just in my residency time I've seen cash-paying decrease to near-zero. That goes a very long way towards reducing trivial inconvenience and collection costs, and again hasn't enticed ridership enough. (Yeah, I know covid confounds a lot of things related to public transit ridership still...and it's hard to distinguish lack-of-progress from losing-more-slowly. Certainly things wouldn't be __better__ if everyone still had to carry around dollar bills and quarters.)
I also have an intuitive sense that...paying a fare is part of generating Skin In The Game? Truly-free things increase utilization, but also make tragedy-of-the-commons more likely; small fares make me feel like I have some tiny ownership stake in public transit, much more than if the equivalent amount were illegibly extracted from me via taxes. The state of public property here (including transit infrastructure) isn't dubious just because of things like homelessness...it also comes from a basic lack of civic respect, of pride in keeping the beach nice for everyone. People don't graffiti their own cars, or abandon trash on their own seats, or put their feet up on not-meant-for-feet areas - not unless they're prepared to deal themselves with the consequences. I think paying a small fare helps pump that intuition, that "if I mess up this train, I'm that much less likely to pay for it in the future, so I shouldn't".
Inconsistent enforcement is indeed a costly problem, but like with criminal deterrence, I'm skeptical that the obviously-correct solution is to move to no-enforcement, rather than near-universal enforcement with minimal punishment? The Venn diagram of "likely to vandalize public transit" and "likely to evade fares" has pretty significant overlap, you know? The liberal retort is that the 3rd circle of "most needs public transit to begin with" also has strong overlap here, which I concede...but that just goes back to the who's-going-to-pay-for-it issue. The people who can actually afford to finance public transit won't do so if it's too unpleasant for them to ever personally use, and it's a tough lift to argue the positive externalities really do pencil out, no, trust me. I think people can understand that in some ways for stuff like public parks, which have other values like aesthetics...but transit, not so much.
Lastly, did you mean to randomly exclude the #6 tweet from Chris Elmendorf thread? Slightly jarring flow annoyance, pehaps there were reasons.
I'm in Australia and I've said a few times in the last decade that "over the last 30 years we have done too good a job convincing students to go to university instead of pick up a trade, and now we're facing the consequences".
Although the fact this same problem exists in the US where there is (to my understanding) plenty of cheap construction workers available through immigrant labour makes me doubt my thoughts. On the financial independence forums I often see tradesmen from the US post about doing quite well, so maybe the supplementation by immigrant workers isn't as pervasive as I thought?
Anyway, it's not something I ever see discussed in the 'intellectual' spaces I read l. There's more to blue collar work than manufacturing jobs, has the push for a white collar as a marker for success been too successful for its own good?
"Suburbia is a den of racism"
I.e. white people shouldn't have the right not to live around minorities responsible for large amounts of violent crime and anri-social behavior.
Revealed preferences can be very important, and having people pay (directly or indirectly) for the services they use seems important in many pro-social ways. US states often partially fund road maintenance with gas taxes, for instance, and that seems like a good solution.
Having riders pay for public transit services seems like a similarly good idea. Also, and again like road maintenance, all of the beneficiaries are not just the people directly using the public transit. People who benefit from less congestion while they themselves avoid public transit should also be required to pay some. Having non-riders pay all of the costs creates anti-social tendencies. It also creates perverse incentives - like wasteful over-ridership, economically inefficient uses, etc.
That said, there are people who would struggle to pay who most would agree should be riding. A specific example would be a low pay worker who cannot afford a car. We don't actually want to force them to get a car and add to traffic, and we can recognize that they are using the service for an economically beneficial purpose (for both themselves and the city). I would suggest a means-tested price available for regular drivers. That is, a monthly/yearly pass available with means-adjusted cost. I strongly disagree with making this free, again for pro-social reasons.
Matt Yglesias regularly deletes his tweets, which breaks links to those tweets. If you're saving them for a roundup later, they might even break before you put up the roundup, which has happened here with the "Small town in Marin County passes rent control" link.
If you want to link to his tweets, I strongly recommend throwing them into archive.today at the point at which you save them, so they won't vanish.
As someone who loves living in rural america, I understand somewhat the appeal of a city. But I ]wonder if some of that appeal will go away with connected technologies. (Last year we got fiber internet out here, replacing the crappy satellite connection... It's f-ing awesome.) So I was trying to list the good things about a city. I hope you will help with my list.
1.) Jobs are there
2.) Friends are there
3.) Great food is there
4.) Great art is there
5.) Live sports is there
What am I missing?
The Matthew Martin's example is nonsense which makes my suspicious of motivated reasoning.
Ulaanbaataar- Yes I had to google it, also yes it is immediately clear that this example falls nowhere near the 'empirical' claim that it is attached to. Its a highly unique situation that has little (nothing) to do with the supposed density issues- starting with the fact that it is the coldest capital in the world (wikipedia) 'The coldest January temperatures, usually at the time just before sunrise, are between −36 and −40 °C (−32.8 and −40.0 °F)', and crap infrastructure heavily funded by the Soviets which means a low economic baseline for the country, lousy centrally planned infrastructure (the first google hit on traffic there mentioned only a single major East<->West throughway)- and to top it all off the population of the city has risen greatly over the past 30 years without alleviating the traffic issue (and I'd wager its probably significantly worse than in 1990). This is just 'I found a low density city with traffic, guess that's proof enough'. Anyone here convinced by the argument that Los Angeles as traffic issues and is a densely populated area? No?
Re: Lack of density makes other options infeasible: He mentions biking which is wrong. High density living is worse for biking (with a few notable exceptions), more people, more cars and more activity means more stopping and maneuvering (and accidents).
As for the rest of his post, he just lists things as if the number of places you go is fixed and density is all that matters. This is clearly not true, just trivially if you have a yard in the suburbs and children you kids can play outside where there is grass and trees without leaving your property, which sounds small until you realize that this applies to things like food deliveries which are a huge logistical pain for massively dense cities and require constant flows of trucks to just keep people fed. Also the density of a city is a reasonably proxy for how attractive a tourist destination it is, which means more people than the listed number with peak seasons potentially being very crowded. Then there is the larger sq footage of roads needed in less dense areas, and congestion is traffic/total road surface, not not total miles driven (more roads also means more ways to relieve congestion when there are backups such as construction and accidents'.
What is the sum result of everything? Don't know, but listing 3-4 things you thought of with a cherry picked example is low value work.
Regarding free mass transit, Seattle stopped enforcing fares for a while during the lockdown (or probably more accurately, during the fallout from the CHAZ/CHOP). The result was that the backs of buses on some routes spontaneously turned into mobile homeless shelters. This makes sense: it's dry, heated, relatively safe, and you can either nap, chat with friends, or do non-obtrusive drugs. At the end of the route, I suppose they got off and hopped on a bus going the opposite direction. Mostly the paying riders stayed in the front halves; it was very obvious when I was riding, without anyone having to say a word. I'm not aware of any serious problems that resulted, but anecdotally, several people I know started not taking transit as much (even accounting for the pandemic) and making vague negative comments about it. They're all left-leaning enough to not talk directly about the problem if it was related to the homeless situation, so I can't tell for certain, but that's my best guess.
As a result, I'd suggest that if you eliminate fares, you'll also want to simultaneously do something about the homeless, to at least provide them with better options than sleeping on public transit. (Bad joke: keep public libraries open 24 hours a day.) But seriously, a lot of shelters cherry-pick the ones who cause the fewest problems, meaning that the homeless people who resort to buses are probably far gone into the triad of mental illness, drug use, and antisocial behavior. It's a serious problem and I don't know of any way to treat it that isn't expensive in time and money*, but I hold out hope that there may be some half-a-loaf mitigations that are easy and cheap enough to reliably implement. As long as we don't let the perfect be the enemy of the, if not "good", then at least the "substantially less horrifying than their current lives".
* Although given that there's approximately $100,000 per homeless person per year being spent in Seattle**, you'd think that there'd be some opportunities to try. And I was pleasantly surprised to hear of one, a few months ago, so maybe that's a good sign.
** Not spent by the city alone, but spent by the city, county, state, and federal governments, and by nonprofits, on homeless people within the city limits. To our best guesses about spending and homeless numbers.