Iowa City made its buses free. Traffic cleared, and so did the air

Local context & political setting

• Iowa City is described as a small, very liberal university town with just 13 routes, short commutes, and extremely low visible homelessness; several commenters stress this makes it unlike large coastal metros.
• The university already runs a free campus bus; city buses mainly extend beyond campus.
• Some conservatives in the thread explicitly support free buses as a legitimate public good, provided car use remains a real, non‑manipulated choice.

Ridership, costs & funding

• Reported ridership gains (about 18% over 2019) are called modest and likely confounded by added service and streamlined routes; some doubt fares were decisive.
• Many note that in some systems fare revenue roughly equals fare‑collection costs, making free transit an easy financial case; others cite examples (NYC, SF, Seattle) where fares cover a meaningful share of operating budgets, so going free implies a 10–20%+ budget increase.
• There’s debate over “scaling with ridership”: with fares, revenue grows when use grows; without fares, higher use only raises costs.
• Several argue money is better spent on more frequency and coverage than on eliminating fares, since surveys often show “lack of service” beats “cost” as the main deterrent.

Behavior, safety & homelessness

• Experiences diverge sharply: some report free or barrier‑light systems with few problems and even improved behavior due to more “eyes on the system.”
• Others describe free‑fare zones or experiments (e.g., Austin, old Portland policies) that attracted loitering, harassment, and drug use, with drivers and riders eventually demanding fares and enforcement back.
• A recurring split: one camp sees small fares as a useful behavioral filter and legal pretext to remove disruptive riders; the other sees this as proxy criminalization of homelessness and addiction, arguing the real fix is housing and health care, not fare policy.

Roads vs transit, and alternatives

• Long subthread disputes whether drivers “pay for roads”; multiple links claim user fees usually cover only a fraction of road costs, with large hidden subsidies and unpriced externalities (crashes, pollution, sprawl).
• Several want transit subsidized at least as heavily as roads and parking, or funded via land‑value capture and station‑area development, as in Japan/Hong Kong.
• Others point to cycling cities (Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen) and congestion pricing as more powerful levers than free buses alone.

Skepticism about the article & generalization

• Some see the NYT piece as “solutions journalism” that overstates impacts (“traffic cleared, air cleared”) from limited data in a tiny market.
• Commenters caution against extrapolating Iowa City’s experience to large, complex systems like NYC, SF, or LA without acknowledging scale, homelessness, enforcement, and fiscal differences.