On fare-dodging progressives, who freeload altruistically:
“I don’t pay,” said a 35-year-old man wearing an orange puffy vest and clutching a beige shoulder bag and a banana. The man said he earns $75,000 working for an Oakland-based climate nonprofit. “Muni should be free, to make it accessible.”
Or, my activist lifestyle should be subsidised by others, the less important.
A 25-year-old research associate for a Google-owned subsidiary who also earns $75,000 a year said she almost never pays the fare. “I’d say 99% of the time, I just walk on,” she said, adding that she saw everyone else doing it when she moved to the city three years ago. “It’s like a San Francisco thing, I guess.”
Ah, that community spirit, a triumph of fairness over selfishness, in a city of good people. Good people who steal as a matter of routine. Because when it comes to paying their way, well, they’d rather not.
But don’t we want to follow California’s progressive experiment to its logical conclusion, as kind of a cautionary tale? Why get uptight about some middle class schlubs not paying their way.
They are entitled to their non-entitlements.
I’m sure they’ll applaud when the drivers of said vehicles start seeing their pay reduced because of the progressives pilfering of free rides.
Too bad everyone else wasn’t stepping in front of the bus.
And the shit magically cleans itself from the sidewalks.
Everything should be free… except for the rich. They make too much. Take all their money. They should pay for what I want.
Meanwhile, here’s a hobo’s vision of utopia, The Big Rock Candy Mountain. The Commie Regressives have a slightly different vision, but it’s the same in principle.
https://genius.com/Harry-mcclintock-big-rock-candy-mountain-lyrics
this is the very essence of socialism, someone else pays. the end game is always and everywhere brutality and depravity
Well, if they want me out of my car, and onto public transit, it had better be free. I already pay for it through my taxes.
Free transit probably is a good idea except where it gets filled up with homeless, smelly, druggies who ride it all day long to keep warm in Toronto.
Parliamentarians recently voted overwhelmingly in committee to decriminalize heroin and cocaine along with marijuana, so obviously canadians want more homeless, smelly, druggies, not less.
Public systems like transit and imaginary health care are less important to canadians than getting high on cocaine.
Nothing can be done.
I have an acquaintance who is a bus driver. The homeless and welfare cases are given free bus passes. One gets on his bus and rides around all day, usually sitting behind him and talking his ear off.
In a related story .. BART is hundreds of millions in the hole. Why? Because ah-Dokktor Fauxci told us that people breathing in close spaces will KILL you, and that you need (at least) a double mask, and a lucite face shield to go in public and get within 6ft. of any other human. Yeah … no one has forgotten Fauxci’s new medical orthodoxies.
So … Biden called it an “infrastructure Bill, or a “Inflation-reduction” Bill that he used to paper-over Fauxci’s irrational edicts. ALL the Bay Area transit agencies have been receiving hundreds of millions in bailouts each year since “15 days to stop the spread” in 2020. Because FEW people have returned to MASS transit. Leftists NEVER think of unintended consequences … they just demand that we Plebe’s PAY for them.
Now BART is demanding ANOTHER sales tax increase (I already pay 9.75%) sales tax. What next? BART will demand a VAT tax in the BART counties?
No public transit system in the United States is self-supporting. The federal government typically sprinkles funds around to assist with the initial construction, and then abandons the parasitic system to local government who must then support the money-losing system with subsidies for decades.
The single most cost-effective transit system in the West requires the simple use of paint to create traffic lanes used only by buses. This, of course, is rarely used because it is not high profile, and doesn’t generate thousands of inches of columns of positive news coverage for rapacious politicians.
Since 2020 … those subsidies have exploded to “unsustainable” levels. It’s high time DOGE do away with the voodoo economics of Public transit funding.
Seriously. It would be cheaper to simply PAY every transit rider to take an Uber.
Nobody expects Californians to know how to count.
Fruits and nuts, the lot of ’em.
No … but the fruits and nuts like renaming stuff. Such as the Lake Merritt BART station. Yeah, it’s being renamed the “Chinatown” station. Why? To assuage the Oakland guilt. The guilt caused by all the BLACK Oakland residents committing AAPI hate crimes. Yeah, it’s embarrassing when you try to pin it on Trump … when it’s all the BLACK thugs beating down the YELLOW man.
https://www.kqed.org/news/12016715/bart-may-rename-oaklands-lake-merritt-station-could-cost-750000
https://youtu.be/z0Y2YuimdJA?si=Qu0ZtS3JMSFamOrH
Kenji, I need your assistance, advice. One of my post-secondary aged children was offered a 3-month co-op position at Merck SanFran in May 2025. We live in BC, Canada, and my child is an American citizen. An answer to the offer is due on Tuesday, Dec 10. Right now, our main concern is logistics: can we make this work? I do have old friends/coworkers in the area, but such a short period of time requires getting in there with a place, a car (or a plan to not pay public transit…). It’s a great resume “stuffing” opportunity, but… But. I would greatly appreciate if you could engage with my question thread, and I will find ways to engage outside Kate’s great blog.
My daughter in law works for Gilead in Foster City … and they just laid-off 104 employees including exec’s. So I am surprised Merck is hiring. But it sounds more like a consultancy. I am in the East Bay suburbs, so I am a bit far afield from San Francisco. BART is $5.80 one way from my station to downtown SF. $11.60 round trip each day … not including bus transfers.
Merck appears to be in South San Francisco which is really somewhat inaccessible without a vehicle … and a traffic nightmare during commute hours. You’d probably want to locate as near South SF as possible … most housing is all west of the Merck location.
Not sure how much help I can be. Housing is pricey and hard to find … and Merck Labs is in a virtual automobile-only location.
In 2009 or so, the Montreal Metro put up posters bragging about their ridership.
I did some math, and, using conservative numbers, the STM was pulling in twice the money that they were budgeted. Basically, its a cash-cow for the city.
Start randomly checking and ticketing free riders.
Won’t take too much high pitched whining about $100 fines to encourage the others to start paying.
All normal subways do that.
I’m old enough to remember when our CA culture didn’t NEED “hardened fare gates”. That we had a mostly law-abiding culture. There were no such things as “smash and grabs” … let alone fare-evasion.
https://www.bart.gov/about/projects/fare-gate
Our culture has degenerated to that of a 4th-world shithole.
This is a recurring theme in all Liberal Do-Gooder projects.
These “Great Planners” are very generous with our money.
Yet cheat the systems every way they can.
From this I conclude that every Do-Gooder agitating for a social good..needs to be taxed at 200% of their gross income..
Until they go away.
For it is always other people money they seek.
Monorail,monorail…